Chasing a sale to exchange without becoming a nuisance

Sales progression is the least glamorous part of agency work and the part that most directly determines whether you get paid. It is also the part most often done by instinct, which in practice means ringing everybody once a week to ask if there is any news.

There is a better model, and it starts from the observation that an agreed sale is almost always stuck on one of a small number of things. Knowing which one you are in tells you who to ring and, more usefully, who not to.

The buyer's mortgage. The application is in, or it is not. The valuation is booked, has happened, or has come back short. Each of those states has exactly one person who can move it, and none of them is the seller's solicitor. A down-valuation is the most common serious blockage and the one where speed matters most, because the options, which are renegotiate, find the difference, or challenge the valuation, all get harder the longer everybody sits with the news.

Searches. Local authority search times vary enormously by council and are outside everybody's control, which makes this the blockage most worth setting expectations about rather than chasing. Find out the current turnaround for the relevant council and tell both parties the number. People tolerate a delay they were warned about and panic at one they were not.

Enquiries raised by the buyer's solicitor. This is where most of the genuinely lost weeks live. The seller's solicitor has asked the seller a question, the seller has not answered, and nobody is chasing because the agent does not know the question was asked. This is the blockage where an agent adds the most value, because you are the only person in the transaction who will actually ring the seller and ask them to dig out a FENSA certificate.

Leasehold information. If there is a management pack to obtain, that is a known, specific delay with a known, specific cause, and it should be started on day one rather than discovered in week five. It is the single most predictable delay in the whole process and it is routinely the least anticipated.

Something in the chain. Not your transaction at all. The only useful action is to know the shape of the whole chain and who is stuck, because you cannot fix it and you can stop chasing people who are waiting on it.

And, less often but expensively, something structural: probate not granted, a title defect, an absent freeholder, an unresolved planning matter. These are the ones that should have been surfaced at acceptance, and the argument for asking that question on day one is that they are all better handled early.

The discipline that makes this work is writing down, after each contact, what state the transaction is in rather than what was said. Said is a log. State is a thing you can act on, and it lets somebody else in the office pick it up when you are on holiday.

Two things about frequency. Both parties should hear from you on a schedule you told them about, even when there is no news, because no news delivered on time reads as control and silence reads as a problem. And solicitors should hear from you when you have something to give them or a specific thing to ask, not weekly out of habit, because the agent who only rings with a reason is the agent whose calls get returned.