Countability — for your agency
A sale and a lease both earn you a fee. Are they recorded in the same shape, and can you put them side by side?
Yes, or the point where the shapes part. In most agencies they part completely: sales live in one pipeline measured in completions, lettings live in another measured in monthly income, and nobody can state which of the two halves of the business is actually carrying the other.
That matters more here than in any other trade on this list, because the two halves behave as opposites. Sales income is large, lumpy and dependent on a market. Management income is small, recurring and dependent on nothing much at all. An agency that cannot compare them cannot tell whether a quiet quarter was a market event or a structural one.
Then the rest of recording to a single standard. Is every instruction opened the same way, or to whichever negotiator's habits? Is the marketing spend recorded against the property? Is the time recorded against anything — the viewings conducted, the chasing, the Saturday appraisal that produced no instruction? Is a fall-through recorded as a fall-through, with a reason? Is it known which negotiator listed it and which one sold it, which are routinely different people and routinely argued about? Is the outcome a measurable figure, or an impression?
The fall-through reason is the sharp end. A transaction that collapses is recorded in most agencies as a property returning to the market. The reason — the survey, the lender, the chain, the buyer's own sale — is in a negotiator's memory, which means the single most instructive event in the whole business leaves no trace at all. Twenty of those a year is a pattern nobody can see.
An empty tenth front makes the agency impossible to interrogate. Which portal to keep paying for, whether to grow the lettings book, what the commission ought to be, which negotiator to promote — every one is resolved by the sharpest recollection in the room, and sharp usually means last month's disappointment.
Surveying and inspection is the one line here with naturally countable work — discrete jobs, fixed fees, measurable turnaround — and is therefore the line where the absence of a record is least excusable.
Tonight. Take last month's completions and last month's new tenancies and try to put them on one page in the same units. If they will not go, write down where the shapes part. That sentence is itself the measurement, and a measurement is what is wanted here.
The other eleven
This is question 10 of twelve. Countability is whether every job is recorded the same way — 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.
- 11. AnswerabilityWhether you can ask your own business a question.
- 12. LearnabilityWhether the business gets better from its own record.