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Same valuations 46 instructions a quarter instead of 29
Kennet & Vale Estate Agents in Marlborough had a full diary of valuations and, for years, too few of them turning into a board outside the house, which the agency had put down to the market. In the first quarter of 2025 the 2 branches carried out 84 valuations and signed 29 of them. A year later, on 87 valuations, they signed 46, with the client's monthly ad spend down from £550 to £490. The cause was the 4 days after the valuer's car left the drive, which nobody at the agency had ever measured.
About the client
Kennet & Vale is a family-owned sales, lettings and property-management agency with branches in Marlborough and Pewsey, Wiltshire, 14 staff, run by James Aldous, charging 1.25% plus VAT on sales that typically sit between £350,000 and £550,000, so each completed instruction is worth £4,000 to £7,000 in fee. The only advertising was £550 a month, all of it media cost, on Rightmove Featured Property upgrades and boosted Facebook posts. James had believed for the better part of a decade that the agency "always lost about 2 in 3" valuations because this was Marlborough, and a sharper pack, a new valuer, a spell on OnTheMarket and a reversed fee cut had all failed to change the rate.
Estate agency: sales, lettings and property management
Marlborough, Wiltshire, England
14 people
2003
Our analysis of the situation
James's explanation went first: of the 55 homeowners valued in the first quarter of 2025 who did not instruct Kennet & Vale, 31 were listed with another agent within 6 weeks, most with the 2 other Marlborough firms charging within a quarter of a percent of the same fee, so the homeowners were selling and paying a similar fee to do it. Reputation went second: both branches sat at 4.6 and 4.7 on Google, none of the reviews mentioned a valuation visit, and the valuers we sat in with were prepared and straight about price.
So we built the record the agency had never kept, reconciling the Excel sheet against both branches' diaries and the signed agreements: a median 4 to 5 days from visit to a standard letter that repeated the price and nothing else, and 40 of 84 homeowners with one follow-up contact logged or none.
Kennet & Vale's 34.5% was the industry average to the decimal. The 2 numbers to fix were days to proposal and follow-up contacts per valuation; the valuation count we left alone, and the effort moved from buying attention for live listings to the 84 homeowners a quarter who had already let a valuer in.
Supporting research
Reapit research published by Acaboom puts the UK average for valuation-to-instruction at 34%, rising to 51% for valuers in the top ten per cent of the country [1]. Agent Response's June 2024 analysis of around 100,000 leads across 400 branches found Rightmove enquiries complete a form at 48% against Zoopla's 25% [2], which told us the portal a homeowner came from was a usable signal of how far along they were.
Our strategy to solve the problem
In May 2025 both branches moved from the spreadsheet onto Alto, Zoopla's agency CRM, at £250 a month, with its tracking script on the agency's WordPress site so that a valuation request, the visit, the proposal and every return to the site sat on one record. The migration took 2 weekends and a lot of James's patience with the lettings team, who liked the spreadsheet. By the end of the month a valuer could look at a homeowner's record before picking up the phone and see whether they had been back on the valuation page that week or were browsing listings in their own postcode.
June was the proposal. This is the change that did the work. We built a Google Docs template with James so that a valuer could produce a personal proposal in 20 minutes on the same day as the visit: the agreed asking range, the 2 or 3 things the homeowner had raised at the kitchen table, the comparable sales they had discussed, and a plain paragraph on what would happen in the first fortnight of marketing. The rule was same day, next morning at the latest, and Alto held the deadline as a task. By the first week of July the median gap from visit to proposal was under a day, and James told us the first thing he noticed was homeowners ringing back to ask questions, which had almost never happened before.
Over the summer we put the follow-up on a schedule that Alto owned instead of the valuer's memory: a call the day after the proposal landed, an email 3 days later with one relevant comparable, a second call the week after. Each step was a dated task on the valuer's list and rolled over if it was missed, which meant James could see the misses. We paced it by source. Homeowners who had come through Rightmove had usually already spoken to 2 other agents and needed the proposal fast and the calls light; Zoopla and word-of-mouth homeowners were earlier in their decision and could take the full sequence. By September, the branch managers' fortnightly review showed the follow-up column filling in, and the instruction rate for the summer quarter had climbed into the mid-forties.
