Where the Next Instruction Comes From

Before you plan a year, count the last one. Every instruction you won in the last twelve months, one line each, with the fee banked next to it and one source per row. Not two. Pick the one source without which the call would never have happened, because a row with three sources on it tells you nothing in March.

Ten sources cover almost everything in this business: past client, personal sphere, recommendation, introducer, lettings or landlord, patch and proximity, social and content, portal or website enquiry, withdrawn or expired, and second time around. Most agents can name where they think their work comes from. Very few have counted, and the counted answer is usually a surprise.

The three findings that decide next year

Total the instructions and the fees by source, then write down the hours a week you currently give each one. Three things fall out of that table, and between them they decide where next year’s time goes.

The first is your top two sources: the two that between them produced more than half the money. The second is the dead source, the one taking real hours and returning nothing. Fix it or stop it, and be honest that stopping is the more likely right answer. The third is the mismatch, which is the interesting one: the source that made you the most money and gets the least of your week.

Your own lead time

Add one more column to the audit: the date that person first entered your world, not the date of the valuation. The average gap between first contact and instruction is your lead time, and it is the number that makes the whole job make sense.

If your lead time is five months, the work you do this week is for the autumn, and a quiet March was decided in October. That is not an excuse and it is not a comfort. It is the reason you cannot judge a week by what completed in it, and the reason the rest of this course is built on activity you can count today.

You are not judging the week on instructions. Instructions this week came from work you did in the autumn. You are judging the week on the work you did in it.

Two more figures worth having

Write down your instruction count for the twelve months and your average fee banked, and keep them somewhere you will find them, because every plan you build after this leans on both. An average fee taken from memory is usually your best fee rather than your average one, and the difference across a year is the size of a small mortgage.

Then leave the page open for a week and add anything you remember late. Withdrawn and expired properties, second-time-around sellers and probate cases are the three that get missed on the first pass, and they are three of the most workable sources on the list.

Nearly every agent has a database and nearly none of them have one they can work. A list of names and mobile numbers is a phone book. What you need is a list of people who would take your call, with enough written next to each one that you have a reason to ring and something to say when they answer.

Start with the sweep, and do it in one sitting rather than in bits. Phone contacts from A to Z. Christmas card list and WhatsApp groups. Past clients you are entitled to keep. Social connections you have actually met. Where you spend money. Where you spend time. Neighbours and your own street. School, club, team, church. Write the count as you finish each place, and do not go any further in this course until you are past two hundred names.

That two hundred is the split Gary Keller draws in The Millionaire Real Estate Agent, between the people you have met and the people you have not. The met list is the one that pays, and almost every agent already owns a bigger one than they think.

What a record has to carry

A name and a mobile is a dead record. Six fields make it a live one, and you can set them up in your system this afternoon.

• Name, mobile, email and the address they actually live in.
• How you know them, in your own words, one line.
• The source, from the ten in lesson one, so next year’s audit is not guesswork.
• When they are likely to move. Your judgement, not theirs.
• Last contact, and the next action with a date on it. This is the field that turns a list into a pipeline.
• One human fact. A new baby, an extension going in, retiring in the spring.

One place, and a slot to keep it tidy

Name the system and write down what you are going to stop using. Two half-kept databases are worse than one scruffy one, because you never trust either. Then put a weekly tidy-up slot in the diary, a fixed day and time, because a database decays quietly and you will not notice until the day you need it.

The rule that holds the whole thing up is this: no conversation ends without the next task booked, with a date, in the system. Not in your head, not on a pad. A contact with no next action is a contact you have quietly abandoned, and you will not find out for a year.

If it is not in the system with a next action and a date, it does not exist.

What you are entitled to keep

Be clear about which past client records you are actually entitled to hold and work, and on what basis, before you build a year of contact on top of them. Check it with your broker rather than assuming, and record it once so you are not revisiting the question every time you add a name.

Then set the target and stop when you reach it. Two hundred complete records beats eight hundred names with nothing next to them, and the eight hundred is the version that makes an agent feel well equipped while producing nothing at all.

The same list does three different jobs, so sort it into three piles. Now, for anyone likely to move inside three months. Soon, for six to eighteen months, where something has changed. Someday, for everyone else, where there is no known trigger at all.

