Practice Briefing: Cross-cultural negotiation in real estate

Purpose Cross-cultural negotiation adds complexity to an already demanding professional reality. In our previous work, we introduced a comprehensive negotiation framework tailored to real estate professionals (Wiegelmann and Falcão, 2024, 2025) and distilled key cross-cultural insights in a broader business context (Falcão and Wiegelmann, 2025). This briefing equips real estate professionals and negotiators with a nuanced understanding of how cultural variables impact cross-border negotiations. It introduces a practical framework designed to enhance cross-cultural negotiation performance in diverse, global contexts. Design/methodology/approach This is an expert opinion piece that merges the practical anecdotal knowledge from a real estate expert and a professional negotiator, together with the academic literature on cross-cultural dimensions and negotiations. This opinion piece results from the identification of a poor understanding of cross-cultural negotiation challenges and scarcity of frameworks, both of which the two experts experienced when researching the academic literature and engaging or negotiating with several real estate investors in their decades of experience with real estate negotiations. Findings Cross-cultural challenges in negotiations are often overestimated and underestimated at the same time. Savvy cross-cultural negotiators will navigate the matrix of cultures to refine their approach to the unique individual in front of them. They will focus their negotiation mostly on the human component we all share as individuals while carefully treading the three main cross-cultural negotiation differences: intentions, rituals and preferences. Practical implications Despite the abundant and valuable literature, academic or otherwise, on cultural dimensions, real estate negotiators on average, do not have the time nor will they reap the value from focusing on a single cultural analysis. To then aspire to run several cultural analyses on different nationalities, incorporate them in a coherent negotiation strategy and be able to change behaviour accordingly is a tall order for any negotiator, from novice to expert. This article provides a much-needed, theoretically sound, coherent, robust, flexible and pragmatic cross-cultural negotiation framework for real estate investors globally. Originality/value The originality comes first from demonstrating, based on the authors’ expert opinion, how cultural dimensions are less practical tools for the real estate negotiator who has to negotiate with several cultures at once or in short sequence and then from sharing a cross-cultural negotiation framework that can guide the strategy and behaviours of cross-cultural negotiators to improve their performance.