Automability — for your agency
An offer is accepted on a Friday afternoon. What happens over the weekend without an agent doing it?
An answer of nothing happens finishes the question, and in most agencies that is the accurate one. No owner has ever asked this — its subject is apparatus that cannot be seen from outside the building — so you are asked it bare, and a candid nothing outranks any hopeful account of a system.
The weekend is chosen deliberately. It is sixty hours in which a buyer can cool, a competing offer can arrive, a lender can be applied to, and a solicitor can be instructed — and in a great many agencies the first of those sixty hours of work begins on Monday at nine, because the memorandum of sale lives in somebody's notebook.
So: when an offer is accepted, does the memorandum go out on its own. Do both sides' representatives get notified. Does the listing status change on every portal, or on the one somebody remembers. Does the buyer get told what happens next without being telephoned. Does a chase get scheduled for the mortgage application. When a survey is booked, does anything know. After ten still days in a chain, does a list reach anybody, or only an unease. When a tenancy nears its end, does the renewal conversation start by itself.
In property the arrangement is usually visible on a wall, which is why agencies perform better here than they would claim and cannot put it into words. The mechanism is a whiteboard, a column of cards, or one negotiator carrying eleven transactions in her head — a genuine mechanism, with nothing written behind it, flawless while she is at her desk and wholly absent the week she takes leave.
The costly one is reliably the same: the stalled chain nobody is counting. A sale sitting still for a fortnight is not a sale anybody decided to neglect. It is a sale that fell off the top of a list, and the fall-through that follows gets recorded as the market.
The charge here lands on the agency, not the owner. Anything leaning on memory survives a slow month and gives way in a crowded one, and a crowded month is when giving way costs a completion. Nothing records a chase that never happened; it surfaces weeks later as a transaction that died.
Ahead of any automation, setting the split on paper exposes the two places the risk is concentrated — here, reliably, the weekend that follows an acceptance and the renewal that never began.
Tonight. Take one accepted offer. List the first eight things that must happen. Put fires or somebody does it against each. The size of the second group is what you bring.
The other eleven
This is question 6 of twelve. Automability is whether the job moves on without somebody remembering — 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.
- 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.
- 11. AnswerabilityWhether you can ask your own business a question.
- 12. LearnabilityWhether the business gets better from its own record.