Your availability schedule is out of date before it arrives

A unit goes under offer on the Tuesday morning. By Friday it has let. Between those two moments, in most firms, the same single fact has to be typed by hand into three separate systems, and usually is not.

Tuesday, eleven o'clock

The offer comes in, the landlord takes it, and the unit is under offer. Three jobs follow.

The portal listing needs its status changed. The website needs the same change, which means either the person who took the offer has a login and remembers how it works, or an email goes to somebody who does. And the spreadsheet, the one the availability schedule is built from, needs a new word in the status column.

That is three logins and three chances to forget, on a day when the phone does not stop. In practice the portal gets done first, because that is where the enquiries come from and a live listing on a spoken-for unit generates calls somebody has to field. The other two wait for a quiet hour that never quite arrives.

If your website is one of those a member of staff cannot change without emailing a developer, the website job does not get done at all. That is a separate problem with its own costs, and we have written about why so many firms cannot edit their own site.

Then there is the schedule you sent on Monday to forty people. It is now wrong. There is no way to correct it, because it is a PDF sitting in forty inboxes, and some of those people have already forwarded it on.

Friday, and the four months after

The unit lets. The same three jobs come round again, and the same one gets done.

Four months later the website still shows it as available. An applicant rings about it and is told it went in August. They will not ring twice. Other agents quietly form a view about which websites are worth checking, and once formed that view is very hard to shift.

The other direction is worse because you never see it. Somebody browses at nine in the evening, sees stock that has obviously been sitting there since spring, decides the firm is asleep, and closes the tab. No call, and no record that it ever nearly happened.

For landlords the arithmetic is unforgiving. Simply Business put the average English void at 24 days and about £1,135 in lost rent, up 12.9% in the year to April 2026 from £1,005. Roughly £47 for every day a unit sits empty. That is the argument for treating an empty unit as an active cost rather than a gap in the diary.

Be clear about what a website does and does not do here. If enquiries arrive and nobody replies until Thursday, better software only delivers the enquiry to the inbox faster. We can build the alert. We cannot make anyone answer it. What a site can do is stop turning people away before they ever reach the phone.

Nobody can filter a list of forty units

The second failure is quieter. Most property websites present stock as one long list, ordered by whenever each entry happened to be added.

Say somebody is looking for 2,000 to 5,000 sq ft, E use class, under £20 per sq ft, within ten miles of a particular junction. On your site they have to open forty pages and read each one. On the portal they tick four boxes and get an answer in seconds, so that is where they go. The portals will always take the bulk of search traffic and no website changes that fact.

What changes is the smaller group who came to you deliberately: the ones who had your name from a board or a previous deal. Those people arrived already interested, and a list they cannot sort is a poor way to greet them. Size, rent, use class, location and status are the fields that do the work. Store them properly once and the filtering follows.

One link instead of an attachment

The availability schedule should be a web address, not a file.

Same data, one source. The unit exists once in the system. The website listing, the schedule page and the printable version all read from that single record. Change the status once and everything changes together. If your CRM already feeds the portals, the site should read from the same place, so you are typing once rather than three times.

It carries its own timestamp. A live schedule can say when it was last updated. A PDF cannot, which is why nobody trusts one that is more than a week old.

It survives forwarding. Send the link to forty contacts and every one of them sees today's position, including the person who is sent it second hand in November. Anyone who genuinely wants paper can still print it, but they print something current.

It can tell you who looked. A link shows you which units get attention and which sit ignored. Useful to know before the next landlord review meeting.

Photographs that do not undersell the unit

Presentation is the part firms most often leave to whoever happens to be on site with a phone. A poor photograph makes a sound unit look cheap, and a cheap-looking unit invites a lower offer.

The standards are not complicated. Shoot from a corner with a wide lens so the space reads as its true size. Lights on, blinds up, even on a bright day. Overcast is fine, and usually better than hard midday sun through south-facing glazing. Sweep the floor first and move the pallets. Then photograph the frontage from across the road, far enough back that the whole elevation fits in the frame.

Add a measured floor plan and a stated area. It saves a phone call on almost every enquiry, and it sits alongside the material information a listing now has to carry anyway. A well-built site can put those fields in front of whoever writes the listing so they are harder to leave blank, though the duty to get them right stays with your firm.

Send us the schedule you emailed out last Monday, along with the address of your website. Ask us for a quote and you will have a figure and a timescale by the end of the next working day.