Continuity — for your agency
I am leasing it again. Does the new lease start from what you already hold?
What an owner does not have to supply twice — that is the answer, and it is a list rather than a sentence. The deed. The association's own paperwork. Appliance manuals and their service record. The safety certificates and when each expires. The inventory, updated rather than rebuilt. The photographs, if the property has not changed. Her bank details and her instructions.
If the honest position is that she supplies all of it again, publish that. She will do it. What damages the relationship is an agency implying custody and then emailing to request a floor plan it produced itself fourteen months earlier.
The structural questions sit underneath. When a property comes back, does it reopen against its own history, or arrive as a new instruction at the same address? Can whoever handles it read what the property achieved last time and what the previous tenancy was like? Is there any interval at which a past owner hears from you, or does the relationship end at the final invoice and restart at a vacancy? Can she change her negotiator, her contact preferences, her reporting? Can she take her own inventory and certificates away if she instructs somebody else — at no cost to you, and the clearest signal available about whose file it is?
No front in these twelve has better arithmetic and none is attended to less. She has chosen the agency twice. Winning her costs nothing, the property is known, the documents exist, and what stands between you is retrieval. Agencies will fund boards, portals and sponsored local football and then mislay this landlord between an archive and a re-let.
What goes next is knowledge, and it does not come back. A property returning after two years is evidence: of whether the rent was pitched right, of whether the tenant you placed was the tenant you thought, of what actually brings an owner back. Re-opening it as a fresh instruction erases the comparison in silence, and nobody at the agency learns it was available.
Sales agency turns this on its head to good effect: a client coming back brings a different transaction rather than the same one again, and what she does not want to provide again is her identification, her title history and the survey from last time.
Tonight. The list of what she does not have to send twice. Then locate the last landlord who came back and establish whether the file she came back to was her own.
The other eleven
This is question 8 of twelve. Continuity is whether the next visit starts where the last one ended — 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.
- 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.