What Is Framing Hard and Playing Soft?
Put yourself in your vendor’s shoes for a moment.
You’ve bought a property in the past, likely through the private treaty method. That means you’re familiar with how this method works and you’re comfortable with it. You know that you put the property on the market and your real estate agent holds inspections etc. You wait for them to do their thing and then you start getting offers.
All of this happens over a few weeks and it’s all rather comfortable.
You assume that the agent you’ve decided to work with will use this method…
But instead, they launch straight into talking about auctions. The very first conversation you have with them involved going through this process that you don’t understand. You’re yanked right out of your comfort zone and thrust into a direction that you’re not ready to follow.
What emotion do you feel at that moment?
I’d say it’s fear.
You’re already scared of the auction process and you’re terrified about how this agent seems to have homed in on it immediately.
Now, flip the script back around and think about how you present the idea of auctions to your vendors.
Perhaps you’ve just realised why so few of them want to convert to auctions!
Avoiding this situation is the idea behind framing hard and playing soft.
I worked with an agent a few years ago who had an amazing process around this. This guy had an amazing system for converting private treaties into auctions. And the key to this system was that he always thought two or three steps ahead of the vendor.
He understood that most vendors aren’t ready to go to auction right away. As a result, they’d likely say no if he tried to make them do that.
Instead, he’d list the property as they’d requested. Then he’d rely on his systems and processes to introduce this concept of an auction to the vendor. Over the next couple of weeks, he’d drop truth bombs on them to help them see why going to auction was a good idea.
Then he’d go in hard on the idea of going to auction a couple of weeks later.
That’s exactly what you need to do.
Go in soft with the vendor initially so that you can secure the listing. From there, you start moving towards the idea of an auction.

Creating Your Commencement Letter
If you want to learn more about the process for guiding the vendor towards an auction, you’ll need to jump into our elite agency training system, details below.
Here, I’m going to talk to you about the early part of the process – taking control of the stock.
To do that, you’re going to send a commencement letter to the vendor when listing a private treaty.
There are three key points that you need to layer into this letter to make it effective and allow for the process of framing hard and playing soft to come into play.
If they run open for inspections and less than two people arrive at any open home.
Two weeks pass by without you getting a written offer from a potential buyer.
No formal requests for private inspections outside of an open home.
Think about your previous campaigns that have failed or faltered. You would have one or all of the above happen at some point in your career. Laying these points into your commencement letter with a summary that you will sit down together and review these on day 14 will allow the auction conversation to be positioned effectively.
With this commencement letter, you’re laying the facts on the table and setting the groundwork for moving to auction.

Play It Soft Before You Go in Hard
You can think of the commencement letter as the kick-off point for taking a property to auction.
That means by day 14 they’re more willing to listen when you introduce the idea of going to auction. And ultimately, this means that you’ll convert more of your stale private treaty stock to auction.