Phase plan template for Real estate

The phase plan with the boundaries an agency needs: vendor-funded budget never moved between listings under ordinary authority, the price guide and the method of sale outside anybody's media permissions, and limits that account for campaigns lasting weeks rather than quarters.

Everything else is the general phase plan, unchanged. One row per area per phase, an explicit approval list, a reversal rule and a record of every change.

Write it when a coordinator or an agency runs campaigns funded by vendors, which is the normal arrangement. The money belongs to somebody outside the office, and a permission structure that does not say so will eventually be used to move it.

Revisit it when the office takes on a development or any campaign large enough to change the shape of the account.

Almost every permission question in an agency comes back to one fact: most of the budget was given by a vendor to sell one specific property.

That makes the usual media instinct — move money to where it is working — inapplicable. Moving a vendor's budget to a listing that is performing better is spending one person's money on another person's home, and no amount of media sense makes it defensible. A permission structure that does not say so explicitly will eventually be used that way, by somebody acting in good faith, during a week when one campaign is doing well and another is not.

So the first line of this document is that vendor-funded budget does not move between listings under any ordinary authority. Inside a listing's campaign, between placements and channels, it can move freely. Across the boundary, it cannot move at all.

The compensating half is that within a listing, authority should be wide from phase one.

Property campaigns run for weeks, not quarters, and they run to a date that cannot move. A coordinator who has to wait two days for approval to reallocate after a quiet first inspection has lost a meaningful share of the campaign. So moving budget between placements, adjusting bids, changing schedules and rotating among approved creative should all be available immediately, bounded by the listing.

Reductions should need no approval at all, at any phase. Being able to stop spend quickly matters more in a short campaign than anywhere else.

Two things sit outside every media permission, permanently.

The price guide is the most load-bearing statement in the campaign. It decides which buyers consider the property at all, and it belongs to the vendor and the agent. Changing it in an ad is publishing a different guide, whatever the intention, and two guides in market is worse than one that is too high.

The method of sale is the same. Auction, private treaty and expressions of interest ask buyers for different things, and the campaign's message follows from that choice rather than the other way around.

Both belong in the approval column with the listing agent named, at every phase.

The record kept in this version carries the listing reference on every line.

The reason is the same one that drives the naming convention: the question that follows every campaign is what was spent on this property and what it produced. A change log without listing references answers none of it, and reconstructing the reference afterwards is a search rather than a lookup.

It costs one cell per line and it is what makes the vendor report assemble itself.

The agency's own campaigns — the ones that win the next listing — belong in this document with their own rows, their own limits and their own metric.

Keeping them separate is the practical protection against the boundary above being eroded. Where presence and listing authority are the same permission, presence spend eventually gets funded from whichever campaign has budget left, which is exactly what the ring-fence exists to prevent.

Presence rows can be more permissive, because the money is the office's own, and they should carry a slower cadence, because presence works over quarters rather than weeks.

The phases here move faster than in most categories, because the unit of work is a campaign lasting weeks.

The evidence to advance is therefore usually a count rather than a duration: a number of campaigns completed under the current limits, each reconciled against its vendor agreement, with every change recorded and no reversal. That is more meaningful than eight weeks, because eight weeks in an agency might contain one listing or fifteen.

Write the condition as a count and the plan will fit the way the office actually works.

Automated rules may move money between placements inside a listing's campaign, within bounds, and they may reduce spend anywhere.

They may not move money between listings, for exactly the same reason a person may not. A rule that optimises across an account will find the best-performing campaign and feed it, which in an agency means feeding it with somebody else's money.

That constraint has to be built in rather than assumed, because the default behaviour of most optimisation is account-wide.

A complication unique to this category: in many offices the person with the strongest view about a campaign is the listing agent, who is not the person holding the media authority.

That is workable if the plan says so. Give the agent named approval rights over the things that are theirs — the guide, the method of sale, the creative, the inspection schedule — and give the coordinator the media authority within the listing. Neither needs to wait for the other on the things they own, and the two lists together cover everything.

Where it fails is when an agent asks for a media change directly and informally. Write into the notes that requests are recorded like any other change, with the listing reference and the reason, so a campaign's history reads the same whoever initiated it.

Seven checks. One row per area, no blanket permission. Vendor-funded budget never moves between listings under ordinary authority, and rules carry the same ring-fence. Within a listing, operational authority is wide from phase one, and reductions need no approval anywhere. The price guide and the method of sale sit in the approval column with the listing agent named. Every change record carries a listing reference. Office presence spend has its own rows and its own cadence. And the evidence to advance is written as a count of completed campaigns rather than a number of weeks.