Account audit template for Real estate

The account audit with the checks an agency needs: whether campaigns for sold or withdrawn properties are still spending, whether every campaign can be reported back to the vendor who funded it, how quickly enquiries are answered, and how much of the account is the office's own presence.

Everything else is the general audit, unchanged. One row per finding, evidence attached, honest severity, one action, one owner, one date.

Run it monthly rather than quarterly. An agency account turns over faster than almost any other, because every listing creates a campaign and very few of them are deliberately ended, so a quarter is long enough for a meaningful amount of spend to go to properties that have already sold.

Run it also before any vendor reporting cycle.

An agency account is unlike almost any other: it is hundreds of short campaigns, created quickly, funded by different people, and ended only when somebody remembers.

That produces one finding reliably, and it is the reason this audit should be monthly. Join the list of campaigns that spent in the last month to the agency's current listing register. Anything spending against a property that has sold, been withdrawn or been relisted under a new reference is spending somebody's money on something that is no longer for sale.

The recommendation is rarely just to end those campaigns. It is to add an end-of-campaign step to the listing workflow, so the account stops accumulating them, and the effort column should say that this is a process change rather than an afternoon of tidying.

The second check is whether every spending campaign can be traced to a listing reference and to whoever funded it.

Where it cannot, one of two things is true. Either the office cannot report that spend to the vendor who paid for it, which produces an awkward conversation at invoice time. Or the office is paying for it without having decided to, which is worse and more common than anybody expects.

The check is a join between the account and the vendor marketing agreements. The finding is the list of campaigns that do not reconcile, with the amounts.

Measure how long enquiries take to reach a person and to be answered, per campaign and per agent.

This is not an advertising metric and it is the most important number in a property campaign's funnel. A buyer who has emailed three agencies about three properties on a Saturday morning will inspect whichever one replies first, and no amount of targeting compensates for a reply on Monday.

Measure it from real data rather than from impressions: pull the enquiry timestamps and the first response timestamps, and report the spread. Where the office does not record one of those, the finding is that it cannot be measured, and that is itself worth fixing.

Separate the account's spend into vendor-funded listing campaigns and the office's own presence spend.

Where the naming convention carries it, this is a filter. Where it does not, it is a reconciliation against the vendor agreements, and any campaign that cannot be placed on one side or the other is a finding.

The reason it matters is not bookkeeping. It is that presence spend and listing spend are judged on completely different things — appraisal requests against inspection attendance — and an account where they are mixed reports a blended number that describes neither and will eventually be used to cut the presence spend.

Check for assets still in use from campaigns that have ended: an image of a sold property in a carousel, a retargeting audience built for a listing that has settled, a page that no longer exists.

Property creative is disposable and it is rarely cleaned up, so the residue accumulates. The visible cost is small; the reputational one is not, because an ad for a house that sold two months ago reaches people who know it sold.

A related check: list every retargeting or custom audience in use, what it was built from, and when.

Agency accounts accumulate audiences built for individual listings and then reused, usually because they perform well. An audience of people who looked at a sold property is not a general buyer audience, and reusing it quietly narrows the reach of the campaign it is attached to.

Record what each audience contains and retire the ones whose source no longer exists.

The check that costs nothing until it costs a lot: who can administer the ad accounts, the pages, the portal integrations and the payment methods.

In an agency these are frequently held by one coordinator, and coordinators change jobs. Record the list with the date, and make sure at least two current people can administer anything the office depends on.

The individual findings are useful. The accumulation is worth more, and it is the argument for running this monthly rather than when somebody is unhappy.

Twelve months of consistently recorded findings tells an office what a campaign in each corridor typically costs, how quickly its agents actually reply, how often campaigns run past their listings, and whether the presence spend has ever produced anything measurable. Those are the four questions every listing presentation implicitly answers, and most agencies answer them from memory.

Keep the closed rows rather than deleting them, and keep the evidence with them. The record is the part that compounds, and it costs nothing beyond not throwing it away.

Seven checks. Every finding separates what was found from what should be done, with evidence. Campaigns spending against sold or withdrawn listings have been listed, with amounts. Every spending campaign traces to a listing reference and a funding source. Enquiry response times have been measured from real timestamps. Office presence spend is separated from vendor-funded spend. Audiences and creative belonging to finished listings have been retired. And at least two current people can administer everything the office depends on.