Monitoring Office Targets - Estate Agency

[Andy10163]

I have a large new whiteboard to help my office create, record and monitor our monthly/weekly and personal targets.

My thoughts are if we have a monthly target of say 24 property valuations, a weekly target would be to have 6 and would put numbers 1 to 6 on the board and when a valuation is booked, to put the details on the board. Reach 6 in the week an we are 100% on target. If we get 12 property details written on the board then we are at 200%. Therefore if we were to fail to get any valuations in week 2, we would still be at 100% target. My colleagues argue with me that we should only be recording the valuations that we have been out to within the target week and not base the results on booked appointments that may be cancelled.

This method worked for me in a previous employment and I can't understand why this method is causing office conflict and I would appreciate any input of support or of an alternative way of dealing with this situation. Thanks.

 

[obscure]

Is your objective to book appointments or to actually value properties? Are you paid to do valuations or is that just a step down the road to getting a client signed up? I would say you should be tracking things that actually make money.

Achieving 100% "appointments booked" target is meaningless if 50% of those cancel and only 1% of the remainder ever actually become clients. Likewise tracking clients signed is meaningless if you never sell anything and they dump you after 3 months.

Tracking this information IS important but only as an indicator of how efficient you are at converting appointments into valuations into clients into sales. What tracking appointments (or even valuations) doesn't do is indicate how well the business is doing. For that you need to be tracking the point at which money is generated.

 

[WaveJumper]

Well said above, so you could have 200 valuations booked but only actually get out too 100 so now you down on target, I would be more concerned about how many of the 100 actually turn into sales, whats your conversion rate?

 

[fisicx]

Your colleagues are right.

The target is valuations not bookings.

 

[CVRO]

I'd track both as that will give you an indication of your conversion rate appointments to valuations. If a good percentage of your valuation appointments get cancelled, maybe, you'd need to look at how you are screennig the calls prior to booking a valuation.
Eventually, you could also have a target for this conversion rate but as mentioned above. The conversion rate of valuations to sales is more important.

 

[Mr D]

When setting targets it helps to have a system for working them out.

Do not just make them up.

Figure out what can be achieved, how it's achieved, how it's recorded, what happens when demand changes, what training is needed.

And if people are easilyachieving targets, it can be worth raising them over time or providing incentives when higher targets are set and achieved.

 

[tony84]

What your team are suggesting is better for you anyway as it is a step further down the line before it actually counts. It means everyone has more work to do before hitting target.

Having spent 6 months booking in appointments for mortgage brokers at a previous job, we have about 10-15% cancel and 1-2% not in when the advisor turned up.

 

[Financial-Modeller]

On the basis that an estate agency earns money from selling properties (ignoring rentals as you have only mentioned valuations) you should track:

on the vendor side:
Appointments
Valuations
Conversion ratio Valuations : Appointments
Instructions
Conversion ratio Instructions : Valuations

on the purchaser side:
Viewings
Offers
Conversion ratio Offers : Viewings
Completions
Conversion ratio Completions : Offers

You already have all the information. Being aware of changes to any of those ratios and/or trends, and understanding the reason for the change, can only be beneficial.

 

[AllUpHere]

The idea is fundamentally flawed. You are just disincentivising people. If they do well in the first week, they will know the targets are met and be tempted to sit back and relax for the following week.

 

[Graham Tyers]

I find all targets end up being counterproductive in the long run. I am probably really rubbish at this , but setting targets always ends badly for me, so I don't.

In their place I publish 'Magic Numbers' and 'Magic Animals' These are made up of a collection of metrics - so basically if a good thing happens it increases a magic number and conversely decreases it if otherwise.

Everyone in the office gets excited when magic numbers go up, and motivated to action when they go down. Animals range from small mammals up to charismatic mega-fauna. A Lion trumps a Selenodon ( which is currently showing on our portal )

Don't try this at home.

 

[Financial-Modeller]

I'm only drawing upon best practice at some fairly successful companies, and have used similar KPIs and metrics to drive significant increase in realised value at various companies.

I'm not suggesting data is a substitute or replacement for good people, and good management of them, but when the data is already there, I would encourage beneficial use of it.

 

[NickGrogan]

Tracking non-existant figures to make yourself look busy. Completely pointless.

I book a valuation week one, I cancel and rearrange for week 2, I cancel again and book for week 3 and so on.

A couple of months go by, no valuation is done, the seller goes elsewhere, but I've book 8 viewings.

Do that with a couple of clients and I'm on target, where's my bonus?

Reminds me of recruiters who were targeted on phone time, they called the speaking clock or each other.

There are many things that you could track, @Financial-Modeller has suggested a few.

Whatever it is it needs to be relevant.

And hitting target last week/month doesn't carry forward to next month.

 

[tony84]

Reminds me of recruiters who were targeted on phone time, they called the speaking clock or each other.

I had a job with call time as a target. Monday morning, called up my good accounts and had a catch up on football. Friday morning, talking about the weekends football.

Champions league - mid week targets smashed.

We used to piss ourselves saying it is "building relationships" - easiest job ever... unless there was no football.