How much business is hiding between your teams?

Real estate agencies spend a lot of time looking for the next opportunity.

The next appraisal.

The next landlord.

The next buyer.

The next property to add to the rent roll.

But some of those opportunities may already be sitting inside your agency.

A buyer purchases an investment property through your sales team.

Then six months later, they need someone to manage it.

A landlord on your rent roll starts thinking about selling.

A tenant who has rented through you for three years finally has their deposit together and starts looking to buy.

None of these people are strangers to your agency.

You’ve already built the relationship.

The question is whether the right person knows that relationship changes.

Some of your best leads might not look like leads

When we think about growth, we tend to think about getting more people through the door.

• More portal enquiries
• More prospecting
• More advertising
• More names in the database

Of course agencies need new business.

But there’s another source of growth that’s much easier to overlook: the people already dealing with you.

Think about how much can change during one person’s property journey.

Today’s tenant could be a buyer in a few years.

A buyer could become a landlord almost immediately.

A landlord might eventually decide it’s time to sell.

The opportunity usually appears when their needs change.

That’s why having thousands of contacts in a database isn’t especially useful on its own.

Your team needs enough visibility to recognise those moments and do something with them.

The awkward bit is usually the handover

Here’s a scenario that will probably sound familiar.

A property manager is on the phone with a landlord.

During the conversation, the landlord casually mentions they’re thinking about selling.

What happens next?

Maybe the PM sends an email to someone in sales.

Maybe they add a note.

Maybe they mention it when they walk past an agent later that afternoon.

Or maybe it’s 4.45pm, there’s an urgent maintenance issue waiting, three emails have just landed and everyone forgets about it.

That’s a potential listing sitting right there.

The same thing can happen in the other direction.

An agent sells an investment property to a buyer who needs a property manager.

Sales knows the buyer, knows the property and knows exactly what they’ve just purchased.

How much of that information makes its way to the PM team?

When handovers rely on someone remembering to send an email or copy information from one system into another, there’s plenty of room for things to go missing.

Our new Invisible Walls video brings this very familiar agency moment to life…check it out below.

Your client doesn’t know your org chart

From inside an agency, Sales, Lettings and Property Management can feel like very different worlds.

To the client, they’re dealing with the same agency.

They’ve already told you who they are.

You’ve already got their phone number.

You might know what they bought, sold or rented, who they dealt with and how long they’ve been a client.

So when they move from one part of the agency to another, starting from scratch can feel a bit strange.

Imagine buying an investment property through an agency and then asking the same agency to manage it, only to find yourself explaining the property and your situation all over again.

Internally, there’s probably a perfectly reasonable explanation.

Different team.

Different system.

Different process.

The client doesn’t see any of that.

They just know what they’ve already told you.

A good handover keeps that relationship moving without making the client do the work for you.

Look for the moments when someone’s needs change

You don’t need to turn every contact into a cross-sell opportunity.

What matters is recognising the genuine moments when someone’s property needs change.

There's a few obvious ones worth looking at across your agency:

• ‍A buyer purchases an investment property. Do they need property management?‍
• A landlord starts talking about selling. Does sales know?‍
• A tenant begins looking to buy. Is there a natural way to introduce them to the sales team?‍
• A managed property needs a new tenant. How easily does information move into the leasing process?‍
• An owner expands their portfolio. Can your team see the bigger relationship, rather than each property in isolation?

Some of these opportunities will go nowhere.

That’s just real estate.

But your team should at least be able to see them.

Double handling is a clue

There’s a fairly simple way to find some of the gaps in your agency: look for the copy and paste.

If Sales already has a client’s details, why is PM entering them again?

If Lettings has already collected the information needed to create a tenancy, why does PM have to rekey?

If somebody has to send an internal email every time a client moves from one team to another, what happens when that email isn’t sent?

Manual work isn’t automatically bad.

Sometimes a person should absolutely be involved.

But repeated data entry and workarounds are usually clues that two parts of the client journey aren’t talking to each other particularly well.

Do that once and it’s a lil annoying.

Do it across hundreds or thousands of properties, applications and contacts, and you’ve created a lot of work nobody really wants to be doing.

And that’s a fantastic way to waste time.

Try this with one client

You don’t need a six-month transformation project to workout where the gaps are.

Pick one client who’s dealt with more than one part of your agency and follow their journey.

Start from their first enquiry and ask:

• Where did their information have to be entered again?
• Where did one team have to contact another?
• Did the client ever have to repeat something you’d already been told?
• Was there a point where somebody had to remember to follow up?
• Could each team see the client’s previous relationship with the agency?
• If another opportunity came up, who would know about it?

You’ll probably find a couple of clunky moments pretty quick.

Those are worth fixing first.

A connected agency has more chances to stay useful

If somebody already trusts your agency and their property needs change, you want to be in a position to help.

That gets harder when information lives in separate places, teams can’t easily see what happened before them, or a good handover depends on someone remembering to make it.

And as an agency grows, those gaps can grow with it.

Add rent roll, another office or a new division and suddenly the workaround that was fine for ten people isn’t quite so fine for fifty.

That’s why we created How to Offer Value End-to End.

Our free guide lets you choose the journey that looks most like your agency:

• Sales
• Leasing + Property Management, or
• Both

Inside you’ll find practical journey maps, action tables, examples and an End-to-End Experience Health Check to help you work out where value might be getting lost.

Your next opportunity might be a brand new lead.

Orrr it might be someone your agency already knows 😉