Your dead month was decided in July
It’s the second week of the month and the phone hasn’t rung.
You had a good August. Three deals, one of them a villa you’d been working since spring. You told people the market had turned. Then September arrived, and the enquiries stopped, and by the fifteenth you were saying the other thing agents say. It’s quiet out there.
It isn’t. Here’s what actually happened.
Every Deal Has a Lag, and Yours Is Longer Than You Think
Take your last five deals. For each one, write down two dates. The first real conversation with the client, not the enquiry, the conversation. And the date the commission landed.
Count the days between them. On a Dubai sale it’s usually somewhere between forty five and ninety. On a rental, two or three weeks.
That number is your lag. It’s the single most useful thing you’ll learn about your own business this year, and almost nobody works it out.
Because once you know it, this month’s number stops being this month’s work. It’s what you did sixty days ago.
The Fortnight After Is Where the Quiet Month Starts
So what were you doing sixty days ago?
You’d just closed three deals. You were busy. Viewings for the buyers, paperwork for the villa, the celebration dinner. Owner calls dropped from twenty a week to six, then to two. You didn’t decide to stop prospecting. You just stopped, because who prospects when they’re winning.
That fortnight is this month.
I’ve run this exercise with agents in every brokerage I’ve managed. Pull the owner calls for the two weeks after any deal lands. They drop. Every time. Then, sixty days later, the quiet month arrives and gets blamed on the market, the leads, Ramadan, summer, the portals.
The month doesn’t swing. The activity swings, eight weeks earlier, and you’re only ever looking at the result.
You Can’t Fix This Month. You Can Only Feed the Next One
This is the uncomfortable part.
If your lag is sixty days, nothing you do today changes this month. The calls you make this week land in November. The calls you didn’t make in July are why September is quiet.
Most agents respond to a quiet month with panic prospecting. Forty calls a day for a week. Some of it works, deals land in six to eight weeks, and they call it a good month. Then they stop again.
The way out isn’t working harder in the panic weeks. It’s not stopping in the good ones. Same number of owner calls, every day, including the day after the villa completes.
The Four Numbers That Make It Visible
You can’t hold that line if you can’t see it. So the fix starts with four numbers on a piece of paper, every day. Owner calls. Follow-ups. Viewings. Meetings booked.
Sunday, look at the week. Not the money. The four numbers.
Do that for a quarter and you’ll know your lag, you’ll know your real source of business, and you’ll have seen the fortnight-after drop with your own eyes, which is the only way anyone ever stops doing it.
That page is the daily scorecard. It’s free, one page, and it’s here: Download the daily scorecard
And if you’d rather work out your lag with someone who’s read a few hundred of these, book a free 30 minute call. No pitch, just the numbers.
Mind. Method. Market.
Want a second opinion on your numbers?
Book a free 30 minute call with Ashley. No pitch, just the numbers and what to do next.
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Ashley J Hawthorne is the founder of Your Real Estate COO and Managing Director of a Dubai brokerage, with 23 years in real estate across the UK and Dubai and nine industry awards. More about Ashley.