The sort is your judgement and it has to be, because nobody puts their hand up eight months early. Write the reason next to each name in the now and soon piles. If you cannot write a reason, it belongs in someday, and pretending otherwise is how agents end up with forty names in a pile they never ring.

The signals that move a name up

None of these is a seller. All of them are a reason for a proper conversation, and all of them are visible in your patch if you are looking.

• A birth, a death, a marriage or a separation.
• A retirement, or a new job.
• A commute that has become intolerable.
• Planning going in, or planning refused.
• A neighbour’s board going up.
• A landlord with a void or arrears.
• A valuation elsewhere that went nowhere.
• A house that has been too big since the children left.
• Something said at a barbecue.
• A probate, or an estate being wound up.

Write the cadence once

Decide how often each pile hears from you, write it down, and build it in the system the same afternoon, because a cadence you have to remember is not a cadence. The now pile is every week or two, and in the diary rather than only in the system. The soon pile is monthly. Someday is six to twelve touches a year.

The two cadences worth stealing outright come from Gary Keller in The Millionaire Real Estate Agent: eight touches over eight weeks for anyone new, on mixed channels, and roughly thirty touches a year across the whole met list. Thirty sounds like a lot until you count what it actually is, which is a little over two things a month to somebody who knows you.

Then apply the test before anything goes out. If they never sell, was that message still worth their thirty seconds? If it was not, do not send it. Go and find something first.

Nobody has ever complained about an agent who kept telling them useful things about their own street.

Write down who each signal points at

Go down the list of signals and, next to each one, write the name of somebody in your patch it applies to right now. If you cannot name anybody for a signal, that is not a gap in the list, it is a gap in what you are noticing, and it will still be a gap next month unless you write it down.

Then move the names. A signal that does not move somebody from someday to soon, or from soon to now, was noticed and wasted, and the sort is only worth doing if it changes what happens on Monday morning.

Prospecting is the only task in agency with no deadline attached. Nothing breaks when it is skipped. No client rings, no chain falls over, no portal complains. So it goes last, and last means never, and eight weeks later the pipeline is empty and nobody can point at the day it happened.

The fix is not discipline. It is a fixed time, decided once, in writing. Ninety minutes, the same start every day, put in the calendar under a name a client reading over your shoulder would not question. Write down where you sit to do it, and who asks you for the number on a Friday, because a block nobody ever asks about is a block that quietly stops.

What is in the block, and what is not

In: outbound calls, follow-up calls from the task list, past valuations, introducer calls, doors around a live board, handwritten cards, voice notes to real people.

Out: portal admin, particulars, chasing solicitors, editing a reel, tidying the database, booking the photographer, “research”, and making a list of who to call instead of calling them.

Work the list down by warmth rather than down the screen. Tasks due today first, then the now pile, then past valuations, then soon touches, then introducers, then cold. Most agents do that in exactly the wrong order and conclude that prospecting does not work.

There is no such thing as time management, only choice management.

Tom Panos

The three rules that make it survive a real week

Same time every day. A variable start turns the block into a decision, and decisions lose to whatever landed in the inbox at nine.

Count attempts, not outcomes. You control how many times you pick up the phone. You do not control who answers. Judging the block on appointments booked means the block gets abandoned in the first bad week, when it is doing exactly what it should.

Log it before you leave the chair. Two minutes: attempts, conversations, appointments. Filled in from memory on Friday it is fiction, and flattering fiction at that.

And one rule over the top of those three: never miss twice. One missed morning is a Tuesday. Two is a habit forming.

Name the thieves in advance

Write down the three things most likely to take the block in your week, and the exact defence for each. Vague defences do not hold at nine on a Tuesday.

The one that gets everybody is comfortable work. Particulars, portal tweaks, tidying the system, editing a video. It feels like work and it produces something visible at the end of the morning, which is precisely how a whole quarter goes by without a single new conversation.

Put a name and a place on it

Write down where you sit to do the block, and put it in the calendar under a title that would survive a client looking over your shoulder. Both of those sound trivial and neither is. A block with no location becomes a block done from the car between other things, and a calendar entry called “prospecting” is the first thing anybody asks you to move.

