Where People Add No Value, They Add Risk

Every industry has its own collection of sayings that become so familiar they're accepted as fact. They get repeated at conferences, quoted in boardrooms and eventually become part of the culture. The trouble is, once that happens, very few people stop to ask whether they're actually true.

One of residential property's favourites is, "People buy from people."

It's a comforting phrase because it reinforces the idea that ours is, above all else, a relationship business. It suggests that success comes from employing more people, speaking to customers more often and inserting ourselves into as many stages of the process as possible. It also provides a convenient defence whenever technology enters the conversation. After all, if people buy from people, then replacing people with technology must surely make the customer experience worse.

I've never believed that.

Not because relationships aren't important- they're fundamental- but because we've confused relationships with participation. Somewhere along the way we've convinced ourselves that every time a member of staff touches a process they're adding value. In reality, many of the activities that occupy our teams every day don't improve the outcome at all. They simply exist because the process itself is inefficient.

That distinction matters, because they're two entirely different problems. One requires better people. The other requires better operational thinking.

I was reminded of this during a recent conversation with Sammy Pahal, Managing Director of the UK PropTech Association. We spent surprisingly little time talking about technology itself. Instead, much of the discussion revolved around people, psychology and the challenge of changing behaviour. Sammy's academic background is in psychology rather than computer science, and she made the point that introducing technology is rarely the difficult part. The difficult part is persuading organisations to question habits that have become deeply ingrained over many years. I think she's absolutely right.

The residential property sector doesn't lack technology. It lacks the willingness to ask awkward questions about the way work is organised. We spend huge amounts of time discussing growth strategies, marketing campaigns, market share and recruitment, yet remarkably little time asking whether the people already sitting in our offices are actually spending their day doing work that justifies their experience.

It's a question that has fascinated me for years because, the more agencies I've visited, the more obvious the contrast has become. The best-run businesses rarely feel like the busiest. In fact, they often feel quieter than everyone else.

That doesn't mean people are idle. Quite the opposite. The office is purposeful rather than frantic. Conversations are focused. Staff aren't constantly interrupted by somebody needing a signature, chasing an update or trying to find information that should have been available in the first place. There's a calmness about those businesses that has very little to do with personalities and almost everything to do with operational design.

Compare that with agencies where every day feels like organised chaos. Phones are ringing constantly. Colleagues are interrupting one another to ask where something has got to. Customers are waiting for updates that somebody hasn't had time to send because they're already dealing with ten other pieces of administration. The team works incredibly hard, yet somehow always seems to be running just to stand still.

The instinctive reaction is often to conclude that the second agency needs more people. I'm not convinced that's true. I think they need to ask a much more uncomfortable question first. What proportion of their team's day is genuinely creating value?

That isn't the same as asking whether they're busy. Most people in residential property are exceptionally busy. The question is whether the activity they're busy with actually improves the customer's experience or the outcome of the transaction.

If somebody spends twenty minutes copying information from one system into another, have they added value? If they're manually checking information that already exists elsewhere, forwarding emails between disconnected systems or repeatedly chasing updates because software can't communicate with software, what expertise have they actually contributed? The answer, in most cases, is none.

They've simply acted as the bridge between two broken processes. That's not a criticism of the individual. It's a criticism of the system we've asked them to work within. Over the years I've arrived at a view that has become one of the principles I use whenever I'm looking at an operational process.

Where a person adds no value to an outcome, all they add is risk.

That might sound provocative at first, but think about what happens whenever somebody is inserted into a task that doesn't require judgement. They can make a mistake. They can misunderstand instructions. They can be interrupted halfway through. They can forget to complete something. They can be off sick. They can be on annual leave. They can simply have a bad day.

None of those things are failings. They're the realities of being human. The problem is that if the person's involvement wasn't improving the outcome in the first place, we've accepted all of those risks without gaining any corresponding benefit. That's a terrible trade.

Yet residential property is full of processes that have evolved in exactly this way. Every time a system couldn't talk to another system, a person was inserted to bridge the gap. Every time legislation introduced another requirement, another manual check was added. Every time a customer wanted more visibility, another email or phone call became part of somebody's daily routine.

Individually, each decision made sense. Collectively, they created businesses where talented people spend extraordinary amounts of time acting as human middleware between disconnected pieces of technology. That's not where expertise belongs.

One of the biggest misconceptions surrounding technology is that automating work somehow removes the human element from a business. I hear versions of that argument all the time and it usually comes wrapped inside the same phrase we started with: people buy from people. I don't think our own behaviour supports that idea.

Think about booking a taxi twenty years ago…..

You phoned the local office. Somebody answered. They took your booking. You waited. If the taxi didn't arrive, you phoned back. Somebody apologised, put you on hold, checked with the driver and promised it would only be another five minutes. Nobody particularly enjoyed that experience.

Then along came apps that allowed you to book instantly, watch the driver's progress in real time and pay automatically without reaching for your wallet. The remarkable thing is that almost nobody misses the old process. Not because the person answering the phone lacked warmth or professionalism, but because their role largely existed to compensate for the fact the process itself wasn't very good.

Technology didn't remove a relationship people valued. It removed work that nobody wanted anybody to be doing in the first place.

