The Market You Say You Serve and the One You Actually Serve

If somebody asked you to describe your business in one sentence, you would probably answer with an area and a type of client. Most agents can do this without hesitating, and most of the answers are aspirational rather than descriptive.

The useful exercise is not the sentence. It is what happens when you put the sentence next to your last twelve or twenty transactions and read them together.

The gap between the description and the record

Your completed transactions are a factual account of who chose you, what they were buying or selling, and roughly what they were worth. They are not an opinion and they are not affected by what you would prefer to be doing. For a lot of agents the first reading is uncomfortable, because the record shows a concentration they never consciously chose, in a price band or a postcode or a client situation that was simply where the work happened to come from.

Why the record is more useful than the intention

An intention tells you where your attention is pointed. A record tells you where you are actually credible, and credibility is the harder of the two to manufacture. If seven of your last twelve sales were first time buyers in two or three neighbourhoods, then you have accumulated genuinely specific knowledge about those buyers and those streets, whether or not you ever meant to.

That knowledge is an asset. It is also invisible to you, because knowledge you acquired gradually rarely feels like expertise. It feels like the obvious.

Worth separating here are two things that often get read as the same. One is who you have served. The other is where the work came from, which is a question about your lead sources rather than about you. A concentration created by one referring solicitor is a different business from a concentration created by your own reputation in a neighbourhood, and the two carry very different risks.

What a concentration actually buys you

A concentrated business is easier to market, easier to describe to a stranger and easier to get referred into, because the people doing the referring can finish the sentence for you. It also compounds, since every additional transaction in the same segment adds to what you can say about it with authority.

A scattered business can work perfectly well. It simply costs more, because each new client arrives with a situation you are meeting for roughly the first time, and very little of what you learnt on the last transaction transfers to the next one.

Choosing it rather than accepting it

None of this means your record should decide your future. Plenty of agents look at the concentration they have and decide they do not want it, usually for reasons to do with price band, workload or the kind of transaction they find draining. That is a legitimate conclusion and it is a business decision like any other. What is not a decision is leaving the gap unexamined and continuing to describe one business while running another.

A question to sit with this week

Pull your last twelve transactions into a list and write beside each one how that client found you and what they were buying or selling. Read the list as if it belonged to somebody else. What business would you say that person was in, and how far is it from the sentence you would have given before you looked?

Where to take this next

If you want to work through what your own transaction history is telling you and what to do about it, book a discovery call and we will read it together.