Negotiation lessons from two deals that almost fell apart

Join Suze Cumming for a free live webinar: Negotiation in the real world: What would you do? Deals fall apart for reasons that have nothing to do with price. In this free, interactive webinar, Suze Cumming will be joined by top agents to work through real negotiation scenarios with you — the kind that don’t have obvious answers — and breaks down the thinking behind them. Bring your toughest situations. There’ll be time for questions. Register here.

 

Read on for two deals that almost didn’t happen and what made the difference.

Remember the good old days when buyers made their best offer with as few conditions as they could stomach, and felt like they’d won the lottery if they got the house?

The market has changed. Putting and keeping deals together is now the hardest part of real estate.

Buyers are hesitant, sellers are anxious, and agents are either adapting or failing.

I know it’s hard right now. Many of you are feeling the strain of more hours, more frustration, more costs and fewer deals. I’ve been there. This market echoes the real estate recession of the 1990s in many ways, when I was a young, ambitious agent in Toronto. My negotiation knowledge began in those trenches because, like you, I didn’t have a choice. I was not going to fail.

And neither are you — if you continue to evolve your negotiation skills.

Two stories from my inner circle show exactly what that looks like in today’s market.

The inspection wasn’t the problem

Janet Rathbun in White Rock, B.C., is a high-producing agent who has been working with me and the Nature of Real Estate for years. She’s taken all the courses and participates in our bimonthly Alliance group meetings. The negotiation skills she’s learned — and continues to master — are a significant part of her success in this market.

Janet listed a property, priced it sharply, generated good activity right away, and attracted two offers. They accepted one. But after the inspection, the buyer walked — over Poly-B plumbing.

Except that wasn’t the real issue. The plumbing had been disclosed and factored into the price.

The real issue? The buyer hadn’t fully come to terms with what they were taking on when they wrote the offer.

The inspection didn’t create the problem. It exposed their uncertainty. Once you see it that way, you stop treating inspections as a hurdle and start treating them as a predictable failure point in the decision-making process.

So Janet changed her approach.

Before the next offer came in, she made the risks explicit — Poly-B, age, condition. Documented. Shared. Discussed. She also called agents before offers arrived, asking about financing, experience and decisiveness. When the next offer came in, both sides initialled the property information sheet, and they included a clause clarifying the inspection was for due diligence, not renegotiation on known issues.

Same property. Same market. Completely different outcome. The buyer removed subjects and closed.

When the deal dies — and then doesn’t

Leslie Briggs doesn’t chase deals. She reads them.

In central Toronto’s punishing market, Leslie has built her business on something slower and harder to teach: the ability to understand what’s actually happening beneath the surface of a transaction. She’s part of our negotiation mastermind group — a community where agents do the work most skip.

This is a story about a house, a seller who couldn’t let go, and the moment a negotiation became something else entirely.

It started like so many do: offer night, two competing bids, and Leslie’s first-time buyers at the top of the pile.

Then the seller froze.

Deadlines passed. Extensions were offered, accepted, and expired without a decision. No counter. No acceptance. Just silence. The deal collapsed under its own weight.

What Leslie recognized — and this is the shift that changes everything — is that the seller wasn’t negotiating. He was grieving. Thirty-five years in that home. He wasn’t weighing numbers on a spreadsheet; he was trying to figure out how to say goodbye to a life. You can’t pressure someone through that. You can only stay in the conversation and wait for them to find the door themselves.

So she did.

Through steady dialogue with the listing agent, through patience and careful listening, she pieced together what was really happening. He wasn’t a difficult seller. He was an overwhelmed one. That realization didn’t make the deal easier — but it made the strategy clearer. Information, not pressure. Understanding, not ultimatums.

Meanwhile, her buyers had emotionally moved in. They were measuring furniture in their heads, naming the guest room, comparing every other listing to this one. That kind of attachment is its own trap.

So she said something simple. Direct. A little bit blunt.

“Either you need to break up with this house — or buy it.”

It landed. The buyers re-engaged. They wrote again. This time, the offer was designed around the seller — not just the price, but the irrevocable period, the pacing, the breathing room.

He still said no.

Most agents close the file there. But Leslie knows the difference between someone who won’t and someone who isn’t ready yet. She never let go of the relationship with the listing agent. That quiet persistence earned her the call.

Two days later, her phone rang.

“If your buyers still want it, he’ll take your terms.”

Deal done.

Not because she pushed harder. Because she understood the difference between timing and readiness, between leverage and pressure, between closing a negotiation and allowing one to finish.

Want to negotiate like this?

Both Janet and Leslie credit their results in part to the skills they’ve built through the Accredited Real Estate Negotiator (AREN) Foundations Course — a live, online certification designed specifically for real estate agents who want to lead negotiations with confidence and integrity.

The next AREN course runs May 26 and 27, 2026 in a small-group Zoom format built around real-life case studies and role plays.

Registration is $399 — no annual fees, no upsells. Discounts are available for pairs and teams. Ready to commit? Register for the AREN course here.

Want to keep the conversation going? Join Suze for a free live webinar where she works through real negotiation scenarios and answers your questions.

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