That, for me, is the point that so many conversations around PropTech miss. We spend far too much time debating technology when we should be debating operations. Technology is simply one of the tools available to redesign an operational process. If the process itself is poor, digitising it achieves very little beyond making a bad process happen more quickly.

I know that because it was exactly the lesson we learned when we built The Depositary. People often assume we started with deposits. We didn't. We started with frustration.

Long before there was a platform, there was a letting agency. Like every other agency, we had experienced property managers doing their absolute best to deliver a fair outcome for landlords and tenants whilst navigating one of the most fragmented processes in the industry. Whenever we asked the team where they felt the business was letting them down, the answer was remarkably consistent. Tenancy conclusions were always near the top of the list. They were time-consuming, administratively heavy and emotionally draining. More importantly, they rarely allowed our people to do the part of the job they were actually good at.

Our property managers found themselves caught in the middle of every tenancy. Landlords assumed the agency was trying to protect the tenant. Tenants assumed the agency was siding with the landlord. Meanwhile, the people actually doing the work spent hours collecting information, requesting documents, chasing responses, moving files between systems and trying to keep everybody updated on what was happening next.

Eventually we stopped looking at the process through the lens of deposits and started looking at it through the lens of value. That changed everything.

When we broke the process down into its individual stages, something became impossible to ignore. Roughly ninety per cent of the work consisted of administration. Gathering information. Sending reminders. Moving documents. Checking status updates. Recording actions. Coordinating multiple parties. Only a tiny proportion of the process required genuine professional judgement; the kind of experience that justified employing an experienced property manager in the first place.

Yet our people were investing one hundred per cent of their time. That's mad. It's also bad business.

If ninety per cent of somebody's workload doesn't require their expertise, then we're paying highly capable people to perform tasks that don't benefit from their capability. Worse still, we're taking them away from the moments where they can genuinely influence an outcome. The difficult conversation with a landlord. The balanced assessment of evidence. The empathetic discussion with a tenant. The judgement call that software simply cannot make because it depends on context, experience and emotional intelligence.

Those are the interactions that create trust. Those are the moments where "people buy from people" actually becomes true. Everything else deserves to be challenged.

I sometimes wonder whether the phrase itself has been misunderstood over the years. Perhaps what customers really buy isn't people at all. Perhaps they buy confidence. They buy certainty. They buy the feeling that somebody has designed a process which respects their time and gives them clarity about what's happening. Sometimes that confidence comes from another human being. Sometimes it comes from a beautifully designed digital experience. The medium matters far less than the outcome.

We see evidence of this everywhere in our daily lives. We happily check in for flights without speaking to anyone. We order food, manage our banking and renew insurance policies through apps because they're faster, clearer and more convenient than the alternatives they replaced. Nobody argues that online banking removed humanity from financial services. It removed unnecessary administration from customers' lives whilst allowing bank staff to focus on situations where expertise genuinely adds value. Residential property should be aiming for exactly the same thing.

Ironically, I think one of the biggest barriers isn't technology at all. It's identity.

Our industry has spent decades defining professionalism by activity. The busier somebody appears, the more valuable we assume they are. Diaries packed with meetings, overflowing inboxes and constant interruptions become badges of honour. There's almost an unspoken belief that if a process becomes easier, somehow the work has become less worthwhile. The opposite is usually true.

The most valuable professionals I know aren't valuable because they're busy. They're valuable because they consistently apply judgement where judgement is needed. Their contribution isn't measured by how many forms they've completed or how many emails they've sent. It's measured by the quality of the decisions they make and the confidence they give to the people relying on them. That's where our industry should be heading.

When Sammy spoke about digital transformation during our conversation, she repeatedly returned to the idea that technology is fundamentally about people and behaviour rather than software. Looking back, I think that's probably why our conversation resonated with me so strongly.

The challenge facing residential property isn't persuading software to do more. It's persuading ourselves to let go of work that no longer deserves a person's attention.

That requires leaders to ask questions they may never have asked before….

Which parts of our business genuinely require human expertise?

Which parts exist purely because we've always done them that way?

If we removed this task tomorrow, would anybody notice?

Most importantly, if somebody spends an hour completing this activity, is the outcome genuinely better because they were involved?

They're uncomfortable questions because they force us to separate activity from value. But they're also the questions that will define the next generation of letting businesses. For years we've measured success through growth. More branches. More instructions. More staff. More properties under management.

I suspect the agencies that outperform over the next decade will measure something different. They'll ask how much of their team's day is spent doing work that only a human being can do. Because that's where competitive advantage lives now.

Not in having more people. Not in buying more software. But in building businesses where the two complement each other properly.

Technology should deal with certainty. People should deal with complexity. Technology should manage repetition. People should exercise judgement. Technology should remove friction. People should build relationships.

Get that balance right and something interesting happens. Your customers receive a faster, clearer and more transparent service. Your employees spend more of their time using the skills they actually enjoy using. The business becomes more resilient because it relies less on manual intervention, and growth no longer depends on recruiting ever larger teams simply to keep the wheels turning.

That's a future worth building. And it starts with a single question that every agency owner should ask when they look at any process in their business.

Where, in this process, does a person genuinely add value?

If the answer is nowhere, then keeping them there isn't protecting the human touch. It's simply adding risk.