Then name the person who asks you for the number on a Friday. It can be a club member, a team leader or an agent in the same position as you. A block nobody ever asks about is a block that quietly stops in week nine, and week nine is where almost all of them go.

Five mornings, five jobs, decided in advance. If every prospecting morning is the same undifferentiated hour of ringing whoever is nearest the top of the list, two things happen: the awkward jobs never get done, and the block starts with ten minutes of deciding, which is ten minutes of the block gone.

Give each morning a named job and the list it works. Change the days to suit your patch, but do not change the principle. Friday is doors, because you will not do doors on a Monday, and Thursday is introducers, because that call always loses to something more urgent unless it owns a morning.

The weekly floor

A floor is what you hit on a bad week. It is not a target you hit on a good one, and that distinction matters more than the numbers themselves, because a target you miss four weeks running stops meaning anything while a floor you hold through a bad fortnight is the only proof you have that the business is still running.

Six numbers carry a floor: contact attempts, real conversations, new names added, appointments booked, new introducer conversations, and valuations attended. Start with an opening figure for each, then replace it with your own once you have twelve weeks of counting behind you. A voicemail is not a conversation. A conversation is a real two-way talk about somebody’s property situation, and being strict about that from week one is what stops the numbers flattering you later.

Friday, ten minutes, before the laptop shuts

Fill in the week’s row, then write one sentence: which block got skipped, and why. That is the whole review at this stage. Twelve weeks of that honest sentence is the most useful document in the business, because the pattern in it is always specific. It is never “I need to be more disciplined”. It is Thursday, every time, because Thursday is when the second viewing gets booked at nine thirty.

Thirteen weeks on one page

Then put a quarter on a single page and shade a box for every block you completed. Five boxes a week, sixty-five in a quarter. It takes four seconds a day and it is the whole argument, because at the end of the quarter you are not remembering how it went, you are looking at it.

Count the longest unbroken run and the number of weeks you never missed twice. Those two figures predict the following quarter’s income better than anything else you could write down.

Nothing here tells you anything in week one. Give it a quarter before you decide whether it is working.

What the five mornings usually look like

A workable default: Monday on the now pile, because Monday is when people have talked about it over the weekend. Tuesday on the tasks the system has thrown up. Wednesday on past valuations and the lost list. Thursday on introducers. Friday on doors, around a live board.

Write which list each morning works, and what has to be ready the night before, because the list not being ready is the most common way a ninety-minute block turns into a fifty-minute one without anybody deciding it should.

You are not selling a valuation on this call. You are earning a conversation, and the appointment is what happens at the end of it if the conversation went well. Agents who open by asking for the appointment get the answer that question deserves.

Fill the sheet in while they are talking, in their words, not your summary of them. You will want to quote those words back at the appointment, and it lands very differently when it is exactly what they said rather than your tidied-up version.

The five things you need before you hang up

• What is prompting the move, and where are they going.
• The timing, and the one thing it depends on: a probate, a school place, a job start, a purchase they have seen, a settlement.
• Who else is in on the decision, and whether they will be there.
• Who else they have had out, and what they made of them.
• Who else is on the deeds. Ask it plainly, early, and save yourself a wasted evening.

None of those is an interrogation if you are genuinely interested in the answers. All five are impossible to get later without it sounding like a form.

Offer two times, never “when suits”

Two specific times. “When suits you” hands a stranger a diary they cannot see and asks them to do work, and what comes back is “let me speak to my wife and come back to you”, which is the same sentence as no.

Ask for both owners at the appointment while you are booking it, not the day before. A valuation with one of two decision makers in the room is a valuation you will be asked to repeat, or worse, one that gets relayed to the absent half by somebody who was not really listening.

The three minutes after the call

A confirmation text within two minutes: date, time, your name, your mobile. Two minutes matters, because that is while they are still holding the phone and still thinking about you.

Then an email with something genuinely useful attached, and recent sold prices on their road is the one that always earns its place. It answers the question they are actually asking, and it arrives before the agent booked for the day after you has sent anything at all.

Then the next task in the system, with a date, before you do anything else. Not after lunch. Everything in this course leaks at exactly this point, in the ninety seconds when a call has gone well and the next thing is already ringing.

