Top tips for swifter completions

Every agent knows that managing post-sale effectively can lead to swifter sale completions and happier buyers and sellers. The issues arise when no-one is steering the ship. Having someone pro-actively contacting all parties and ensuring they are progressing their areas is the best way to ensure a swifter, hassle free process. You may not have a dedicated resource for that which then puts pressure on your already busy day and takes away your focus from winning more valuations and sales. Whatever your situation, you can’t afford to throw away sales so here are a few top tips to avoid delays.

Ask some standard questions right at the beginning – is your buyer or seller going on holiday in the next 8-10 weeks? That could cause a delay if their solicitor is waiting on some responses from them to move forward. Is there a deadline in their mind (because of some important event/necessity)? That could give the parties a little extra motivation to avoid losing the sale. Make sure everyone involved has this information.

Talk timescales –  managing customers’ expectations is definitely top of the priority list. If you talk timescales and look to aim for a certain timeframe it can again, help motivate the parties involved. It also ensures that everyone work towards a goal. Unless there is a very good reason on the buyer or sellers part, try to avoid talking about specific dates as this often leads to disappointment. We don’t control the timescales; we can only aim to influence it.

Ensure your buyers and sellers are keeping in touch with the solicitors regularly– you may think you don’t need to tell them that, but if you want the case to progress swiftly, it needs to be kept on top of to ensure everyone is doing their bit as quickly as possible. If you don’t have time to do that pro-actively then you need your buyers and sellers on the case. Even if you are being pro-active, it doesn’t hurt to have them on it too!

Deal with issues swiftly – if an issue arises, deal with it as swiftly as you can. It’s easy sometimes to think that an issue with blow over, or that someone else will deal with it but get involved as quickly as you can to avoid turning a little issue into a big delay.

Make sure you build relationships with the solicitors – it’s so important to have a friendly, co-operative relationship with the solicitors involved. Yours is not the only sale on their desk so you need to make sure you are helping not hindering!

All this may seem like common sense and things you do consistently with your sales. If that’s you then great! Just remember that other agents involved in the chain may not be as pro-active as you are!

Savvy Sales Progressors provides pro-active, outsourced sales progression services for estate agents. If you and your sales team manage the sales progression, you should consider outsourcing your sales progression to regain some valuable time to focus your in-house resource on sales. Outsourcing can provide an excellent customer experience, help you win more valuations and ultimately sell more properties. Take a look at our unique online calculator to see whether you can reduce your costs by outsourcing. You can access the calculator and further information on our service by visiting our website: www.savvysalesprogressors.co.uk

Alex Evans

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