The instruction you lost because you sent an email

The instruction that disappeared into an inbox

Picture a perfectly plausible situation. You have been out to value a house. You prepared properly, spent an hour with the seller and explained your advice. You leave feeling that you made a decent connection.

Back at the office, the proposal goes by email. The CRM sets a follow-up. A few days later, another email asks whether they have had a chance to consider it. No reply arrives, so the file stays pending.

Then you see the property listed with somebody else.

What happened? Perhaps the other agent was the better fit. Perhaps their service suited the seller more closely. You will lose instructions for perfectly reasonable reasons. But perhaps there was a question you could have answered and never discovered.

The seller may have misunderstood the fee. They may have wanted to challenge your pricing recommendation. They may have liked you but been unsure who would handle the sale. A conversation could have brought that into the open while there was still a decision to influence.

A generic follow-up email asks the seller to restart the relationship. A well-timed call, where that suits their preferences, lets you take responsibility for continuing it.

You could say: “When we met, you mentioned wanting to be moving before the school term starts. Having had a chance to think about the advice, what are you still weighing up?”

That gives the call a purpose beyond asking whether they are ready to give you the business. Listen to the answer. You may need to explain something better, acknowledge a concern or accept that their plans have changed.

None of this guarantees the instruction. It gives you the chance to have the conversation that an unanswered email never created.

When an appointment is marked lost, I would want to know what the follow-up actually involved. Did somebody speak to the seller? Did we understand their decision? Or did we send a proposal, send a reminder and assume we had done everything reasonably possible?

Before spending more money generating valuations, look at what happens after the ones you already attend. An efficient follow-up process is only valuable if it helps people make decisions and gives your team a fair opportunity to earn the instruction.

Communication was one of my earliest lessons

I spent six years working in the Swiss Alps before starting my agency in the UK. It was a very different market. The resort had roughly a hundred sales a year, so putting one deal together in a month mattered. You had to understand the buyer, their circumstances and where in the world they happened to be.

Those conversations taught me a great deal. People were busy. Decisions involved significant money. You could not assume that someone was available because it suited your diary, and you could not afford to let an important issue sit there because you were uncomfortable delivering it.

One lesson stayed with me: good news or bad news, communicate it promptly. Then work out the next step.

That does not mean barging into somebody’s day without thought. It means taking responsibility for making sure an important conversation happens. Agree a time. Establish their preferred way of speaking. Be prepared. But don’t hide behind the fact that you sent something.

An email can carry information very well. It cannot always tell you how that information has landed.

A sent message is a very low bar

Imagine a seller whose property has had little interest for three weeks. They receive a report showing the online activity, the enquiries and the viewings. The figures are accurate. The branding is lovely. It arrives exactly when promised.

Meanwhile, the seller is wondering whether they chose the wrong agent.

The report does not know that. Unless someone asks, neither do you.

Perhaps they think your marketing has stopped. Perhaps another agent has been in touch. Perhaps their onward purchase is under pressure and they have not told you. The useful conversation is about those things as much as the number of people who clicked on the listing.

If your team’s answer is, “They get the report every Friday,” you have described a process. You have not established whether the relationship is being looked after.

I would want to know when someone last spoke to the seller, what they learned and what both sides agreed to do next. That tells me far more than a record of an email leaving the system.

Sometimes efficiency is avoidance wearing a smart jacket

We should be honest about why some calls do not happen.

It is not always workload. Sometimes the negotiator knows the seller will ask a difficult question. Sometimes the feedback is disappointing. Sometimes there is no progress, and nobody wants to explain why. A message feels easier because it can be composed, checked and sent without hearing the reaction.

I understand that feeling. Difficult conversations are difficult. But giving people more ways to postpone them does not make the business better.

“I’ve emailed them” can become a very convenient sentence. It sounds like action. It closes the task. It buys a bit of time. The problem is that the client may still be sitting with exactly the same uncertainty.

The management response should be support and a clear standard. Help the team prepare for the conversation. Join the call if necessary. Practise how to explain disappointing feedback. Make it normal to discuss what someone is worried about saying.

If people only feel safe delivering good news, you have a leadership issue as well as a communication issue.

Viewing feedback should lead somewhere

“Lovely house, but the bedrooms were too small.”

That might be an honest reaction. It might also be a polite way of saying the property did not feel worth the asking price. Or the buyer may be trying to compare it with something completely different.

If that sentence drops straight into a seller’s inbox, what have we actually added?

A proper conversation gives the agent a chance to explore it. What size did they expect? What are they comparing it with? Was the room size the only concern? Would a different price change their view, or is this simply the wrong property?

You do not have to interrogate someone who has already said no. You do need enough curiosity to understand the answer before presenting it as useful advice to your client.

Then speak to the seller with some interpretation. Explain whether this is an isolated reaction or a pattern. Talk through what it might mean. Agree whether anything needs to change.

Collecting feedback is administration. Understanding it and helping someone act on it is part of the job they are paying you to do.

