Communication & Negotiation | Luke Andrews

“Just because you’re confronting something doesn’t mean that it has to be combative. It doesn’t mean that it has to be a conflict, it just means that you’re standing up in the jury addressing it.”

FULL AUDIO TRANSCRIPTION: 

Justin Stoddart 0:02
Today we talk about the fundamentals. Welcome back, everybody to the Think bigger real estate Show. Today I have a very special guest. Stay with us. It’s gonna be an amazing episode that’s gonna again, bring you back to the things that are going to drive results in this competitive market.

Again, welcome back to the Think bigger real estate Show. I’m your host Justin Stoddart thrilled today to be with someone who I call a friend, someone who is is inspiring a whole group of us that I’m in a mastermind with his name’s Luke Andrews. Today, again, we’re going to talk deep on communication and negotiation. Luke Andrews, thanks for coming on the show today, my friend.

Luke Andrews 0:46
Hey, so excited to be here, buddy. So excited to be here with you.

Justin Stoddart 0:50
It’s mutual, I’ve admired your presence in our group for some time, everybody respects you. And it’s fun to hear more of your story. You’ve been in the real estate industry for six years, the past three, roughly full time. Correct. And in those three years, you’ve built a team with 19 other agents who are top producers. Like that’s, that’s not common, just you know, I’ve been working in this industry for like, for a long time, what you’ve done is not common, so congrats to you on the big success. Super exciting. I know you also have are a master of of actually authoring content. I’m excited at the end of this episode or every no that Luke has actually a very special offer for everybody course book, just some stuff that’s gonna really help you to implement, you know, the stuff that you know, that we’re gonna talk about today. And then some. So Luke, let’s, let’s get right in buddy, we’re in a we’re in a changing market, aren’t we we have inventory that is breaking all kinds of records. We’ve got more agents and listings, we’ve got people that are are going to be getting out of the business. And we’ve got a group of people that are big thinkers that refuse that are going to be thriving in this market. So let’s go back to the fundamentals. Right. I’m inspired by Vince Lombardi. Great.

Luke Andrews 2:07
I apologize if you hear my dog in

Justin Stoddart 2:09
the background. I love you something kicked off, what kind of dog is it? Let’s hear it. Okay, dog. She’s,

Luke Andrews 2:13
she’s she’s a golden doodle. She’s very, very hyper rambunctious and thinks that every trash man, Amazon delivery man, is better. So

Justin Stoddart 2:24
I love it, I’ve got a similar dog, I get it. So again, Vince Lombardi, right, at the very beginning of every season, he would teach his players, this is a football, John Wooden, right, who is arguably the best basketball coach ever, at least in college for sure, with being of a season with teaches players how to put their socks on, okay. And then he went on to win more national championships than any other coach out there. So if those guys who created massive success went back to the fundamentals, I’m encouraging all of us to do the same thing. We’re gonna go back to the fundamentals. Today, we’re going to talk about communication. And we’re gonna talk about negotiation. And these things are going to help us to stand out in a crowded, hyper competitive market. So Luke, let’s get into it. Let’s talk about communication. What is it that you feel like agents need to know about communication?

Luke Andrews 3:09
Well, I mean, I, you’re 100% Correct, where we just need to get back to the fundamentals. What I’m finding with a lot of the agents that are out there, and, you know, I think we tend to put this label on millennials, but I’m finding it agents of all agents, all ages and experience levels. They really struggle with just basic communication skills. And it’s either not knowing what to say, or it’s being afraid to have the conversations. I think there’s there’s this big fear of confrontation that’s out there. And I think it’s it’s because of this major fallacy that there’s this assumption that confrontation equals conflict. And it’s just not, it’s just not the case. Just because you’re confronting something doesn’t mean that it has to be combative. It doesn’t mean that it has to be a conflict, it just means that you’re standing up in the jury addressing it. And what I’m teaching my agents right now, is that just by having these conversations, you’re already winning. It doesn’t even matter what you say, just by having the conversation because everybody else is so afraid to have these conversations that just by the mere fact of you having them means that you’re winning at that point.

Justin Stoddart 4:25
Well, that’s, I think that’d be a value for a lot of people to say, Wow. You know, I mean, think of it this way, there are more agents than we’ve ever had. Many of them come from a from a generation that has done a lot of their communication via text. If the goal of marketing is to stand out, right, here’s a big takeaway for everybody that Luke just gave us, which is simply pick up the phone and call people, right? Somebody be willing to have the conversation, maybe it’s email, maybe it’s some other like methodology. But the point is, if you’re willing to have those conversations again, we’ve got a crowded ocean. And we’re saying, How do I stand out? How do I stand out? Luke just gave us a tip there. Be willing, when the conversation is difficult know that other people aren’t having that if you have that you will stand out.

