Playbook, estate agency
Two customers, one procedure, and the stage after the agency
An agency is paid by one side and deals daily with the other, so a complaint arriving through the website is about one of two entirely different things. A seller or a landlord is unhappy with a service they bought and can point at an agreement. A buyer or a tenant is unhappy about a property the agency markets or manages but does not own. Both go through the same written procedure, that procedure has named stages and deadlines, and there is a stage beyond it that the agency does not run.
Why this is not the general answer
The handling pattern for complaints holds across every trade. What follows is the part that does not.
- The person complaining is frequently not the client, so a tenant reporting that nothing has been done about the damp is complaining about an asset belonging to somebody else, and what the agency can do about it depends on which service level the landlord bought.
- The procedure is a document with stages and a deadline attached to each, and once those stages are exhausted the matter goes to the redress scheme the branch belongs to, which is a route worth publishing plainly rather than mentioning only when pushed.
- Complaints about money separate from complaints about service, because client money protection arrangements cover one of those and not the other, and blurring them in a written reply creates an expectation the agency cannot meet.
- A repair complaint carries a clock that a service complaint does not, since a heating failure inside a managed tenancy is an obligation already running rather than a piece of feedback waiting to be logged.
How it arrives
- how do i make a complaint about your branch
- who do i go to if you do not sort it out
- my landlord is ignoring the repairs who do i tell
- the agent did not pass on my offer what can i do
- how long do you take to reply to a complaint
- what redress scheme are you in
What has to be indexed for this to work
| Your written complaints procedure, stage by stage | Who the complaint goes to first, how long each stage takes, what the final response is called and when it is issued. The timescales are the part people quote back, so publish the ones you actually keep rather than the ones that read well. |
|---|---|
| Where a complaint has to be sent, and in what form | The named address or role, whether it has to be in writing, and what the agency needs in order to identify the file: the property, the dates, who was dealt with. A complaint that arrives without those loses a week at the first stage. |
| Your membership statement, as published | The redress scheme the branch belongs to and the client money protection arrangements you hold, exactly as they appear on your own material. State the fact of membership and leave the scheme to describe its own process, because paraphrasing somebody else's procedure is how a wrong deadline gets published. |
| How repairs are reported, by service level | The reporting route for a managed tenancy, what happens on a rent collection or tenant find instruction where the landlord holds the repairs, and the emergency route. Half of what arrives labelled as a complaint is a repair that went to the wrong place. |
The reply
Our complaints procedure sets out the stages and the time we take at each one, and it says who the complaint should be addressed to and what to include [1]. If you are still not satisfied once we have issued our final response, the procedure explains that the matter can then be taken to the redress scheme we belong to, which is named in the same document [2]. If what you are describing is a repair rather than a complaint about us, it needs the repairs route instead and that is faster. Tell me your name, an email and a short description and I will put it in front of somebody here today.
It leads with the procedure rather than with sympathy, because a person writing a complaint at nine at night wants the mechanism, not a paragraph of regret. It names the external stage before being asked, which costs nothing and defuses the suspicion that the agency is hiding it. Separating repairs out early stops a genuine repair sitting in a complaints queue for a week.
Where it stops
The trigger. The visitor starts describing what happened to them, names a member of staff, refers to money that has not arrived, or mentions anything that sounds like a safety issue in an occupied property.
I can tell you how the procedure works but I am not the right place to make the complaint itself, and I do not want it sitting in a chat window. Give me your name, an email and one line about the property and I will pass it straight to the person who handles these.
It stops answering before it guesses, says who will pick it up, and asks for the one thing that makes a reply possible. Nothing about it reads as a dead end.
Never say this here
Out of bounds
- Never accept or deny that the agency did anything wrong, since a written admission from the website will be attached to the complaint at every later stage.
- Never predict that a complaint will be upheld or dismissed, because the outcome belongs to whoever conducts the stage and a prediction becomes a promise.
- Never state that a particular repair is the landlord's responsibility, as that turns on the tenancy agreement and the service level and the assistant has read neither for that property.
- Never send somebody to the redress scheme before the internal stages are finished, because it will be returned to the agency and the complainant will have lost weeks.
Questions
- Should the assistant take the complaint itself?
- It should take a name, an email and one line, and no more. A full account typed into a chat box is not evidence anybody can work from, and the person writing it will have to write it again properly at stage one. Get the contact detail and route it.
- Does publishing the procedure invite complaints?
- It invites the complaints you were going to get anyway, earlier and in the right place. The expensive ones are the ones that skip the branch entirely because nobody could find where to send them.
- What if somebody is complaining about the landlord rather than about us?
- The assistant should say so and point at the repairs route, without characterising who is responsible. On a managed instruction that is your work and it should go to the property manager. On a tenant find, the landlord holds it and the honest answer is that the agency is not the right recipient.
Keep reading
- Everything for a estate agencyViewings, fees, referencing and deposit rules are answerable at any hour. Valuing a property or discussing an offer is not.
- Handling complaints in generalThe job is to route, not to resolve. Acknowledge without conceding, name the escalation route, and get it to a person fast.
- The branch being open does not mean a viewing is availableBranch hours, viewing hours and the emergency line are three different timetables, and the one people want is rarely the office one.
- Where do I park is two questions and only one is about your officeA permit bay is a particular about the property, not a facility of the office. Two questions wearing the same six words.
- Take me off your list is not the same as delete my fileReferencing packs, identity copies and rent ledgers. Some of it belongs to a landlord, some to a scheme, and some cannot go yet.
Try it on your own material
Upload a document or point it at your site, paste one line of HTML, then ask it something only your business could answer.