If We’re Honest, a Lot of the “Work” in Property Isn’t Actually Value

One of the reasons I enjoyed sitting down with Phil Farrell from Offr is that he’s one of those people who can have a proper conversation about the future of agency without either disappearing into PropTech fantasy land or defaulting to the usual defensive nonsense about how “property is a people business” and therefore apparently exempt from progress.

It is a people business, of course it is. But that line gets thrown around so often, and so lazily, that it now tends to close the conversation down rather than move it forward. It becomes a shield. A way of avoiding the more uncomfortable question, which is this: if you strip away the noise, where do agents genuinely add value and where are we just propping up a process that should have been fixed years ago?

That, for me, was the most interesting thread running through the conversation with Phil. Not because it is new, but because it is timely. We are reaching a point in this industry where it is no longer enough to defend the status quo just because it is familiar. The status quo in sales, in particular, is painfully slow, hopelessly fragmented and far too dependent on people manually holding things together. We have normalised an extraordinary amount of inefficiency and then convinced ourselves that managing that inefficiency is the same thing as delivering value.

It isn’t. Or at least, not in the way we often tell ourselves it is.

Phil made the point that most of a property transaction is still made up of admin, poor communication, duplicated effort and avoidable friction. That felt about right to me. Anyone who has spent time in agency, or even alongside agency, knows how much of the day can disappear into chasing updates, relaying information, trying to pin down what should already be clear, and generally acting as the glue in a system that doesn’t naturally want to hold together. It matters, yes. Deals fall apart without people doing that work. But it is still largely process management. It is not the same as saying this is the bit clients truly value.

And that distinction matters more than ever.

Because if technology starts removing some of that friction - and it already is - then we have to be honest about what is left. If offers can be handled more cleanly, if property information is made available earlier, if communication becomes more transparent and less reliant on someone remembering to send the next email, then the old comfort blanket of “we add value because we manage the process” starts to wear very thin.

That is not anti-agent. Quite the opposite. I think it is one of the most pro-agent arguments you can make, because it forces a much sharper focus on the things good agents actually do well. Real value in this industry has never been in forwarding an email, chasing a document or sitting on hold to a solicitor for the third time that week. Real value is judgement. It is knowing when to push, when to pause, when to challenge, when to reassure and when to tell a client something they might not particularly want to hear but need to hear all the same. It is in influencing outcomes, not just tracking them.

That is why I think this conversation matters just as much in lettings as it does in sales, even if the examples are not always identical. At The Depositary, we live this every day through the end-of-tenancy process. Historically, tenancy conclusion has been one of those areas of the market where everyone has simply accepted the faff. Endless back and forth. Different versions of what was said. Delays. Emotion. Confusion. More time spent managing the mechanics of the process than actually moving it to a fair and sensible conclusion. Again, all of that has been treated as “the job”. But if you look at it properly, much of it is not value. It is friction.

And once you begin removing that friction, something quite interesting happens. It becomes much clearer, very quickly, where the human really matters.

When a process that used to take hours suddenly takes minutes, you do not make the professional redundant. You expose what the professional is there to do. The admin stops hiding the quality. The process stops masking the gaps. You can no longer kid yourself that busyness is the same as expertise. Clients see it more clearly. Teams feel it more clearly. Businesses do too.

That is why some agencies will find this shift uncomfortable. Not because technology is somehow coming for them, but because it removes a lot of the old excuses. If your business model, or your service proposition, is too heavily tied to manually shepherding broken systems along, then yes, better systems are going to feel threatening. But if your value is genuinely in advice, communication, trust, negotiation and strategic oversight, then better systems should be liberating. They should create the space for you to do more of the work that actually matters and less of the work that only exists because the process is clunky.

There is also, if we are being honest, a wider industry habit here that needs challenging. Property has a tendency to romanticise its inefficiencies. We dress them up as craftsmanship or service or personal touch when very often they are just bad process with a good PR spin. That may have been easier to get away with ten years ago. It is much harder now. Consumers are more digitally fluent. Expectations around speed and visibility are higher. Government, clumsy though it often is, is pushing towards digitisation. And the economic pressure on agency businesses means fewer and fewer can afford to waste time doing things badly just because that is how they have always been done.

So the question is not whether this shift is coming. It is already here. The more useful question is whether businesses are prepared to look honestly at themselves and ask where their value truly lies.

That requires a bit of humility. It requires some uncomfortable introspection. It requires leaders to distinguish between the parts of the operation that are genuinely client-facing value and the parts that are simply operational drag. But done properly, that exercise is not a threat to agency. It is an opportunity to sharpen it. To build businesses that are easier, faster and better not just because a website says so, but because they genuinely remove waste and concentrate human effort where it has the biggest impact.

That, in the end, was my biggest takeaway from the conversation with Phil. Not that technology has all the answers, because it doesn’t. And not that the human becomes less important, because I think the opposite is true. It is that once we stop defending broken process for the sake of habit, we get a much clearer view of what good people in this industry are actually for.

And that is a conversation well worth having.