“Nothing to report” is still a conversation

There will be weeks when the news is that very little has happened. No new viewing. No offer. No meaningful movement in the chain.

That does not excuse silence. In fact, it is often when a client most needs to hear from you.

A useful call might acknowledge the lack of progress, explain what you have checked and set out what will happen next. If you are waiting for information, say who you are waiting for and when you will chase it. If the marketing response is weak, discuss what that suggests instead of pretending another week will automatically fix it.

Be careful with promises. “I’ll call you by Thursday afternoon, even if I’m still waiting” is a commitment you control. “We’ll have an answer on Thursday” may depend entirely on somebody else.

When the promised update arrives, the client knows the matter has remained on your radar. They do not have to spend their morning wondering whether to chase you again.

Reliability is built through those ordinary moments. It does not require a new piece of software.

Let technology create time for the conversation

There is plenty I would happily automate. Appointment confirmations. Routine reminders. The assembly of marketing reports. Requests for documents. Internal prompts that stop an important follow-up being forgotten.

Used properly, those tools give a team more capacity to think, advise and speak to clients.

But be clear about where the saved time goes. If every improvement is immediately absorbed by a larger workload, and the number of meaningful conversations keeps falling, you may have improved output while weakening service.

Ask a simple question when considering any new process: what will this allow our people to do better?

If the answer is that they will have more time to understand buyers, advise sellers or deal with problems earlier, brilliant. If the answer is only that fewer people will need to talk to clients, look a little harder.

A reminder to make a call is useful. A system that makes everyone believe the reminder itself was the service is rather less useful.

Respect how the client wants to communicate

Picking up the phone is not a licence to ignore people’s preferences. Some clients cannot take calls at work. Some find written communication easier or more accessible. Others want a message first so they can arrange a suitable time.

Ask at the beginning. Record it properly. Agree how routine updates will work and what you will do if something urgent needs discussing.

The point is to have a real exchange in a way that works for the person involved. That might be a scheduled call, a video meeting, an accessible written conversation or a face-to-face appointment. What matters is that they can ask questions and you can check understanding.

After an important conversation, send a clear written summary of the decisions and next steps. A good call and a good written record work very well together.

If someone does not answer, a sensible message should explain why you called and how to get back to you. Do not turn follow-up into repeated interruption. Use judgement, honour agreed preferences and make the next contact worth responding to.

Give the team a standard they can actually use

“We need to communicate better” is too vague to manage.

I would agree a few practical expectations. Every active seller has a named contact. The next update is agreed. Material feedback is interpreted before it is passed on. Important changes prompt a conversation. Commitments made to clients are recorded and followed through.

Give people enough time to meet those expectations. Protect some space in the diary for client calls instead of expecting them to squeeze them between an overfilled viewing schedule and the journey home.

Prepare before calling. Read the notes. Know what has changed. Decide what you need to understand and what you can genuinely offer. The client should not have to remind you of the entire history every time they hear from the office.

Then record the useful part: the concern raised, the advice given, the decision made and the next action. “Spoke to vendor” is barely a note. It tells the next person almost nothing.

Good records let the whole team offer continuity. They also stop the same client having to explain the same worry three times.

Measure whether the communication helped

Call totals have their place, but a high total does not prove good service. Someone can make plenty of calls without listening particularly well.

Alongside activity, look at what the conversations achieved. Did you understand the buyer’s position? Did the seller agree the marketing plan? Was a concern identified before it became a complaint? Is there a clear next step? Were the promises kept?

In a team meeting, discuss a few examples. A conversation that moved something forward. One that went badly. One somebody has been putting off. You will learn more about the standard of communication than you will from congratulating everyone on a column turning green.

Owners need to model it too. If you expect your team to deliver difficult messages promptly, they need to see you doing the same. If you say relationships matter, make sure the diary and the management conversations reflect that.

People notice what gets attention. Give useful conversations some of yours.

Try this before buying another system

Choose ten active clients and review their recent contact. This is a small sample to learn from, not an excuse to announce that the whole agency is failing.

For each one, ask who last had a meaningful exchange with them, what the client is currently worried about and what happens next. Check whether the contact matched their preferences. Look at whether there is a promise outstanding.

Where the answers are unclear, put it right. Then examine why the gap happened. Too much work? Unclear responsibility? Weak notes? A difficult conversation avoided? An automated process everyone trusted too much?

You may find that your technology is doing a perfectly good job and your team is using it well. You may find a simple change in responsibility solves the problem. Either way, start with the actual experience of the client rather than assuming another subscription is the answer.

Estate agency involves people making consequential decisions, often while dealing with pressure elsewhere in their lives. They want to know that somebody understands what is happening and is prepared to help them through it.

Build your efficiencies around that. Free people to have better conversations. Make the routine work easier so the important work gets done properly.

And when a client needs a conversation, pick up the bloody phone.

Keep reading

• Your next instruction might be the one you’re about to lose
• The valuation starts before you reach the front door
• Revenue Is Vanity. Profit Is Sanity. Cash Is King.