Luke Andrews 5:12
In I think it’s some of the pushback that I get from my agencies, oh, well, I’m

going to send it in a text or I’m going to send it in an email because I want to have a, a written record of what was said, and, you know, I’ve gotten to the point now where I just call him out and just say, hey, look, that’s BS, You’re just afraid to pick up the phone and have that conversation, you’re afraid they’re gonna say something that you’re not going to know the answer to? Well, here’s the secret that nobody wants to talk about. They don’t know the answer to the question either. And you don’t know how much more information you’re going to get by putting somebody on the spot. And I’m not saying put them on the spot in a bad way. But just, you know, calling up an agent and just asking them very point blank questions of how many offers Do you have? What’s your best offer look like right now? What is it going to take to get this deal done right now? You never know, by catching them off guard, what they’re going to say what information they’re going to divulge that they don’t mean to that’s going to give your client the edge and going to give you an edge as an agent, as opposed to if you just send a text or an email, you know, they have time to craft a response. Again, I’m not advocating putting somebody in an uncomfortable situation. But sometimes whoever’s willing to get the most uncomfortable is going to win the negotiation. Yeah.

Justin Stoddart 6:30
I don’t know how many people have come to me to say, when I was in my former world of escrow, or title escrow, and people say like, I really love working with this particular person, because she’ll just pick up the phone and call me. Right? Like that was the differentiator. Now, she was wonderful in many other ways. But I agree with you that all too many are afraid to do that. And what an advantage you get when you can actually speak voice to voice so we talked about the most powerful way to have communication is face to face, right? That is probably video like we’re having right now. And following that voice to voice and then it’s probably like handwritten, and then maybe digital communication. So if you want to have your your communication have an impact, why would you not use the highest value modality that you possibly can,

Luke Andrews 7:13
right? When I say 93% of all communication is is not the words that you’re saying. It’s all about tone, it’s all about PACE, it’s all about body language. And so you can’t get those things over text, you never know what kind of mood the other person’s going to be in how they’re going to receive what what you’re saying, you could be putting yourself at a disadvantage right off the bat, just because they read your text in a way that you didn’t mean it to. We talked about standing out when you’re marketing, even when you’re looking at new clients, when everybody else is sending texts and emails, you can still send texts and emails, but hey, why not shoot them a quick video text? Why not shoot them a quick video email, do something that’s just a little bit different to go through and, and to stand out?

Justin Stoddart 7:57
That’s funny, I’m actually in the process of about finishing up this book called human centered communication. It was written by the guys who founded bom, bom. And I think Bom. Bom is a great service, I think their book is just as good. It just pulls in this this concept that at the the the people who like when we communicate, we communicate with people, we’ve done so many things to automate, expedite, make communication more convenient. Yet we’ve we’ve stripped out the power of it, right, we’ve stripped out so many things that cause it that take away, you know, the really the impact that communication can have. And it’s really been an insightful read.

Luke Andrews 8:38
It’s interesting. I mean, for for me right now, this is actually extremely relevant because my son who’s in sixth grade, just had to get up and give a presentation in front of his class. And it did not go well at all. I mean, he was he was not prepared. He was kind of got the giggles partway through forgetting everything that he was supposed to do. He there were some technical challenges with it with a video that he had made when everybody else made a slide. And it just, it just wasn’t working. So much. So to where the teacher said, go sit down. He had to go and apologize and write a letter to say, hey, please give me another shot, to at least get partial credit on this. And what it did is it took me back to why I created my negotiation course to begin with. It was actually a sixth grade presentation that I did. It was a presentation I was not prepared for it was on Michael Jordan, who was my favorite person on the planet at the time. And I just I assumed that I could get up there and I could just wing it. And I stood up in front of this class. And I had never felt that sheer embarrassment and terror to where your face gets super flush and hot. And so I didn’t know what it was. I felt like that there was just like, the sun was an inch from my face, it was so hot, I realized that I was mumbling the things that I was mumbling didn’t make any sense. They were incorrect facts, and enough so to where my teacher said, go sit down, you’re not ready for this gave me an opportunity to come back and, and do it again. But I vowed at that point that I would never be unprepared for something, you know, for a presentation again. And as I as I’ve been working with my agents over the last several years, I realized that communication and negotiation which go hand in hand, were areas where they struggled, and that’s why I put this course together is to just find just very, very simple ways, very simple things that they can do that translate to all negotiation and all communication.

