When you are making a decision over which estate agent to instruct to sell or let your home, you want to ensure your agent has the ability to keep your best interests as their top priority. So how many listings are too many to handle and how much time will they have for you?
When listing with an estate agent, you want to ensure they will do a variety of things for you, including:
- - Market your property via several different mediums
- - Call prospective purchasers with a view to introducing your property
- - Update you with market response, viewing feedback and general market patterns
- - Carry out viewings and follow up with buyers
Now while this may sound obvious, the agent needs to have sufficient man hours each week to be able to service every client.
For example:
If your chosen agent has 2 staff focusing on selling properties, that is 80 ‘man hours’ in a week. If your chosen agent has 4 staff, then that’s 160 ‘man hours’ in a week.
Now divide the number of man hours between the number of listings and you can see how much time they have to dedicate to your property. A 4 staff agency with 20 listings has eight hours a week to dedicate solely to your home.
On the other hand, if an agent has 4 staff agency were to have 250 listings, they have about 40 minutes per listing PER WEEK (and that’s if they don’t have down time or take any coffee breaks!). If leaving the office to carry out a viewing and come back takes about half an hour, then there’s no time left for anything else.
So what will this mean?
Heaven forbid anyone would instruct an agent that has 250 listings, but if they were to, they may find the following scenario:
As the staff are paid on a commission of what they sell, all staff will be focusing on selling the more “sellable” properties, the ones they deem will sell faster as they want the commission before their colleague does. The majority of properties will sit there doing nothing much, simply hoping enquiries come in off the pages of propertygibraltar.com and ultimately the property will fall so far down the “latest instruction” rankings enquiries invariably won’t come in.
So what is the right amount?
We would suggest that in order to get at least one or two viewings a week (which should be a basic minimum), your agent should be able to commit at least four hours a week to your property. This enables the purchasers to be contacted, the viewings to take place and you to be kept fully updated on the state of play. At Richardsons we ensure that we are sticking to this formula as this is tried and tested and works.
In the example above, if you were to instruct an agent that did happen to have 250 listings, they would need to have 25 staff members purely dedicated to sales to deliver the service you deserve; not Lettings, not Property Management, not New Homes, not Admin, just sales, and there is no agency in Gibraltar with that!
Ideally your chosen agent should have around about 20 – 30 listings in order to be truly effective and provide the professional service you are engaging them for.
To find out how our different approach can help you, call our team today.