Memory — for your agency

You leased my place two years ago. Do you still have the inventory and the lease file?

Two things answer her: what is held, and for how long. The inventory is the one she is really asking about, because an inventory with photographs is the only document that decides a deposit dispute, and an owner who has lost hers has lost the argument before it starts.

Behind that sits everything an agency learns about a property and files somewhere nobody can find. Every tenancy and every sale it has handled. The condition record and the photographs. The appliances, their ages, their warranties. Which contractor did the boiler and when. The HOA rules and the documents. What the property last achieved, and what it was listed at before that. The owner's own constraints — the minimum she will accept, that she will not take pets, that she needs sixty days' notice because she lives abroad. Who else is involved: the lender, the accountant, the managing agent, the leaseholder.

And the fact nobody writes down: why an owner left you. It is not a field in any agency system. It was a conversation, and eighteen months later nobody is certain whether it was the fee or the negotiator.

Without that held where a second person can reach it, the agency knows a property exactly as well as whichever negotiator handled it last happens to recall. At forty properties that works. Past four hundred it gives way at four predictable points: the owner back after several years, the property whose negotiator has left, the deposit dispute, and the landlord who was promised something verbally on a doorstep.

Lettings and management carries the sharpest version, because the record is the product. A managed property generates a condition history, a payment history, a maintenance history and a compliance history, every one of which is worth money at renewal and at sale — and in many agencies all four live in an email account.

Here too an independent outfit outperforms a national chain with no means of proving it. The streets, the buildings, the block with the parking problem — all of that is yours and none of it is a chain's. Familiarity, though, leaves no document, and an outside enquiry can repeat only what somebody wrote down, which strands your real asset where nobody can see it.

Tonight. What you hold and for how long: two sentences. Then pull five owners who left inside two years and hunt for a recorded reason.

The other eleven

This is question 7 of twelve. Memory is whether you hold what you already know about them — and it is one face of twelve, every one of them turned at a customer whether or not it has been answered.

What you bring, and what it is not