The Work in Your Week That Only You Can Do

Every week in a real estate business contains three kinds of work. There is work that anybody could do, work that somebody trained could do, and work that genuinely requires you. The three are mixed together in the same diary and they are not labelled.

Most agents have a rough sense of the proportions, and that sense is usually generous. The only way to find out is to sort a real week rather than an imagined one.

Sort last week, not next week

Take the week that has just finished and write down everything that took more than fifteen minutes. Not the plan for it. What actually happened, including the parts you would rather leave out.

Then put each item into one of three groups:

• Anybody could have done this, with no training and no knowledge of your business.
• Somebody could do this if you taught them once and wrote it down.
• This needed you specifically, your relationships, your judgement or your licence.

The third group is smaller than expected

For most agents the third group comes down to a short list. Conversations with people who chose you rather than your company. Negotiation where the outcome depends on judgement made in the moment. Decisions about money and risk. The appointments themselves.

Almost everything else, including a great deal of work that feels important while it is happening, sits in the first two groups. That is not a criticism of the work. Somebody has to do it. The question is whether that somebody has to be the person whose hour is the most expensive in the business.

This applies just as much if you work alone

It is tempting to read an exercise like this as a staffing exercise, which makes it easy to dismiss if there is nobody to hand anything to. The sort is still worth doing, because the options are wider than hiring.

Some of the first group can be bought by the hour without anybody joining your business. Some of it can be done once properly and then reused for a year. Some of it, examined honestly, does not need doing at all and has survived only because it has always been there. For an agent working alone, the useful outcome is usually a shorter list of things to stop rather than a new person to pay.

What the sort tends to reveal

The common finding is not that agents are lazy with their time. It is that the first group expands quietly to fill whatever space the diary leaves, because it is visible, finite and comfortable, while the third group is none of those things.

A week spent entirely on work only you can do would be exhausting and probably unwise. The point is not to reach a number. It is to know what the current proportion actually is, so that the next decision about your time is made with evidence rather than with a feeling.

There is a second finding that appears almost as often. Several items in the middle group could not be handed to anybody at the moment even if somebody were willing, because they exist only in your head. They have never been written down, so passing one on would mean explaining it from scratch every time. That is worth noticing, because it turns a staffing question into a much smaller question about what needs documenting first.

A question to sit with this week

Looking at your sorted list, what is the single item in the first group that took the most of your time last week? And what would have to be true, in practice and not in theory, for next week to be the last week you do it?

Taking this further

If you would like to work through what your own week is made of and what to do about the first group, you can book a discovery call and we will work through it together.