You can read about marketing, sales, and advertise in a slew of books. The effective agents have lived the failures and triumphs that come with trial and error. I was working on a parcel of land my client wished to develop into a small subdivision, and later sell as single family home sites. My client asked me to talk to the property abutter and offer him a reasonable sum of money for a 50 foot piece of land. The abutter said no, we raised the price after all the profits from the lots were worth paying a bit of a premium (for the small strip of land). His answer was he wouldn’t sell at any price.

I began to analyze his objection and found it wasn’t about the money, it was his land where he raised his family and he wanted to keep it (in his words) “as long as I am in an upright position”. We talked some more about life, kids, ride-on lawn mowers, and what had changed with the neighborhood over the years. I spoke with the hopeful developer and we offered to give the abutter access to the back of his lot from this proposed street so he could build a shed, we designed a landscape plan that protected his house from new head lights that would be turning that corner, and we offered to name the street after his only daughter. The 50 foot strip of land would be a permanent right of way rather than a change of ownership and in the end our new friend the abutter wouldn’t take any money for this agreement so long as we paid for the legal documents and did what we promised. There are many true stories how seemingly insurmountable objectives are remedied, my favorites aren’t the ones resolved by throwing more money at the problem (although that’s what it takes sometimes).

I would love to hear your experiences, and I promise to tell you more of mine.