Visibility — for your agency
Where do I see the showings, the offers, and what is holding it up?
An owner with a house on the market thinks about it constantly and hears about it occasionally. The gap between those two frequencies is where almost every complaint in this trade is born, and it has nothing to do with how hard anybody is working.
Three answers are all legitimate. A portal she logs into. A weekly report that arrives whether or not anything has happened — a genuinely strong answer that costs a single recurring diary entry. Or a telephone call whenever the owner raises it, which is what most agencies in fact do and is perfectly fit to publish provided somebody publishes it. Software is not what she needs. What she needs is a cadence somebody has committed to in writing.
The weekly report that arrives on a dead week is worth more than a daily one that arrives only on a good week, because the dead week is precisely when she is imagining that nothing is being done.
Then what she should be able to see without asking. How many viewings have happened, and how many were booked and did not turn up. What the feedback actually said, in the viewer's words rather than summarised into nothing. Every offer, including the ones you advised her to refuse — which is a question of trust rather than of information. Where a sale has reached: survey, mortgage offer, title, the other side's chain. What is blocking it and whose move it is. What has been spent on marketing and what she will be invoiced.
The blocked-link sentence is the whole front in a sale. Three weeks of stillness in a transaction is hardly ever your fault; it is somebody else's lender, or a title query, or a buyer's survey. An owner who cannot see that concludes it is you, and a single line reading waiting on the buyer's lender, chased Tuesday ends a fortnight of resentment.
The charge for this lands inside your own working week, not on the instruction board. Chasing calls are unbilled hours, and they happen because the real position sits in one negotiator's head while the owner's version is assembled out of silence. An agency with no visible position works every sale twice: once as a sale, and once as the reassurance about the sale.
Lettings and management has the clearest version of all four lines: an owner needs to see arrears, the inspection, the maintenance job and the renewal date without telephoning anybody.
Tonight. One line: where she looks, or when she hears from you regardless. Then one more: how she finds out what is holding it up.
The other eleven
This is question 5 of twelve. Visibility is whether they can see the work while it is happening — 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.
- 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.