Reflection on the Bullard Houses Negotiation Case

Reflection on The Bullard Houses Negotiation Case

During my preparation, I found that the key information was not allowed to disclose to our partners and that the final price of this site would be much lower if our price was set based on residential condos. My target price was 11 million. I managed to start the conversation first. My offered 10 million dollars, and my justification was that a lot of preservation work and fixings work have to be done before I can start moving in. Soon, I found that the seller was not interested price but have too much interest in the potential use of this site. I tried everything except lying but my partner was feeling difficult to make progresses. Thus, I suggested to make a list of what I can do and what I can’t do. What I can do include office building, hotel, art gallery, residential buildings and etc. I tried to make my really intention, hotel, overwhelmed by a lot of other possible options, and finally we made an agreement of potential uses of the site. After that, our negotiation turned out to be very smooth. We had several offers and counter offers and then reached a deal, 17 million dollars with some additional conditions.

On reflection, I learnt a lot in terms of negotiation strategies and concepts and gained insights of real world negotiation through our post negotiation class discussion and class analysis.

The first and foremost is the no deal option. In this case, no deal is actually the best option because the intended use of this site is not well aligned with the interest of both parties. The common ground was not solid. As we can see from the real picture, I do not think the big hotel building behind the Bullard houses fits well with surroundings. The Bullard houses were abandoned and wasted. It is human nature or a cost-saving thinking mode that drive us to reach a bad deal, and it is also very easy to stick with numbers because of our bias. We need to always be careful about this and gauge our interest in reaching an agreement versus no deal.

Integrated negotiation was another critical part of this negotiation. If both parties agreed on the use of site, a lot of integrated negotiation strategies can be applied. We had common interest on retaining the name, address and appearance of this site and on engaging more local customers. We were able to expand our pie. If those factors mentioned above could be leveraged wisely, I would gain some extra bargaining power. I am practicing and making myself sensitive about what can be done to achieve a win-win situation and make everyone’s slice of pie larger. This is much easier than getting an additional piece of pie from our opponents.

Lying is not a good option although lying may give us more advantage over our opponent. For example, if a buyer lied about our BATNA or use of this site, the buyer would definitely impose more pressure on the opponent to reduce the price. However, in the negotiation, it is very hard to figure out this real reservation price and