Justin Stoddart 10:49
You know, you brought up this oft used, excuse a reason why agents want to have written communication, I think it’s just is a much more effective to have the voice the voice. And then at the end, say, I’m going to, I’m going to summarize everything we’ve talked about in an email, if you just please reply, let me know you got this, and that it looks right to you, right, I mean, you you can accomplish the same thing without having to rely upon the weakness of this digital communication, right, which is not impactful.

Luke Andrews 11:24
Yeah, I mean, you are exactly right. That is such a, an amazing way to do it is to go through have the conversation and then say, I’m going to summarize this for you. Just let me know that you got that’s, it’s perfect. And it’s so simple, right? And it’s so simple.

Justin Stoddart 11:39
What else do we need to know about communication that that Luke knows that would allow us to stand out in this crowded market.

Luke Andrews 11:48
So for me, I tried to I try to keep things very simplified. You know, you and I, you and I talked about the before the call that my backgrounds in strategic marketing, and data analytics, and I was very fortunate to get to spend a lot of corporations money on market research. And we went through, and we essentially put people into eight to 10 different buckets, or avatars, as we’re going out, and we’re advertising. And what we found is that nearly 40% of people were this avatar that we call the simplicity seeking follower, which means that if we asked them to do something, and we made it more than three steps, they just weren’t going to do it. And so I’ve kind of gotten down to this, everything has to come in threes. And you know, our, our mutual mentor, Chevron, where he uses the triangle a lot, he uses the three circles, those things, and it you know, kind of kind of hit home. So I went with this triangle approach. And again, just trying to make it as simple as possible, I came up with what I call the three P’s, which are being prepared. Having good posture, making sure that you’re you know, you’re standing up straight, you’re making the good eye contact. And then finally project, you know, speaking a little louder than you feel like you need to, because more often than not, you know, we can be in a communication, we can be prepared, we can be saying the right things. But if we’re negotiating, and we’re looking all around, we’re slouched over, we’ve got poor body language, we’re not making eye contact, our messages that being received, or maybe we are we do have that good posture, we are making that good eye contact. But if we’re we’re talking softly, and we don’t realize that we’re doing it because we’re nervous, or our voice is cracking. It just puts us in this position of weakness in the negotiation that we’ve already started behind everybody else. And so we have to play catch up. And that’s why I did this project, where I found that if you speak just a little bit louder than you need to you don’t have to scream, but just a little bit louder. It takes away any mumbling. And it takes away any opportunity for your voice to crack. Which again, I just want to make sure that everybody is put in a position of strength as they’re coming through these negotiations.

Justin Stoddart 14:12
I love it right. Oftentimes, you think that the offer is what’s on paper, right? It’s it’s like that the message is what matters. And what I hear you saying is it in negotiation situations? Maybe just as much, if not at least influential is the delivery of the message, right? It’s not just like, how much like what are the terms like it’s like, in addition to like, how it’s actually delivered and what tone? At what decibel level, all this impacts whether or not your offer is accepted? Is that what I’m hearing you say?

Luke Andrews 14:45
Exactly, because if not, if those things didn’t matter, then all business would either go to the best or the cheapest. There wouldn’t be any room for any even perceived middle ground because people would either buy price where they would buy on the highest service, you’ve got to find ways to to be able to communicate a message when you’re not competing on either luxury or price.

Justin Stoddart 15:12
Yeah, love it. Well, that really answers a lot of questions of like, how does that agent always get their offers accepted? Right? Like, how does Luke continue to do it? How do his team keep get offers accepted in this market? It’s not just that they only work with clients that have the most money to put down folks. Right, you may be thinking that like, and that’s that, that goes away from again, personal responsibility and moves us more towards victims, like I can’t do anything this market, I I keep getting outbid get these clients to come in from out of town and just have more money. In some situations, that money might be so far above what your clients have that that property is not going to work. Sure. But if you can also say there are certain situations where it’s close enough to where these things are going to matter significantly, the way that I communicate the way that I follow up, right, all of these things are going to play a part in whether or not my client gets the home and whether or not I I get the commission or not right? Well,

