(Continued from page 31)  This can be extremely frustrating, especially if you think you almost had a deal and suddenly, it gets pulled out from under you. This is a tactic. Recognize it as such. Remember, you never really were that close to a deal, this is just a game they are playing. Don’t get angry, don’t get upset, just play it out.

The best way to deal with this is that if they take all of their concessions off the table, you take all of yours back. Now this gets a little silly, because they already know what you’re willing to give, at least to the point that you’ve already made the concessions, and therefore they know that all those concessions are within your settlement range.

So when you pull them back you can’t really pretend that they’re not there. Nonetheless, it’s better the play the little game because you’re saying to the buyer, fine, if you want to start all over again, be my guest. The message is, I see your tactic, and as we said before, a tactic recognized becomes a useless tactic.

Once the buyer recognizes that you recognize what is going on, their likely response is to fairly rapidly move the negotiation back to where it was when you broke off, and hopefully you’ll be able to move from there to close the sale.

In the process, you may need to do a little reconfiguring just to let the buyer save face and not be forced to acknowledge that they were caught using the tactic.