Predictability — for your agency
Once I sign, how long until it is listed, what do you do for the fee, and who is my point of contact?
Three answers: a number of days, an itemised account of what the percentage buys, and a person's name.
The middle one is the whole of this trade's difficulty with pricing. An owner comparing two agencies at two percentages has no way to tell what the gap pays for, so she treats the difference as pure margin and negotiates. An agency that lists what it does — the photography, the floor plan, the copywriting, the portal syndication, the accompanied viewings, the offer handling, the chain management through to closing — is not justifying a rate. It is describing a product, and a described product does not get compared on price alone.
The first answer is the one that converts. Days from signature to live is a figure every agency knows and almost none publishes, and it is what an owner with a job offer in another state is actually choosing on.
Then everything else that follows the signature. When the photographs happen. Whether she approves the copy before it goes out. How viewings are arranged and whether she must be there. How an offer reaches her and how fast. What happens when a sale falls through — which it does, and an agency that has written down its own process for that moment is immediately more credible than one that has not. Your terms on withdrawal, and on a tie-in period, which is the single most resented unpublished fact in the trade.
Nobody's software will carry this on your account, which is exactly where its value comes from. Ninety-three assistant-facing features were read off the platforms a trade might lean on, and not one set out what a business pledges to do once somebody has said yes. Listings get syndicated. Enquiries get routed. The undertaking does not travel, because a pledge is prose and the agency is the only author available — so the very thing an owner weighs hardest is the thing no vendor will ever supply for you.
What the silence costs is the instruction you then have to defend. An owner with no written account of what the fee buys spends twelve weeks mentally auditing you, and raises the rate again at the first quiet fortnight.
Mortgage broking runs on different clocks and should publish them separately: days to a decision in principle, and days to an offer.
Tonight. Days to live. What the fee buys, as a list. The name of her contact.
The other eleven
This is question 4 of twelve. Predictability is whether they know what happens once they say yes — 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.
- 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.