Luke Andrews 16:05
communicating effectively. I mean, if you think about it, if I’m representing a buyer, and I’m dealing with the listing agent here, and my offer is anywhere close, who do you think that listing agent is going to push for? They’re going to go for the agent and say, hey, you know, I’ve got a good feeling about this agent over here. This is somebody that I know, this is somebody that I trust, or they asked a lot of the right questions, they ask great questions, they’re going to be good to work with throughout the process. So that will make up a significant amount certainty in this market can make up for some dollars, because the sellers are getting so far above and beyond what they were ever hoping for. To begin with. That if they can get a little bit of certainty, a little bit of assurances coming back through and having a good feeling about the agent on the other side. It means so much these relationships are so important.

Justin Stoddart 16:57
But you just dropped a value bomb. They’re honest, I don’t know, if everyone caught. But in this market, what I hear you saying is communication isn’t just about delivery, negotiating is about delivery. It’s about resolving a concern that the other side has, right? Is this offer going to go through? Is there are are these people dependable, right? And the way that you communicate? Either relays the fact that we can trust these guys, this is going to go through this is the right offer? People have a feeling of of insecurity? And am I choosing the right one, this one, there’s multiple offers situation, it looks like all of them wouldn’t be a terrible situation. Which one do I choose? It’s at the end of the day, which one takes away that concern of is, is this going to work? Or is this going to work out? And and what I hear you saying is it when we communicate not only is it the delivery, but the words that we say need to address the fact that they have some underlying concerns, and they’re making a decision to solve those concerns.

Luke Andrews 18:00
Exactly. And that’s, you know, you hear the old adage, price matters when you don’t know where they’re coming from. Remember that, right? But if things are close, and that’s all I’m looking for, is can I get it close enough to where my relationship can put us over the top? Or I can get my relationship good enough with the other side to where they will at least tell me what do I need to do to win this negotiation? Because sometimes that’s what it takes as well. And then I can go back to my client, and I can say, hey, this is what it’s going to take. Are you willing to do it for this home? If yes, fantastic. I can tell you exactly what you need to do for us to win right now. And if not, great, we’ll move on to the next one. But at least they know and it’s not this uncertainty of them putting in an offer, wondering, Hey, if I would have gotten $1,000 More would I have gotten this? And it all comes from my relationships? My communication? What am I doing on the backside, what we have on our team called agent back channeling, where we’re just going back through and we’re trying to find as much information as we can. But again, we can’t get that information over text. We can’t get it over email. It’s got to come with a phone call.

Justin Stoddart 19:17
I’ve heard at a a master negotiator that I worked with years ago. And he said he who has the most information wins, right? Because you’re just able to simply use that information to get that client what they want, right? You’re not guessing anymore. You’re delivering value to what they actually care about. And I love the fact that what did you call it back? We call it agent back channeling back. So you go back and look at all the different emails and pull that information together to be able to

Luke Andrews 19:47
it’s no I mean, it’s it’s really just it’s as simple as just calling the other agent and just asking a lot of questions. Just thing you will be surprised how many agents in our market and you probably wouldn’t be because you know, there’s two Too many agents out there. The barrier to entry in this business is so low. We have a lot of low performers who won’t just call to say, hey, is there anything outside of price that is important to the seller? Yeah, you know, I went a streak just a few months ago where I got three offers in a row accepted that were well below on price, because I asked the question, is there anything other than price, it’s important to the seller, we were able to find other terms that other people could have done if they would have just asked the question, knowing that the seller either needed a very long closed window or very short close window, the seller needed some post close possession, you know, the seller needed A, B or C, the seller needed a reverse contingency where they had some assurances that they had time to go out and find another house to purchase. Just asking those questions allows us to win on things other than price, basic things.

Justin Stoddart 20:53
I love it, man. What else does does Luke Andrews know about negotiation that we should know?

Luke Andrews 20:59
You know, like I said, it’s really who is willing to get the most uncomfortable, who is willing to be the most vulnerable and just ask the questions, putting somebody else on the spot. And again, controlling a conversation and controlling a negotiation and dominating a negotiation doesn’t mean that you’re dominating and controlling another person. Do you got to stay outside of that fallacy? In again, the fallacy of confrontation does not equal conflict. You don’t have to go in guns blazing every time with a negotiation, just coming in and having a conversation, asking direct questions, a lot of direct eye contact, it can make the other person a little uncomfortable, it can put them back on their heels just a little bit. But that’s about getting information that’s going to do right by your clients doing your fiduciary duty, getting them exactly what they want.

