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Showing posts from 2015

How will you hit your 2016 targets?

When I worked in estate/letting agency, on the front line, I hated the first day back after New Year, everything was reset to zero, all the numbers... just like pressing that button on your cars odometer to get it back to zero   ( The odometer is the display that indicates distance travelled by a car .. ie the mile-o-meter as my Mum calls it!).  If you had a cracking year, pressing that reset button was really hard .. and if you had a bad year, sometimes, it couldn’t come soon enough. So, how was 2015 for you? Good, great, Ok, indifferent, rubbish? Do you want to press reset on the year’s odometer?.. or leave it running from 2015? Years ends/ New Years ..some love them .. some hate them! Let me tell you my thoughts on this, something I have learnt only recently and something i want share with you. If you think about it, all a year is a one complete circle of our watery rock called Earth, rotating around the big yellow globe in the sky, called the Sun.. and

The Fall and Rise of Online Estate / Letting Agents

Ok, can I ask you a question ...  ... if a competitor estate or letting agent in your town, that had been going for a couple of years had say 2.5% of the market ... would you be worried about them, would they keep you up at night, would you even consider changing your agency’s business model to try and combat them? No, I don’t think you would .. you would keep an eye on them, just like you would with your other competitors .....   yet this is why I scratch my head, as I hear some fairly decent independent chains   are considering offering   ‘cheap few hundred pounds online package’ alongside their normal ‘high street package’ when they go out on the free val. .. and this worries me .. .. because by offering the very   thing you are most afraid of,   the online agent phenomenon will manifest itself and start to grow like a snowball – which means other agents will start their own online offering, which will mean even more people go to ‘online agents ’and eventually

Letting Agents : Why your perfectionism will ruin you and your lettings agency

Over the last two years, I have met hundreds of letting agents, mostly business owners, be they independent letting agents or franchised letting agents ... and there is something I have noticed about 70% to 80% of them ... their attempt at running the perfect lettings agency. When   I say “perfect letting agency” to these agents, reaching the peak of perfection is the decisive and pinnacle of accomplishment   to them being a letting agent. Such letting agents incessantly strive to be perfect at whatever they do. Sometimes, they will frequently fail at this goal, which fuels their aspiration to be ‘even more perfect’ next time. But striving for perfect must be a good thing? Even if we don’t get perfect, most of the time?  Because by aiming for the best and being perfect, even if we don’t reach perfect, we may still end up being in an awesomely good place .... one or two steps down from greatness…and that has to be a good thing, right? Errr, no.  T