Log the source while you are on the call

One field, chosen from the ten in lesson one, filled in while you are still talking. It takes four seconds and it is the only reason next year’s audit will be a count rather than a guess.

Agents skip it because it produces nothing today. It is the single field that decides where a whole year of hours goes, and there is no way to reconstruct it in January from a folder of instructions.

Most of the outcome is decided before you knock. This is the only stretch of the whole process where you are the only agent talking to them, and there is very likely a competitor booked for the day after you. Agents who treat the week before as dead time hand that advantage away for nothing.

Run the same sequence for every valuation, so it happens when you are busy rather than only when you are keen. Something goes out the same day they book. Something goes out two or three days ahead. Something goes out the day before, and something short goes an hour before you arrive.

What to prepare

The comparables, with a line on each one saying why it is or is not really comparable. Time-to-sell on that road. Your own recent results nearby, named and specific. And what marketing you would actually do for this house, not a list of what you offer everybody.

The comparable with the note attached is the piece that does the work. Any agent can print three sold prices. Being able to say why the one at the end of the road is not a fair comparison, and being right about it, is the moment a vendor decides you know the street.

What not to prepare

A price to open with. You have not been inside. Walking in attached to a figure you invented from a photograph is how agents end up defending a number instead of listening to a family, and it is the single most common way a good valuation goes wrong in the first ten minutes.

The question before you leave the house

Ask them: what happens next in your mind, and when? Then book the next contact on their answer, in front of them, before you are out of the door.

That one question does two jobs. It tells you where you actually are, which is often not where the last twenty minutes suggested. And it turns the follow-up from something you have to justify into something they asked for, which is the difference between a call that is welcome next Tuesday and one that is a nuisance.

You are not there to win it in the room. You are there to be the one they compare the others to.

What goes out, and when

Same day, the confirmation and the sold prices on their road. Two or three days out, something specific about their type of house or their street, and a line on what you would do differently with the marketing. The day before, a short confirmation that also asks whether both owners will be there. An hour before, one line to say you are on your way.

Four contacts, none of them long, and almost nobody else is sending any of them. That is the whole advantage, and it costs about fifteen minutes spread over a week.

Almost every agent follows up twice. Almost every instruction that is not won on the day is won somewhere after the fourth contact. That gap is the least crowded space in estate agency, and it costs nothing to occupy.

The reason the gap exists is not laziness. It is that the fifth contact is the one that feels like pestering, and the honest answer is that it only feels that way when you have nothing to say. Fix the having-something-to-say problem and the fifth contact stops being uncomfortable.

Follow up. Follow through. Follow back.

Ryan Serhant’s three F’s

Three cadences, written once

You need three, and only three. A new enquiry with no appointment yet. A valuation attended with no instruction. A past client or sphere contact. Write eight touches for each, decide the channel for every one, then build all three in the system this afternoon.

Built in the system, follow-up survives a bad week, a holiday and a busy fortnight. Left as an intention, it survives until the first Thursday when three things go wrong at once, and that Thursday is always inside the first month.

Match the channel to the warmth

Call, text, email, post, knock. Write down what each one is for and, more usefully, what it is never for. Guessing at this is how agents end up texting somebody who needed a call, and emailing somebody who would have been delighted to be knocked on.

What “adding value” actually means

It means telling them something about their house, their street or their move that they did not already know. A sold price. A new listing that competes with theirs. A planning decision. A change in what is selling in their bracket.

If a message does not pass that test, do not send it. “Just checking in” is not a touch, it is an admission that you had nothing, and enough of them teaches somebody to stop reading you.

Write out twelve value touches now, while you are thinking clearly, so that on a Tuesday morning you are choosing from a list rather than inventing one. Inventing one is exactly the friction that turns a five-touch cadence into a two-touch cadence.

Eight touches, then a rhythm

Write the first eight touches for each cadence with a channel against every one, then decide what happens after the eighth, because the eighth is where most sequences simply stop and the person falls out of the business.

What happens next is the someday cadence from lesson three, which is where everybody ends up eventually. Nobody should ever leave the system because a sequence ran out; they should move down a gear and keep hearing from you until they move or tell you to stop.

The warmest list in your business is the one nobody works: the valuations you attended and did not win. Those people have met you, sat with you, seen your comparables and made a decision about you. Nothing in your database is closer to a transaction, and most agents close the file the day they hear.