Justin Stoddart 21:59
I love it, man. So much wisdom here. I’ve got one more question. But before I go to that last question, want to ask how do people get more of Luke answers? What does this look like? I know you’ve got some some some things to offer the audience today, which I’m extremely grateful for just about how we do that, I’ll put it in the comments here is your speaking.

Luke Andrews 22:15
Sure. So if you just just go to my website, Luke andrews.us, you can go you can get access to my books to my courses. I’ve got a course on there on on dynamic negotiation, which is all about the three P’s that we talked about, and really how it goes deep into what those are the science behind it and how to implement it. And then I’ve got another course as well on you know, success in your first 320 days of real estate. But just going to that website there, if you use the coupon code, think bigger, all one word, think bigger. It’ll give you 20% off anything that you get through there.

Justin Stoddart 22:54
I love it, man. Think bigger. That’s fantastic. And I’m gonna I’m just putting itself down. So anybody that’s that’s listening to this, again, hopefully you capture that. If not rewind, for those that are watching it online. I’m putting all the comments here for you. So be sure to go find that look, amazing information. absolute amazing. Get back to the fundamentals, right. communication, negotiation, the things that we think that everybody does and that everyone does well, and it’s not a differentiator You’ve helped us to see it absolutely is a differentiator. So my final question to you is Luke, you’ve done some some big things here in just three years as a full time agent, right. 19 top producers on your team. Dang, brother. That’s amazing. Thomas about what Luke Andrews does, to continue to be a big thinker. What do you do to continue to expand your possibilities?

Luke Andrews 23:45
You know, for me it started with a with a question. I’m sure you’ve you’ve read Rich Dad, Poor Dad,

Justin Stoddart 23:54
Robert Kiyosaki,

Luke Andrews 23:55
one of the things that one of the key things that I took out of that book, shifting my thinking from, I can’t afford this, too. How can I afford this? And it started very financially, right? It started with, Okay, well, I, I can’t afford to hire a coach, I can’t afford to go to this conference. I can’t afford to buy this investment property to shifting my mindset to okay, how can I afford coaching? How can I afford this conference? How can I afford this this investment property? And did I get all of them? Was I able to do everything? Absolutely not. But what it did was it opened me up to so many new possibilities. But more than that, it got my creative juices flowing. So now when I’m going through, like if I’m, if I’m working with a new agent, or I’ve got a deal challenge, it’s, it used to be a you know what, I can’t get this agent to produce they’re just they’re not going to work here, you know, or, I can’t get this deal to go through. We can’t get it figured out. We’re just gonna release. Move that to how can I motivate this agent? How can I get this deal to go through and just got my mind to go and get my mind moving, and I’m coming up with, some of them are just crazy things that I would have thought they’re not even realistic possibilities. But if you get in front of a whiteboard and you say no ideas, a bad idea, and nothing is too crazy, and you just start writing stuff down, you figure out that there’s some real pearls, there’s some real wisdom that comes out of there. And that has helped me tremendously and something that I do on a daily basis, and something that I’m trying to impart to my kids to let them know that hey, nothing is too crazy out there. You just have to figure out how every day when they get out of school, I I’m blessed and fortunate enough that with my schedule, I can drop them off every single morning at school in every morning, right as they get as they’re getting ready to open the door to get out. I give them the old Walt Disney quote I say if you can dream it, and they automatically chime back with you can do it and I say anything in the world all you need is a and then they follow back with a plan. So it’s if you can dream it, you can do it anything in the world all you need to plan and that’s Robert Kiyosaki has really got me got me thinking on that one

Justin Stoddart 26:09
bad as like, we got real estate, we got fatherhood, we got thinking bigger. Luke, you You brought the house down, but this has been fantastic. Thank you. For the nuggets of wisdom. Bienville been willing to share them with us. So good. So so good. For everybody that’s listening, whether you’re listening live or after the fact. Thank you for tuning in. I appreciate you. As you know, as you heard me announced yesterday, I’ve got some big things going on. Think bigger real estate is much more than just a podcast. It’s a platform on the network to help you to think bigger, to help you to live, give and serve abundantly. Please reach out to me if we can talk more about how I might be able to help you to do that, Luke, but it’s such a pleasure again, to everybody listening, my final request are these three simple words and they are go think bigger. Look at that today. My brother.

Luke Andrews 26:55
Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. My pleasure.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai