Mum life, market open houses

School pickup is at 1.30. It is at 1.30 whether or not a buyer wants to see a unit at 1.15, whether or not the seller has just called, and whether or not I am halfway across the island with somebody who has decided they want to look at one more.

For about a year I treated that as the thing making me worse at my job. It is the thing that made me better at it, and I would like to have worked that out sooner than I did.

The shape of the week

A constraint you cannot argue with forces you to look at everything else, and most of what I found was not load-bearing. The week has four kinds of block in it now and nothing that is not one of them:

• Mornings, 9.15 to 12.45. Viewings, and only viewings. Three of them, four if they are in the same estate. Nobody is shown anything outside this window on a weekday and it has cost me less than I expected.
• The dead hour, 12.45 to 1.30. In the car, parked, near the school. Calls that need a voice — a seller who wants an update, a buyer talking themselves into or out of something. It is the most productive forty-five minutes of my day and it exists because it cannot be used for anything else.
• Afternoons. Not work. This was the hard one and it is the one that holds everything else up.
• Saturdays, 11 to 4. Open houses stacked deliberately: two units in the same block back to back, or three in one estate. The whole week’s new buyers see everything in one afternoon and I drive once.

Nothing in that list is clever. What makes it work is that it is written down and that I stopped negotiating with it.

What had to go

The evening viewing went first, and I miss it least. Somebody who can only see a flat at 8.30pm on a Wednesday is somebody who is going to make a decision in the dark about natural light. I would rather wait for Saturday and have them see the thing properly.

The “let me get back to you” went second. It used to be my default and it is a way of making a decision later, badly, while carrying it around all day. Now the answer is a time. I can look at that at nine tomorrow, or I cannot help with that.

And I stopped taking every enquiry. Not out of principle — out of arithmetic. Fifteen viewing slots a week is the whole of what I have, so a buyer who is not going to buy for eight months is genuinely better served by being told that and put in the diary for month seven.

“I did not get more organised because I read about it. I got more organised because 1.30 does not care.”

What clients actually noticed

Not the schedule. Nobody has ever said they appreciated my time blocking, and if they had I would find it worrying.

What they noticed is that I stopped being vague. Estate agents are famously available and famously slow, and the two are the same failure: if any hour might be a work hour then no hour is, and everything gets answered eventually rather than when it was needed. A seller who knows I will call between 12.45 and 1.30 stops checking her phone at eleven.

They also noticed the Saturdays. Seeing four units in one afternoon is a better way to buy than seeing four units across three weeks, because you are comparing rather than remembering. That started as a logistics decision about a car and turned into the best thing I do for buyers.

The part nobody in this industry says out loud

I hid it for the first year. Not lied about it — hid it. A viewing request for 2pm got “I have another appointment”, because somewhere along the way I had absorbed the idea that an agent with a school run is an agent who is not serious, and that a client who found out would go and find one without a child in the picture.

That was the actual problem, and it was not the schedule. Vagueness is expensive. “Another appointment” tells a client nothing they can plan around, so they ask again, and I decline again, and by the third time the impression is not that I am busy — it is that I am slippery.

So I say it now. It is one line in the first message: I do viewings between nine and one on weekdays and eleven to four on Saturdays, because I collect my daughter at half past one. Nobody has ever objected. Two people have said it was why they picked me, which I did not expect and do not entirely believe, but I have stopped arguing with them about it.

The useful part is what it does to the rest of the relationship. A person who has told you one slightly awkward true thing about herself in the first message is easier to believe in the second one, when the awkward true thing is about their asking price.

The bit I am still bad at

School holidays. The whole structure is built on a school day and there are about eleven weeks a year when there is not one. I have tried three arrangements and none of them has been better than the last.

Completion days too. Those cannot be moved either, and when one lands at 2pm somebody else does the pickup and I spend the afternoon feeling like the wrong kind of person. That is the trade, and writing it down honestly is more use to anybody reading this than pretending the system is airtight.

It mostly holds. That is as much as I would claim for it — and it is a great deal more than I had two years ago, when I was available all the time and reachable none of it.

— MG

UnapprovedMichele did not write this post. It was written to the card copy that already existed, to give the template something real to render, and the date on it is invented too. Read it as a shape to correct.