Log the real reason on the day, while it stings, because that is when it is accurate. A fortnight later it has quietly become “they went with a cheaper agent” for every single one, which tells you nothing you can act on.

The tally that tells you which skill to fix

Seven reasons cover almost all of them: they wanted a higher price, they wanted a lower fee, they knew the other agent, the other presentation was better, you did not follow up, they did not move at all, or something else. Tally as you go, and after about thirty valuations your own pattern shows up in ten seconds.

That pattern is worth more than any amount of extra dialling, because each reason points at a different fix. Losing on price is a valuation-room problem. Losing after going quiet is a follow-up problem. Losing to people who knew the other agent is a database problem, and it started two years ago.

The eighteen-month campaign

Put a date twelve weeks out on every one of them and it becomes the easiest call of your week. Then run the sequence: something on day one, something at week three, something at week eight, a proper call at week twelve to sixteen, and monthly after that.

Week twelve to sixteen is where most sole agency terms come up. It is the single highest-value call on the list, and it is in the diary from the day you lost, so it happens whether or not you feel like making it.

The call when it has not sold

Do not open with the price. They have heard about the price, from you, at the time, and being right about it out loud is the fastest way to be right and unemployed.

Open with the question nobody has asked them: what do you think has gone wrong? Then listen properly, and do not fill the pause. Most vendors know exactly what is wrong with their marketing and have never once been asked.

Ask for the date on the day

When you get the call telling you they have gone elsewhere, thank them properly and ask one thing: would they mind if you checked in around twelve weeks. Almost everybody says yes, and it converts the whole eighteen-month campaign from something you are doing to them into something they agreed to.

Then put the date in the system before you put the phone down, because that is the one moment when you will definitely still care enough to do it.

There are about twenty people in your patch who hear that somebody is moving before you do. Mortgage brokers, conveyancers, probate and family solicitors, accountants, letting agents, builders, architects, removals firms, house clearance, surveyors, trades, and the local businesses everybody walks into.

Map the twenty, name the firm, and give the whole thing a morning. Thursday works, because an introducer call always loses to something more urgent unless it owns a slot.

Go first

Send one properly introduced client before you ask for anything at all. Not a name and a number in a text: a real introduction, with a call ahead of it explaining who they are and what they need.

Everything about this relationship is decided by who went first. An agent who has sent two clients is having a completely different conversation to an agent who has sent an email asking to be kept in mind.

Make it easy, and make it safe

People refer when it is easy and when they are confident you will not embarrass them. Both have to be true, and the second one is the one agents neglect.

• Write what a good introduction to you sounds like, in one sentence, short enough that they can recognise the moment for it inside somebody else’s conversation.
• Answer within the hour, always, and then tell the introducer what happened. That last part is the behaviour that produces a second referral.
• Never let one of their clients fall into a black hole. One unanswered introduction ends the relationship permanently, and quietly, and you will never be told.
• Thank them in a way that costs you something. A handwritten note, a bottle, a public mention, a client sent back.

Two coffees a week

Two a week, fifty weeks a year, is a hundred conversations with people whose clients are all moving. There is no version of that year in which nothing comes back, and it is a hundred hours, which is less than the time most agents put into social media in a quarter.

Referral fees, said plainly

If money changes hands between you and an introducer, it gets disclosed to the client in writing, clearly, before they commit. Check your own obligations with your broker or your compliance contact and keep the wording somewhere you can find it.

An undisclosed arrangement is the fastest way to lose both the client and the introducer, and it turns a good relationship into a problem that outlives it.

Log what went each way

Keep a line for each relationship: when you last spoke, what you have sent them, what they have sent you, and the next date. Twenty of those on one page turns a vague sense that you know a few solicitors into a working list, and it shows up the two relationships that are all traffic in one direction.

Those two need either a conversation or a decision. A relationship where you have sent four clients and had none back is not a referral relationship, and pretending otherwise costs you a Thursday every month.

Every let property is a sale with a delay on it. The landlord will sell, eventually, and unlike a homeowner their decision is financial rather than emotional, which makes the timing readable if you are paying attention.

