Findability — for your agency
A homeowner has decided to sell and does not know which agency to ring. She sets the house out to an assistant and asks which firm to list with. A single agency comes back, and it published a percentage.
What is your commission to sell, what is your management fee as a percentage, and do you charge for the first appraisal?
A percentage, a percentage, and a figure or the word free. Three facts, all three of which you quote on the telephone daily, and almost none of which appears on an agency website in the country.
The reason is competitive and it is understandable. Publishing a rate invites the agency down the road to undercut it by a quarter point, and the sales conversation is where the rate gets justified — what you spend on photography, how you handle the viewings, the negotiating. That conversation is the whole craft.
The conversation no longer happens first. She is reading a recommendation that was composed before she spoke to anybody, and a recommendation can only repeat what a page said. An agency with no percentage anywhere is not being undercut; it is unquotable.
Four lines sit here and each prices something different: sales agency on a percentage of the sale, lettings and management on a percentage of the rent plus a setup fee, mortgage broking on a fee or on commission disclosed, and surveying and inspection on a flat figure per property type. All four are publishable. The flat figures are the easiest and are missing most often.
Property is one of only two trades where somebody is already teaching this continuously — and its audience figures are the entire lesson. A real-estate coach's own upload feed, read on 22 October 2026, carries five of its last fifteen on working with an assistant, three of them declared full courses. A seventy-minute course aimed at agents shows 5,732 views. His newest, from September, shows 344.
So the trade that talks about this more than any other has the teaching in place and no audience for it. Those are two separate facts and only the first one is true. Everybody in your trade is being told this matters. Almost nobody has sat down for an hour and done it.
What makes that recoverable is how small the doing is. When an assistant named a business in our own measurement, the reason it gave back was always something the page itself said — a fee, a window, a yes or a no. Not a strategy. A sentence.
Tonight. Your selling commission, as a number. Your management percentage. What an appraisal costs, or the word free. The talk is saturated and the work is almost untouched, which is the best gap your trade will ever hand you.
The other eleven
This is question 1 of twelve. Findability is whether a stranger can tell what you sell and what it costs — and it is one face of twelve, every one of them turned at a customer whether or not it has been answered.
- 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.
- 11. AnswerabilityWhether you can ask your own business a question.
- 12. LearnabilityWhether the business gets better from its own record.