In the autumn we dealt with the ad spend. The Rightmove Featured Property upgrades were making live listings more visible to buyers, which was not the problem, so we cut them from about £400 a month to £190 and kept them for the slower-moving stock. From January 2026 we put £300 a month into Meta ads for a single home-valuation page on the agency's site: one Fluent Forms form, 3 qualifying questions, an explicit tick box for SMS contact so that the text that followed was compliant with PECR, and an automated SMS to the on-call valuer on every submission. Total ad spend settled at £490 a month, and that is what the agency pays the platforms, before any fee of ours. In the first quarter of 2026 the page produced 36 enquiries at £25 each; 11 of them booked a visit, and 4 had signed by the end of March. The rest are in Alto's nurture list and will be worked slowly.
The client's contribution was mostly discipline. Valuers logging the outcome and any stated objection the same day, not on Friday. James's sign-off on the proposal template and his willingness to enforce the same-day rule when a valuer had 6 visits in a day. A 20-minute review every other Wednesday between the 2 branch managers to compare sources and adjust the pacing. And, for the landing page, patience with leads that would convert on a different timescale from the homeowners who already had a valuer at the door.
Before and after
Both periods are January to March, a year apart, so the comparison sits inside the same spring valuation season.
| Metric | Before (Jan–Mar 2025) | After (Jan–Mar 2026) | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly ad spend (client's, not our fee) | £550 | £490 | −11% |
| Valuations carried out (both branches) | 84 | 87 | +3 |
| Signed sales instructions from those valuations | 29 | 46 | +17 |
| Valuation-to-instruction rate | 34.5% | 52.9% | +18.4 points |
| Median time, visit to written proposal | 4–5 days | same or next day | n/a |
| Valuations with 2 or more follow-up contacts logged | 44 of 84 | 83 of 87 | n/a |
| Ad spend per signed instruction | £56.90 | £31.96 | −44% |
| Valuation landing page (Meta, £900 in the quarter) | none | 36 enquiries at £25; 11 visits; 4 instructions | n/a |
The valuation count barely moved, and that was never the target. The agency was already getting through the door of 28 houses a month.
Before, a quarter meant 84 visits, 29 boards, and 55 households who had let a valuer into their kitchen and then heard nothing for 4 days while a competitor's proposal landed. James's fee income depended on which valuer happened to remember which homeowner. After, each visit has a proposal out the same day and a record of every follow-up that the branch manager can read; 17 more instructions in a quarter is, at the agency's typical fee, somewhere between £70,000 and £120,000 in commission once they complete.
Summary
Kennet & Vale were converting an average share of their valuations into instructions and had explained it to themselves as competition for a decade.
Checking where the lost homeowners actually went ruled that out, and building the record the agency had never kept showed a 4-to-5-day wait for a generic proposal and follow-up left to memory.
We moved both branches onto Alto, made a personal proposal on the day of the visit the rule, and let the CRM own a follow-up schedule paced by where the homeowner had come from, while shifting the small ad budget from listing upgrades to a valuation page.
17 more signed instructions in the same 3 months, from 3 more valuations, with the ad budget trimmed by £60 a month.
References
- Acaboom, "Average Valuer Conversion Rates", on Reapit research. acaboom.com
- Property Industry Eye, "Which property portal provides the best lead generation for estate agents?" (June 2024), on Agent Response data. propertyindustryeye.com
Final word from the client
I'd been telling people for 10 years it was Marlborough. Turns out it was us not writing to anyone for 4 days. That's a slightly annoying thing to find out at 51. 46 I'm pleased with; I'd still like to see it hold through a flat autumn before I put it on the window.