Reachability — for your agency
When the lease is up or my mortgage rate resets, do you tell me?
Three things: what you watch, how far ahead you reach out, and by what means.
This front belongs to two of the four lines rather than to all of them, and saying so is more honest than inventing a cycle. A closed sale has no due date of its own. A lease expiry does. A rate reset does. An inspection falling due does. So lettings and management, mortgage broking, and surveying have real dates to publish here, and a sales agency's honest version is narrower: what you do for an owner who did not sell, and what you do for one who did.
What a landlord wants is a number of days. Sixty before expiry, ninety before a rate change, and she will plan around it. A page that says we keep in touch tells her nothing and tells whatever she is asking even less.
Then the operational half, invisible from outside. Does a list exist this morning of every tenancy ending within ninety days? Of every fixed rate expiring inside six months? Of every certificate lapsing? Does anything mark the property whose rent has not been reviewed in three years, which is where the money quietly is? Does anybody reach the owner whose house was withdrawn unsold eight months ago? Does anybody ever ask her for a review, and following what? And if she asks to hear nothing further, is that applied to every list the agency holds, or only to whichever one received the instruction?
The unreviewed rent is the whole front in lettings. It sits under market for three years, the owner does not notice, and when she eventually does the conclusion she reaches is that the agency was not paying attention. She is right.
Nothing you could run will show this loss. Two years of drift leaves an owner absent from every column of losses, none of them having held her. She simply instructs somebody else next time, and there is no moment anybody can point at.
And agencies are largely doing this already, out of sight. Somebody does remember the lease. Calls do get made. It lives in one negotiator's head during a slow fortnight — genuine, unrecorded, and outside the reach of any question a prospective client might put about you.
Tonight. The dates you watch. The notice you give. The channel it arrives by. Three lines, and a truthful none of them fills the third as well as anything else.
The other eleven
This is question 9 of twelve. Reachability is whether you come back to them at the right moment — 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.
- 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.