Readable, and mostly ignored. The average landlord hears from an agent when they want the management, and never again, right up until the fortnight they decide to sell and ring the one agent they can think of.

Never open with “are you thinking of selling”

Open with the number, because a landlord thinks in numbers. Five questions carry the conversation.

• What is it worth now, against what it yields?
• When does the fixed rate end?
• What is the energy rating, and have you priced the work?
• How has the last tenancy gone?
• If you sold, what would you do with the money?

The last one matters most and almost nobody asks it. A landlord with nowhere better to put the money will not sell however tired they are, and knowing that saves you two years of pleasant calls to somebody who was never going anywhere.

The watch list

Keep the addresses you know are let, with the signal you have spotted and the date of the next quarterly call. The signals are specific: a void running over six weeks, a property re-let three times in two years, arrears or a possession notice, damage after a tenancy, a portfolio owner selling one, a poor energy rating on a property needing real work, or retirement, illness or an estate.

A landlord who is not selling this year still sells in a fortnight once they decide. The quarterly call is what puts you in that fortnight.

Rental and finance partners

If you are not doing the lettings yourself, the letting agent and the mortgage broker are two of the most productive relationships available to you. Agree the split, get it in writing on both sides, and disclose it to the client in writing as in the last lesson. Log the introductions each way so you can see whether it is a relationship or a favour.

And the tenants

Today’s tenant is tomorrow’s first-time buyer, and they will call the agent who treated them like a person. Most agents treat tenants as an inconvenience for two years and then wonder why they buy through somebody else.

The quarterly call is the whole system

Four calls a year to a landlord you have a signal on is not a campaign, it is eight minutes a year, and it is more contact than they get from anybody else including the agent managing the property.

Keep the arrangement with any rental or finance partner in writing on both sides, with the split agreed and the disclosure done, and log the introductions each way so that you can tell in six months whether it is working or whether it is two people being polite to each other.

You cannot judge prospecting by income, because income reports on work you did three to six months ago. By the time the bank balance tells you the block stopped, it stopped in the spring. Six numbers move in the same week as the work, which makes them the only honest feedback available.

Contact attempts. Real conversations. New names added. Appointments booked. Valuations attended. Instructions. One row a week, filled in every Friday in ten minutes.

Instructions is the scoreboard, so you read it and never steer by it. Valuations attended is the one to protect above all the others: everything upstream exists to produce it and everything downstream depends on it. If only one number survives a chaotic quarter, make it that one.

The four ratios

Totals tell you how hard you worked. Ratios tell you which skill to fix, which is the more useful answer. Work them off four weeks at a time, never one, because a single week is noise.

• Attempts to conversations. Low means wrong times, or a stale list. A dialling problem.
• Conversations to appointments. Low means the conversation is about you, not about them.
• Appointments to valuations. Low means they cancelled, which is confirmation and preparation.
• Valuations to instructions. Low is either the appointment itself or the follow-up after it, and the tally from lesson nine tells you which.

Reading the page when something is wrong

Walk up the chain rather than panicking at the bottom of it. If instructions are down, look at valuations attended. If valuations are down, look at appointments booked. If appointments are down, look at conversations. If conversations are down, look at attempts. If attempts are down, look at the block, and you already know the answer.

Nearly every “the market is quiet” conversation ends at the top of that list, three or four steps above where it started.

Then pick one thing to change next week. One. Specific, small, and inside your control. Two changes at once and you never find out which one worked.

Keep a wins log

Big or small, written down as they land, with the source and how long it took from first contact. On a hard week this page is the only evidence you have that the work is real, and without it your memory will tell you the whole quarter was a write-off when it plainly was not.

Where this goes next

The Year, The Week, The Number takes these six numbers and works them back from the income you actually need, so the floor in lesson five stops being a guess. The prospecting and pipeline workbook is the printed version of every page in this course.

Twelve weeks before you judge it

Nothing on this page tells you anything in week one, and very little of it means much by week four. Twelve weeks is the shortest honest read, because that is roughly one lead time, and it is the first point at which the work at the top of the chain has had time to show up at the bottom of it.

Count the weeks you hit the floor as well as the totals. Twelve weeks with nine of them at or above the floor is a business running properly, whatever the instruction column happens to say that quarter.