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Most people think negotiating starts when the first offer comes in. It doesn’t. By then, most of the outcome is already decided.
What follows is how I work — the preparation, the questions, the trades, and the one habit that is harder than all the rest put together.
If you are selling, your negotiation begins weeks before anyone writes an offer.
Price the house right and prepare it properly, and buyers show up already competing with each other. I get to negotiate from a strong position because the market handed me one. Price it wrong, and I am working uphill from the first day, trying to talk somebody into a number that buyers have already voted against with their feet. Same house. Two completely different fights.
That is why I am so particular about pricing and preparation with my sellers. I am not fussing over details for the sake of it. I am building the ground I will be standing on later, when it counts. You can read how I approach the whole process in my complete guide to selling a home in Calvert County.
Everybody fixates on the number. I understand why — it is the figure people repeat to their family.
But I have watched a lower offer beat a higher one more times than I can count. One let the sellers stay in the house until their new build finished. One came with cash above the appraised value, so a low appraisal could not blow up the deal. One quietly removed the contingency the sellers had been losing sleep over.
Price, settlement date, contingencies, financing type, repairs, possession — all of it is negotiable, and every piece of it is worth real money to somebody. My job is to work out which pieces matter on the other side, and what they are worth to my client.
Before I make a move, I want to know who I am dealing with. Not their name. Their situation.
There is almost always a gap between what someone says they want and what they actually need. That gap is where deals get made. So these are the questions I am working on from the moment we are in play:
Some of this comes from the other agent, if they are the talking kind. A lot of it comes from listening at the showing, reading the disclosures closely, and paying attention to what the house itself tells me.
Most agents never ask any of it. They send the offer, wait, and react to whatever comes back. Information is the cheapest advantage in this business and hardly anybody goes out and gets it.
This is the one that surprises people.
When I put a number on the table, I stop talking. That is the whole technique.
Silence is uncomfortable and most people cannot sit in it. They fill it. And when they fill it, they start negotiating against themselves without ever meaning to.
Here is what that looks like in real life. A buyer’s agent called me about one of my listings. I asked my question, and then I stopped talking. She filled the space — and what she filled it with was that my listing sat a few doors down from her buyer’s sister, and that the two of them had dreamed for years about living on the same street.
She should never have told me that.
The moment she did, I knew her clients were not walking away over money. My very next thought was simple: these buyers are paying full price for this house. That one sentence, handed to me in a pause, put $23,000 more in my sellers’ pockets at settlement.
I am not telling you that to be smug. I am telling you because it cuts both ways. If you are the one buying, the agent representing you can give your whole position away in a single friendly sentence on the phone, and you will never find out it happened. You will just quietly pay more. So ask whoever you hire what they say about you to the other side — and what they know to keep to themselves.
I am not quiet to be cold. I am quiet because the person who speaks first is usually the person who gives something away.
Nothing crosses the table for free. Not from my side of it.
Say a buyer is willing to let the sellers stay in the house a few weeks after closing at no charge. Wonderful — that rent-back is worth real money to those sellers. So what comes back the other way? A home warranty, maybe. Or a tighter inspection window. The concession should purchase something, because it has value.
The discipline is simply saying the trade out loud. “We can do that for you, and here is what we need in return.” Give and take. Not give and hope.
A concession handed over for nothing does not buy goodwill. It tells the other side there is more where that came from, and they will come back for it. They always do.
Here is the part nobody tells you about this job.
The hardest thing I do is stay quiet when the other side is being aggressive. Not the strategy. Not the contract language. The self-control.
Aggression feels like strength, and it looks like strength to a client watching from the sidelines. But an agent who gets loud has stopped negotiating and started reacting, and the other side can always tell. I have been on calls where the other agent raised their voice for ten minutes, I said almost nothing, and we walked away with every term we had asked for.
I am not naturally calm about it. Twenty-five years in, I still have to fight myself on it, on nearly every deal. That is the point though — it is a skill, not a personality. Which means it can be practiced, and it can be brought to your transaction on purpose.
It matters most when a house draws multiple offers, and when the contingencies in the Maryland contract start doing the real work.
I am a Master Certified Negotiation Expert (MCNE) and hold roughly half a dozen professional designations in negotiation, with advanced training from Yale, Northwestern, UVA, Columbia, and UC Davis. That training shows up in the results: my listings achieve a sold-to-list price consistently over 101%, which means my sellers routinely net more than their original asking price.
Career totals as of 2026: 1,338 homes sold • $532,653,786 in closed sales volume • 25+ years of experience • licensed since 2000 • ranked in the top 1% of Realtors nationwide.
Whether you are selling a home or buying a home in Calvert County, the terms get negotiated at every stage of the deal — see my full Calvert County real estate credentials and awards.
More About Dawn's Experience
If you are hiring an agent, ask them how they decide what to give away. Ask what they do with silence. Ask what questions they plan to ask the other side before they write your offer.
If the answer is vague, you are about to be represented by someone who reacts. You want someone who prepares.