Qualifiability — for your agency
It is a condo with an HOA and a tenant already in it. Do you handle that, and do you cover this zip code?
Two unglamorous facts settle it: the property types you take, and the area you genuinely work, named. Not the greater metro area. Zip codes, or neighbourhoods somebody local would recognise.
The second one is where agencies lose people without ever knowing. A page claiming a wide region reads as competence to a human and as nothing at all to whatever is assembling an answer, which will not assert a coverage area your page declined to name. Meanwhile the agency three streets away that listed eleven zip codes gets put forward for all eleven.
Property type is the other half, and the condo with a sitting tenant is the exact case that separates agencies. It is a sale, a lease assignment, an HOA with its own documents and a tenant with rights — and an owner in that position has already been turned away once by somebody who said yes on the telephone and discovered the complication later.
So publish the awkward cases you actually take. Tenanted property. Probate sales. Multi-family. Co-ops with board approval. Land. Anything with an assessment dispute attached. Then publish the ones you decline and where they go, which sounds like advertising a limit and functions as the opposite: no outsider is able to check anything you assert, so an agency that publishes a refusal becomes one whose remaining claims carry weight.
Then whether you take a single-property landlord, which is the most common unanswered question in lettings and the cheapest to answer. Many firms will not. Many will. Nobody says.
Mortgage broking qualifies on something different and sharper: which lenders you have access to, whether you are tied, and what you can do for somebody self-employed or with thin credit — the three facts an applicant is screening on and the three nobody publishes.
You are eliminated here before any of your market knowledge is in play. She is filtering on type and territory in an evening. If the page cannot confirm you work her street, you are not compared with the agency that can — the comparison never includes you, and fifteen years of selling on that street stay on the far side of a door she never pushed.
Tonight. The zip codes, listed. The property types you take. The ones you turn away. And whether a landlord with one apartment is welcome.
The other eleven
This is question 2 of twelve. Qualifiability is whether they can work out that you can take them — 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.
- 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.