One of the most frustrating things I ever used to hear as an agent is someone saying, “I could do your job.”
Looking back, and perhaps a little bit wiser, I can understand why they thought that.
If all you’ve ever seen is an estate agent putting a property on Rightmove, showing a few people around and sticking a Sold board outside, it probably doesn’t look that difficult. From the outside looking in, I can see why someone would think, “I could do that.”
Years ago, I worked for a large corporate estate agency that decided to trial an online-only proposition alongside the traditional service. The idea made perfect sense. Give homeowners the choice between a lower-cost online package and a full-service estate agent, explain what each one included and let them decide.
Most people in the office assumed the cheaper option would fly, well, it didn’t.
In fact, our instruction rate on the traditional service went up because of it.
For a while, I couldn’t work out why. It wasn’t as though we’d suddenly become better agents overnight, and it certainly wasn’t because the online product was bad. The only thing that had really changed was the conversation we were having at the valuation.
Previously we’d been guilty of doing what I think a lot of agents still do today. We’d tell people we’d market their property, arrange viewings, negotiate offers and manage the sale. We assumed they knew everything else that came with instructing an estate agent.
The online proposition changed that conversation.
Suddenly, we had to explain exactly what the traditional service involved and, more importantly, what the online-only model didn’t include.
We found ourselves talking about what happens when a survey comes back with unexpected issues. What happens when a buyer pulls out three weeks before exchange. How chains are held together when one phone call can stop the whole thing collapsing. How much time is spent chasing solicitors, mortgage brokers and other agents to keep a sale moving.
The more we explained, the more people realised they weren’t paying for a Rightmove listing. They were paying for everything it took to get them from “For Sale” to “Moved”. Nothing about our service had changed. We’d simply become better at explaining it.
That experience has always stuck with me because I think it’s a mistake we still make as an industry. We spend years learning how to negotiate, solve problems, calm difficult situations and keep transactions together, yet we often assume homeowners know all of that already.
But, why would they?
Most people only move a handful of times in their lives. They’ve never sat in your office trying to rescue a chain that’s falling apart. They’ve never spent forty minutes persuading a buyer not to walk away over something that could be resolved with a single phone call. They never see the conversations that happen before they’re updated with, “Everything’s still on track.”
Perhaps that’s why so many people think estate agency is just about putting properties on Rightmove and conducting viewings. That’s the visible part of the job. The dozens of phone calls, negotiations, awkward conversations and problems quietly solved before the client even hears about them all happen behind the curtain.
The irony is, we can be guilty of complaining that homeowners don’t appreciate what we do.
I’m not convinced that’s the real problem.
I think we’ve simply become so used to doing all of those things that we’ve stopped explaining them. We assume people understand the value because, to us, it’s just another Tuesday.
Maybe that’s why that online trial worked so well all those years ago.
It didn’t change the core service we offered.
It simply forced us to stop assuming homeowners understood our value and start showing them instead.
Perhaps that’s the real lesson. The work has always been there.
We’ve just not always done a very good job of making the invisible side of estate agency visible.
