The twenty hours nobody bills
A property sold represents around 34 hours of work. Add roughly twenty more on properties that will go elsewhere. It is the second figure that decides an agency's profitability.
A property sold represents around 34 hours of work. Add roughly twenty more on properties that will go elsewhere. It is the second figure that decides an agency's profitability.
The trade puts forward two figures worth setting side by side. Around 34 hours of work behind a property actually sold. And around 20 more, on average, on properties that will end up going through another agency or directly[1].
The first figure is paid work. The second is work delivered for nothing. And it is the second that drives profitability, because it is the only one of the two that can grow without limit.
An independent seven-person agency closing around fifty sales a year carries, on these orders of magnitude, roughly 1,700 hours of paid work and roughly 1,000 hours of unpaid work. The ratio is brutal stated that way, and it shocks nobody in the sector, because that is the nature of the trade. You cannot know in advance which listing will complete.
The consequence is that an agency cannot steer its profitability by working more. It steers it by reducing the unit cost of uncertain work. Every hour saved on a file that will not complete is a direct margin hour.
Not in viewings, not in negotiation, not in valuations. Those three call for a professional and they are justified even on a property that will not sell, because they build the relationship and the local reputation.
They sit in the mechanical layer. Writing and keying the listing for a property that will not sell through you. Publishing it to the portals, then updating it, then withdrawing it. Viewing reports on an overpriced property the vendor will never reduce. Buyer follow-ups on a file going nowhere. This work is indistinguishable, at the moment you do it, from work on a file that will complete. Which is exactly what makes it impossible to arbitrate.
The instinctive answer is to qualify incoming listings harder, and only work on what will sell. In practice, an agency that becomes very selective sees its portfolio shrink, its window and portal presence thin out, and its local standing fall. The remedy costs more than the disease.
The realistic route is not to refuse more listings, it is to make the uncertain listing cheaper to carry. If the listing writes itself, if the follow-up fires by itself, if the viewing report drafts itself, then a file that fails still costs viewing and advisory time, but no longer keying time. The unpaid share compresses without touching commercial selection at all.
This reasoning moves the conversation about tools. The question is no longer whether a tool saves time on your sales, which is always hard to answer. It becomes whether the tool reduces what an unsold listing costs you. That second question has a measurable answer, and it bears on the heaviest line in an agency's operating account.
During the assessment week we measure time per task, not time per sale. The reason lies entirely in what these two figures describe. Time per sale is an output indicator, it arrives too late and it aggregates everything. Time per task is actionable, because a task can be moved and a sale cannot.