Selling a home takes 85 hours
Selling a home takes 85 hours of work, regardless of whether it is spread over two weeks or six months. Given that a person working 40 hours a week and 48 weeks a year will clock up 1,920 working hours annually, why don't we all (each agent) sell 22 homes a year (1,920/85)?
Join me in this (artificially precise) recount:
1. First telephone conversation: 0.5 hours
2. Site visit and initial contact2 hours
3. Market analysis and property valuation1 hour
4. Office meeting and signature of exclusive1 hour
5. Taking of property details and photo shoot2 hours
6. Preparation of marketing plan (for those of you who do it ad hoc): 3 hours
7. Insertion into CRM, company website and three portals2 hours
8. Sending information to customers in a database, MLS and/or some publication social network1 hour
9. Telephone support (and filing of claim) to twenty incoming calls: 5 hours
10. Ten property viewings (including second visits): 15 hours
11. Supply management-Negotiation-Signing of the deposit contract5 hours
12. Signature of deed of sale before a notary (including prior preparations): 5 hours
After adding them up, we record 42.5; the number of hours directly attributable to a standard sales process (there will be more and fewer complete ones) of a standard dwelling. As it is reasonable to think that to each client we must also allocate some hours destined to management tasks not directly linked to the sale of your property, but rather to the proper functioning of the company that will make it possible, let's allocate an overhead hour for every hour directly chargeable to the sale, that is: 42.5 more.
Every sale we make involves 85 hours of work regardless of whether they are spread over two weeks or six months. Given that a person working 40 hours a week and 48 weeks a year will accumulate 1,920 working hours annually, why don't we all (each agent) sell 22 properties a year (1920/85)?
Choose one of the following 5 answers:
a) Because estate agents spend a lot of time in the pub.
b) Because in reality the whole acquisition-sales-closing process takes 300 hours and you're tricking us.
c) Because there are 70,000 officers in Spain and they make some 300,000 property transactions a year.
d) Because Rafael Bello, from Re/max Arcoiris is a bully and sells everything.
e) None of the above.
The good answer is “Because in Spain there are 70,000 agents and around 300,000 property transactions are carried out a year.” But let's not get carried away since out of the exact 300,349 homes sold in 2013, estate agents only sold 189,000 of them, so that works out at fewer than 3 sales per agent a year!
And you, how many sales a year do you make?
As long as this doesn't change, we will continue to charge our customers fees of €100/hour because they will have to pay us for the hours we dedicate to selling their property and the hours we need to secure the next instruction…
What a crazy sector ours is!
