How To Handle Objections as a Realtor

Recently at my brokerage, we started a series on selling, like actually how to sell, not how to sell real estate, just generalized sales techniques. And I wanted to share an objection handling framework. Hey, my name's Chance Brown. I'm the broker owner of CB&A Realtors and I make video content for real estate agents because I'm passionate about helping people build great businesses. I think one of the things that we do very poorly in this industry is actually train our agents on how to sell. We train contracts, we train transactions, we train compliance, we train technology, we train all these different things, but actual sales technique is typically not one of them. We ran this five-week course in our brokerage recently called Trust Me and it was all trustbased selling and one of the classes was on objections which I think agents tend to hear an objection and they immediately run to try to defend the home or try to answer the objection.

What I'd like to encourage you to do is maybe take a little bit of a step back from that. Let's run a framework. I really love frameworks. They can kind of sometimes seem cheesy to some people. They can kind of sometimes seem a little elementary. And I'm okay with the elementary part because the truth of the matter is if your brain automatically goes to a very simple to follow framework, it makes what you're trying to do and what you're trying to learn and then put into practice and build skills and habits around. It makes that part really easy and it makes it seem natural because you're just saying what happens in the framework. So, I have kind of gotten into a place now in my teaching and in the training that we do in our brokerage where we're trying to create multiple different frameworks for agents to be able to default to when a situation arises. So, this framework is a four-step process for handling objections. The first step is clarification. I think often times when we hear [snorts] an objection come up, we're very quick to respond based off of our assumptions. That's dangerous territory. Everybody knows the the saying about assumptions, right? I think one of the very first things that you can do to make sure that both you understand before moving forward and your client understands that you're listening is to stop for a second and clarify the reason for the objection.

not the objection itself. We'll get to that in a second. We're clarifying the reason for it because they might say that they don't like something and your brain out of past experience automatically goes over here when their brain is over here. We don't want to do that. We want to make sure that we're all on the same page and we understand. So, take a second and just say, let me make sure I'm getting this right. You are blank, whatever it is. And the reason for that is blank. And if we're on the same page, great. If not, we get on the same page over what that objection is about because we can't move forward without that understanding. Then I literally want you just to repeat. We call it confirm. So clarify, confirm, repeat exactly what the objection is.