Some days you spring out of bed ready to take on the world. Others, you feel like the human equivalent of cold porridge. Sometimes the right words, at the right moment, can change the course of your entire day. So here's your cold porridge playlist for the brain: eight talks that'll fire you up - and, because I can't help myself, what each one means for the way you run your agency. Watch one, then do the Rocky dance, then call that client back. 1. Reshma Saujani: Teach Girls

Most agents I speak to have settled into a routine with AI. They opened ChatGPT, maybe dabbled with Claude, used it to tidy up a few emails, and decided that was that. AI sorted. But the chatbots are only one small corner of what's actually out there. While everyone's been busy asking ChatGPT to rewrite their property descriptions, a whole set of genuinely useful tools has grown up around it - tools built to do specific jobs, and do them brilliantly. Here are six AI tools wor

I've made and watched hundreds of estate agency videos. I see so many that nearly always get the same five things wrong. No one in the video, no hook, no personality, no real content, no plan. Sound harsh? It is. But "this is a people industry" rings a bit hollow when your marketing is a faceless home tour, a beige voiceover, and an AI caricature of yourself doing the talking. The good news is that every one of these is fixable, and none of them needs a bigger budget or fanci

8 Customer Touches That Cost Under a Fiver But Feel Like a Grand Wotcha! Quick one, before we get started: me, Tom Panos, Simon Gates, Sally Lawson, and Chris Watkin... all on one bill? You spoil us, ambassador! If you'd like to join me at the Estate Agency Success Summit on 18 June, you're welcome to use promo code TM150 to save on the ticket price. Now, one of the great paradoxes of customer service is this: throw money at someone and they'll forget it; do something small,

Over the last few days, a fleet of "May The 4th Be With You" posts have sieged social media. But you've all failed to mention that the Galactic Empire is, frankly, a terrible business. They've got the budget, the buildings, the brand recognition, and a workforce of millions. And they still get beaten by a handful of farmers, a smuggler, and a tribe of teddy bears with spears. If the Empire ran an estate agency, it would probably look impressive on the outside (big offices, e

Most agents think customer service is about getting everything right across the whole journey. Make sure nothing goes wrong, remove the friction, so it averages out as a good, smooth experience. And that's fine, but no one raves about average. No one tells their neighbour about "consistently competent." The peak-end rule, a concept from Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, says that people don't judge an experience by the average of every moment. They judge it by

The year I left teaching, I decided to tick something off my bucket list: performing stand-up comedy. I researched the art, learnt the discipline, and finally stepped on stage in front of seven people and one canine in a small pub in Nailsea. After stuttering through my lines for ten minutes, I retreated from the stage undefeated but also an exhausted, sweating, nervous wreck. But it's remained a subject that fascinates me to this day, and what I learnt that night still inf

Easter has just been and gone, the chocolate's mostly eaten, and the industry is returning to its favourite pastime: doing the same marketing as everyone else and wondering why it isn't working. So in the spirit of the season, I thought I'd come down from the mountain (well, a Zoom call from my office) with some guidance. Actually, not guidance - commandments . Let us begin. 1. Thou shalt not hide behind thy logo Your logo did not win the instruction; you did. Yet so many a

It's the school holidays, so let's do something a bit different this week. No list. No "10 ways to…" No homework. Well, actually, there is a tiny bit of homework. I've put together a Marketing Report Card for your agency. Think of it like the one you used to get at the end of term, except this time nobody's ringing your parents (probably). It covers ten areas of your marketing, from social media consistency and Google reviews, to video, personal brand, and prospecting, and as

I had the absolute pleasure of joining stats guru Christopher Watkin as a special guest on the UK Property Market Stats Show . In this episode (Week 12 of 2026), Chris and I dive into some incredibly juicy data. We start by unpacking the latest national property market stats, dissecting current listing trends, price adjustments, and why the market remains so resilient right now. We then take a magnifying glass to the Portsmouth property market , analysing which local agents a

We've all had one. The date who talked about themselves for 45 minutes straight, name-dropped their car twice, said "I'm not like other guys" without a shred of irony, and then texted "we should do this again!" before vanishing off the face of the earth. Awkward, inconsiderate, and unforgettable for all the wrong reasons. Now swap that person for your agency's marketing, and it might sound eerily familiar. Almost every bad date move has a perfect marketing equivalent; and mos

Most training is forgotten within a week. (Not mine, FYI) You scribble down some notes, nod along to a mnemonic, scan the QR code at the end, and by the following Monday you're back to doing exactly what you did before. But a great movie scene lodges somewhere in the back of your brain and replays itself at the exact moment you need it. Ah, the power of video. So here are 10 movie scenes that will teach you more about selling property than most training days ever could. Befor

Here's a question for you: what do Call of Duty, Candy Crush, and your local estate agency have in common? More than you'd think. The gaming industry is worth over $200 billion, built on one simple obsession - keeping people engaged, coming back, and feeling like they're winning. Not through luck, but design. And most of the principles that make games addictive are exactly the ones estate agents ignore. Onboarding? Clunky. Feedback? Slow. Loyalty? Non-existent once the deal c

Every agency gets bad reviews, complaints, moments where something goes wrong publicly and the instinct is to delete, defend, or pretend it never happened. But here's what the best brands in the world have figured out (and what many estate agents haven't): a negative review handled well is worth more than a five-star review nobody notices. The businesses I'm about to share with you didn't just survive their worst moments. They turned them into some of the best marketing they'

So many agents say the same thing: "We're posting on social media, but nothing's really happening." And I believe them. They are posting. But the gap between "being on social media" and "social media working for you" is enormous. Here's what I keep seeing when I look at agents' social media: the same mistakes, repeated everywhere, by otherwise brilliant people. Not because they're lazy, but because nobody's told them what's actually changed. The platforms have moved on, t

(and how to stop that from happening) AI is brilliant. AI is also a liability if you don't know what you're doing. And right now, a lot of agents are using it like a microwave - pressing buttons, hoping for quick results, and occasionally setting fire to something important. The good news is that most of the traps are easy to avoid once you know they exist. The bad news is that most people don't know they exist. Here are 10 ways you can go AI can cause reputational damage to

Most business advice for estate agents sounds the same: "Be consistent on social media." "Provide great customer service." "Build your brand." Thanks for that. This week, I wanted to do something different. I've put together 12 ideas that sound a bit unhinged on first read, but every single one of them has genuine business logic underneath. Some are cheap. Some are free. A couple might make you twitch. All of them will make you more memorable than the agent down the road who'

You've almost certainly experienced The IKEA Effect without knowing it had a name. You spend two frustrating hours assembling a wobbly bookshelf. You stand back, admire it, and somehow convince yourself it's better than the identical one in the showroom. It's not. But that doesn't matter because it feels like it is, because you built it. The IKEA Effect is a well-documented cognitive bias, first named by researchers at Harvard in 2012. Put simply: we place disproportionat