You can learn more about negotiation by watching a child at a market stall for 10 minutes than a weekend seminar could teach you. The child picks something up, asks for the price, pays for it or puts it back. No apology. No performance. If the price is too much, the child says so. If the child isn't sure they want it, they just walk away. The stallholder does not take it personally and life goes on.
At some point between the age of 5 and 35, something happens to us. We start to feel that making an offer is rude, that asking a seller to explain their price is confrontational and that walking away without giving a reason requires some kind of exit strategy. Most of us carry this into negotiations with an estate agent, and we pay whatever it says on the brochure because we are so worried about looking silly, or seeming difficult, or offending someone we met 20 minutes ago.
This is worth understanding, because it's not weakness. It's just learned behaviour.
What's the Number on the Wall?
Estate agents know that the asking price of a house is not a fact, it’s an anchor. It’s the first number that they drop in front of you, which then drags every subsequent thought towards it. This number can be completely made up, which is why a house listed at £385,000 feels like a bargain if you initially expected £420,000, even if neither figure is grounded in anything solid.
Children are immune to anchoring because they have not learned to treat a price tag as authoritative. They have no pre-existing framework that says "a person in a suit wrote this number down, so it must mean something." Adults absorb the anchor almost involuntarily. That means you have to recognise when anchoring is happening and remember that the number on the particulars is the beginning of a conversation, not the end.
Do your own research on comparable sales in the same street. Not the same postcode, the same street, preferably the same style of property. Then you have a different anchor, one of your own making, and suddenly the conversation feels a lot less one-sided.
The Power of the Pause (A Small Child Understands This Perfectly)
A child wanting something and not sure about it will hold it, look at it, put it down and then pick it up again. They are entirely comfortable with the silence of indecision, with no pressure to fill it with reassuring chatter.
Adults make offers and immediately start talking. This is about the worst thing you can do. You make an offer, the other side goes quiet and then you start talking again, saying something like “we’re obviously flexible” or “I know that’s a bit low”. You have negotiated against yourself in under four seconds.
Silence after an offer doesn’t have to be awkward. It’s information. If the seller goes quiet, they’re thinking about it, and that’s good. Let them. You don’t need to rescue them from the pause.
How you use every corner of a new property matters just as much as the price you pay for it. How to create a WFH office without losing a bedroom is exactly the kind of thinking that changes how much a home is actually worth to you day to day.
What "Walking Away" Actually Does
A five-year-old takes something back to a shelf in a shop and leaves. No explanation of what has happened is required by anyone.
For most adults, this is almost physically uncomfortable. We have been socialised to believe that changing your mind requires justification, and that walking away from a negotiation is vaguely aggressive. So we stay, agreeing to things we're uncertain about, talking ourselves into accepting terms we weren't quite happy with because leaving felt impolite.
Walking away from a deal is not a tactic, in the cynical sense. When a deal doesn't work for you, you simply walk away. And if you treat walking away as a performance – the big dramatic exit designed to force a callback – then you've lost the plot. But when you can genuinely say "this doesn't work for me, so I'll leave," something changes. You stop buying from a position of anxiety and start buying from a position of choice.
Children don't think of this as negotiation at all. They're just deciding whether they want the thing.
That might be the most useful buying tip of all.
Questions this raises
- How do you negotiate a house price without apologising?
- Is it rude to offer below the asking price?
- What should you do when a seller rejects your offer?
- Does walking away actually strengthen your position?
