Ask most estate agents about a sale they would handle differently and they will have one in mind straight away. Rarely a disaster. Usually something quieter than that. An update that could have come on the Tuesday rather than the Thursday. A client left to work out for themselves what happens after exchange. A landlord who heard nothing for a fortnight and assumed the worst.
Those moments stay with you because you care how it felt from the other side. That instinct is where better service starts, and almost every agent has it.
What decides whether it turns into anything is simpler than it sounds. It is knowing which moments your clients actually noticed, rather than the ones you happen to remember, and hearing about them early enough to do something.
The part clients remember is the people
Research published this year by Moneypenny found that 83% of 2,000 UK adults would rather deal with a person at the critical moments of a property transaction. Only 6% said they would prefer artificial intelligence, usually shortened to AI.
None of that will surprise anyone who has read their own reviews. Clients rarely write about the process. They write about the negotiator who rang when they said they would, the property manager who sorted the boiler before the weekend, the branch manager who talked a nervous first-time buyer through the same question three times without ever making them feel silly.
Small changes, made often
Nobody improves an agency in one go, and nobody needs to.
A sales team decides to call every client on a Friday, even when there is nothing new to report, because feedback showed that silence was being read as bad news. A lettings branch starts confirming who is attending a maintenance visit and when, because clients said the waiting was the hard part. A branch manager changes how the timeline is explained at the point of offer, because too many buyers were arriving at exchange expecting something different.
None of that needs a restructure or a day out of the diary. Each one is small enough to start next week, and each one quietly improves the experience of every client who comes after it.
Knowing which change to make
Most agents have a good instinct for what their clients value. Feedback is what turns that instinct into something specific.
ESTAS collects verified reviews from clients across sales and lettings, so what you are reading reflects the whole business rather than only the people who felt strongly enough to write something unprompted. Your dashboard holds the scores and the written comments together, so you can see how service is going and read, in your clients’ own words, why.
Patterns are the thing to look for. Several clients in a quarter describing the same quiet spell after an offer is accepted is not a run of bad luck. It is one specific change worth making. Three landlords in a month naming the same property manager is not just a nice comment. It tells you what good looks like in your own business, and who else might learn from it.
A year of small changes
Look back over twelve months of that and the picture is different.
The reviews read differently, because the experience behind them has changed. The team feels it too. Sharing the review that named someone does more for standards in a branch than most training days, because it shows everyone what great service looks like in a client’s words rather than a manager’s.
Better service rarely announces itself. It shows up as fewer anxious phone calls, more clients who recommend you without being asked, and landlords who stay because they never had a reason to look anywhere else.
And then October comes around
On Friday 16 October, The ESTAS Awards return to Grosvenor House.
The results are decided entirely by verified client reviews. No judging panel, no self-nomination, nothing to write. The agencies celebrating that night are the ones whose clients rated them most highly across the year, which usually means they kept paying attention to the small things all the way through it.
Recognition is a lovely thing to receive, though it is the result rather than the point. The point is the client who felt properly looked after during the worst week of their move, and told somebody about it afterwards.
Your clients are already telling you where the next small change is. Improve today, and you are building something that lasts a good deal longer than one autumn.
