Bookability — for your agency
Can I book the appraisal appointment myself for Saturday?
Two things finish this: where she books, and whether weekends are real. The second is not a detail. An owner deciding to sell is doing it around a job, and Saturday morning is when a house can be walked without taking leave. An agency whose calendar quietly stops on Friday at five has published an invitation it cannot honour.
So say which. If you do Saturdays, say the hours. If you do not, say so and give the earliest evening — a stated limit is useful, where a silent one produces an owner who requested Saturday, heard nothing until Monday, and by Monday had somebody else's board going up.
Then the rest a stranger cannot work out. Whether the appraisal is free, which belongs on this page as well as the first. How long it takes — thirty minutes or ninety is the difference between fitting it in and planning a day around it. Whether she needs to be present for all of it. Whether she should have anything ready: the deed, the HOA documents, the tenancy. Whether the valuation arrives verbally on the day or in writing afterwards, and how long afterwards. Whether the appointment will wait an hour while she talks to a husband. Whether changing it requires ringing the office.
The difficulty here is real and it is about the appraisal itself. A valuation visit is a listing pitch. You want to arrive prepared, with comparable sales, having researched the street — and a stranger self-booking on Saturday gives you less notice than a conversation would. Opening the diary feels like arriving unprepared.
The preparation is a form, not a phone call. Address, property type, tenanted or vacant, timescale, whether a mortgage is involved. Collected at booking, it tells you more than most telephone conversations do, and it arrives in writing.
And the person lost at this step had already picked you. The page persuaded her and a shut diary finished it. An assistant asked to book a valuation rather than to recommend an agency will book one wherever booking is possible, and it reports nothing back about your having been the stronger choice.
Surveying and inspection has the strongest case of the four lines for making this self-service, because the job is scoped, priced and dated, and the appointment is genuinely bookable without any conversation at all.
Tonight. Where she books. Whether Saturdays exist. How long it takes, and whether it costs anything.
The other eleven
This is question 3 of twelve. Bookability is whether they can actually get in, without you — 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.
- 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.
- 11. AnswerabilityWhether you can ask your own business a question.
- 12. LearnabilityWhether the business gets better from its own record.