Answerability — for your agency
Which source actually produced your last ten listings? Can you tell that from a record?
Every agency has a confident answer and most of them are wrong, because the confident answer is whichever source produced the most memorable instruction rather than the most instructions.
A source and a basis. From the record is a basis. Off the top of my head, and confident about three of them is equally a basis, and writing it down truthfully beats producing a number nobody credits. This front is not scoring you; it establishes what your agency can currently ask of itself, which is what every decision this year rests on.
This has never come from outside the office; its subject is apparatus no client can lay eyes on.
Consider the ground behind it. Counting by negotiator, by property type, by zip code, by source, by outcome. Putting this quarter beside the previous one with nothing commissioned. Retrieving instructions by description: everything on the market more than ninety days, everything withdrawn unsold, every managed property whose rent has not moved in two years. Knowing how negotiator time actually divides between appraising, viewing and chasing. Knowing which half of the business the profit comes from. Knowing which portal produced enquiries that became instructions, as distinct from enquiries.
Then the enquiry worth more than a year of advertising: which source produces owners who instruct twice? An agency becomes known for whatever generates the most activity, and activity and loyalty are separate properties that sometimes pull against each other. A board that produces forty enquiries and two instructions, and a past client who produces one instruction and three referrals, look nothing alike in an accounts ledger and the agency holds nothing that compares them.
The genuine price is a business steered by stories. One difficult landlord becomes a policy about single-property owners. One spectacular sale becomes a marketing budget for three years. The mortgage broker quietly sending you a fifth of your buyers receives no acknowledgement, because the figure that would have pointed at him was never assembled.
Your trade's own situation makes this sit less comfortably than it would elsewhere. Instruction on the subject is available to agents and has been for months; what has not happened is anybody acting on it. A profession can be thoroughly briefed and entirely unchanged, and the two states look identical from inside it.
Tonight. Take your last ten listings and write the source beside each. Note how many you had to guess. That count is the answer.
The other eleven
This is question 11 of twelve. Answerability is whether you can ask your own business a question — and it is one face of twelve, every one of them turned at a customer whether or not it has been answered.
- 1. FindabilityWhether a stranger can tell what you sell and what it costs.
- 2. QualifiabilityWhether they can work out that you can take them.
- 3. BookabilityWhether they can actually get in, without you.
- 4. PredictabilityWhether they know what happens once they say yes.
- 5. VisibilityWhether they can see the work while it is happening.
- 6. AutomabilityWhether the job moves on without somebody remembering.
- 7. MemoryWhether you hold what you already know about them.
- 8. ContinuityWhether the next visit starts where the last one ended.
- 9. ReachabilityWhether you come back to them at the right moment.
- 10. CountabilityWhether every job is recorded the same way.
- 12. LearnabilityWhether the business gets better from its own record.