Hate the player do not…..
Training up new negotiators is always fun, but should “stand
on your chair when speaking to a solicitor” really need to be in the teaching manual?
I hate the term “progress checking”, you may as well call it
“ringing to irritate you”, as that is what everyone seems to think that it is,
or certainly what it does. We have tried our best to wrap up this term in as
many different packages as possible. “We are ringing to facilitate the sale”, “we
are calling to try to help you”, “we are hoping that we can provide you with information
that you might find useful”, “we are the only people who are willing to speak
to all parties involved without charging by the minute”.
The general public think that selling a house is easy, all
you do is find a buyer and the rest of the job is done by the solicitor. After
they have sold their house, they will tell you that their sales negotiator was
invaluable. The negotiator speaks to the seller, the buyer, the buyer’s
solicitor, the seller’s solicitor, the mortgage advisor, the surveyor, the
agents throughout the chain, the utility companies, the contractors instructed
for quotes, the removal firms, the families … and so the list goes on. “How useful”
I hear you cry, “to have access to all this information and to be available at
the other end of a phone or an email”.
Let’s be honest, moving house can be quite stressful. Often
people really don’t want to move or don’t want to have to sell. The three D’s unfortunately
feature daily in our vocabulary (death, divorce and debt) and no one likes to hear
someone in tears over their circumstances, it is actually heart-wrenching. But your
sales negotiator will listen to all your woes, and all your worries, we
will hold your hand throughout the process and will try our best to always
offer impartial advice, always with your best interests at heart.
So, when we are ringing solicitors for an update, this is so
that we can help our clients, but also so that we can help chase things along
too. We are quite happy to pick up the phone to our clients to let them know
that they need to do something, or to explain that they need to call by to sign
a document, or to pay across their deposit. We are NOT just ticking boxes on
our software to say that we have called a solicitor, we are genuinely looking
for ways to make the process smoother and easier for all concerned. If you are
a solicitor reading this, maybe bear in mind that we aren’t all just irritants,
we can actually help you.
I will keep “stand on your chair when ringing a solicitor”
in my training manual for now, but hope to be able to take it out in the future
and replace it with “invite the solicitor out for coffee”. We are all human and
all trying to get to the same goal, and it’s so much nicer if we can all have a
pleasant time along the way. 
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