Performance review template for Real estate

The performance review with the columns a property campaign needs: every line read per listing and per stage of the sale, results read on inspections and registrations rather than enquiries, and causes that include the price guide and the market rather than only the advertising.

Everything else is the general review, unchanged. Planned from the plan, variance separated from cause, cause held to evidence, one decision with one owner and a date.

Run it at the end of every campaign, in the week after the fixed date, while the detail is still recoverable and while the vendor conversation is still ahead of you.

Run a short version weekly during the campaign too, because a four-week flight cannot wait until the end to discover that the first inspection was quiet.

A property campaign is short, funded by one person, and made of stages that buy different things. All three facts point the same way: the unit of review is the listing crossed with the stage.

A launch weekend that filled and a pre-auction week that did not average into a number that describes neither, and the pre-auction week is usually the one that decided the outcome. Reviewing the campaign as a whole produces a figure that can be reported and cannot be acted on.

Per listing matters for a different reason: somebody paid for this campaign specifically, and the review is the document that becomes their report. A review written per channel or per month cannot be handed to them at all.

Enquiries are the easiest thing to produce and the least predictive of anything.

A lower guide, a bigger headline or a more urgent line will all lift enquiry counts, and a proportion of those people were never going to attend. Read the result on inspections attended, or on registered buyers where the method of sale produces them, from the agency's own system.

Record attendance per inspection with the dates, rather than as a total. A campaign that filled the first inspection and emptied by the third is telling a completely different story from one that built steadily, and the total conceals both.

The two most common real causes in this category are not advertising decisions at all.

The price guide decides which buyers consider the property. A campaign with strong reach, good click-through and poor attendance is usually saying something about the guide: people saw it, considered it and did not come. Reading that as a media problem leads to more spend against the same audience, which is the most expensive available response.

The corridor decides how many buyers exist. A narrow bracket in a small market has a finite pool, and a campaign that exhausted it is not fatigued, it is finished. The answer is a wider geography or an adjacent bracket rather than new creative.

Both belong in the cause column, with the evidence: the reach figures, the attendance record, and what the guide was on which dates.

The third cause outside the advertising is how quickly enquiries were answered.

A buyer emailing three agencies on a Saturday morning will inspect whichever replies first. A campaign whose enquiries were answered on Monday will show poor attendance, and no targeting decision in the world will compensate.

Where the office records response times, put them in the row. Where it does not, that is the finding: the largest single determinant of the campaign's result is not being measured, and fixing that is worth more than any media change in the review.

A four-week campaign running to a fixed date cannot wait until the end to learn anything.

So a short version of this review runs weekly: what the week planned to spend, what it spent, what the inspection attendance was, and one decision. It takes ten minutes and it is the only mechanism that catches a quiet first inspection while there are still weeks left to respond.

The decisions available mid-campaign are narrow and that is fine: widen the corridor, change the first image, move weight to the days before the inspection, or raise the question of the guide with the vendor. Naming which one, in writing, on the Monday, is the whole value.

The end-of-campaign review is written in the week after the fixed date, and it is written before the conversation with the vendor rather than after it.

A review written afterwards is written to support whatever was said in the room. Written first, it is the document the conversation is based on: here is what was planned, here is what happened, here is what we think caused it and how confident we are.

It is also considerably easier. Most of the difficulty in that conversation comes from assembling the facts under pressure, and they assemble themselves if the weekly rows were kept.

The accumulated reviews are the asset, and in this category they answer the question every listing presentation is trying to answer.

What a campaign in this corridor at this bracket actually costs. How many inspections a typical campaign here produces. Which stages have been worth extra weight. What proportion of enquiries this office converts to attendance, and how that compares with its own average.

An office with a year of consistent reviews can show a vendor evidence from its own market. An office without them can show a vendor an opinion.

Seven checks. Every row is read per listing and per stage of the sale. Results are read on inspections attended or registrations, from the agency's own system, with attendance recorded per inspection. The price guide and any change to it are recorded with dates and considered as a cause before the advertising is. The corridor's size is considered before fatigue is. Response times are recorded, or the row says they cannot be measured. Every decision has an owner and a date. And the review is written before the vendor conversation rather than after it.