Most agency owners have a settled view on this, and the settled view is no. Vendors are away. Buyers are away. Half your own team is away. Nobody wants a call about moving house while they are trying to get three children through an airport. The received wisdom is to keep the lights on, tidy the database, and start properly in September. It is a reasonable position and it is mostly right. But mostly right is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and the part it hides is the part worth money. ## What is genuinely true Cold prospecting in August is a poor use of anybody’s time. Door knocking, cold calling lists of strangers, direct mail to people with no relationship to your brand. Contact rates fall, and the people you do reach are not in a position to think about it. If that is what prospecting means to you, then no, August is not the month. It is also true that your own team is stretched. Whoever is in the office is covering for two people, dealing with the chains that are still moving, and has no capacity to take on a project. So far, the received wisdom holds. ## What the received wisdom misses There is a difference between contacting strangers and contacting people who already know you. Somewhere in your database is a vendor you valued in February who instructed another agent. Their property has been on the market since. It has not sold. Two weeks ago they cut the price. That person is not on a beach not thinking about property. They are thinking about it a great deal, because it is costing them money and holding up whatever they were trying to do next. They are precisely the person for whom August is not a quiet month. The market is producing a lot of those people at the moment. Rightmove’s July index recorded a 1% fall in the average asking price of newly listed homes, around five times the normal July movement and the largest drop for the month in a decade, with stock per agent close to a twelve year high. More competition for the same buyers, and more sellers having to move on price to get noticed. None of that pauses for the school holidays. ## So why does nobody work it? Not because agents disagree with any of the above. Ask any agency owner whether there is value in their database and they will say yes without hesitating. It does not get worked because of a capacity problem that is completely invisible in a marketing plan and completely obvious on a Tuesday morning. Working a database properly means identifying which contacts have done something worth reacting to, checking each one against the live market, working out what changed and when, and then having the conversation. That first part takes hours, produces nothing visible, and is always the thing that gets dropped when somebody calls in sick or a chain falls over. In August, with a skeleton team, it is not dropped occasionally. It is not attempted at all. ## The honest answer Is it worth prospecting in August? If prospecting means finding new strangers, no. Wait for September. If it means noticing what is happening to people who already know you, then August is arguably the best month of the year for it, for one unglamorous reason. Everybody else has stopped looking. The vendor whose property has just been reduced is going to have a conversation with somebody about it in the next few weeks. In August, the field is thin. The catch is the one above. Noticing takes capacity, and August is the month you have least of it. ## Which is the actual problem to solve The question is not whether to prospect in August. It is whether anything useful can happen in a month when nobody is available to make it happen. That is a narrower problem, and a solvable one. It does not require more people or more hours. It requires the noticing to happen without anybody doing it. Homesearch ReContact checks your CRM against the live market every 24 hours and identifies the contacts who have listed, reduced, relisted or sold nearby. Auto ReContact takes the next step and emails those people directly, in your agency name, so a conversation starts while the office is quiet. Around 60% of what it finds is the same situation: a past contact, now on the market with another agent, who has just cut their price. It runs on Reapit. It is free for the rest of August, and there is nothing to pay until September. [See how Auto ReContact works](https://agents.homesearch.co.uk/auto-recontact)

Table of contents

Most agency owners have a settled view on this, and the settled view is no.

Vendors are away. Buyers are away. Half your own team is away. Nobody wants a call about moving house while they are trying to get three children through an airport. The received wisdom is to keep the lights on, tidy the database, and start properly in September.

It is a reasonable position and it is mostly right. But mostly right is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and the part it hides is the part worth money.

What is genuinely true

Cold prospecting in August is a poor use of anybody’s time. Door knocking, cold calling lists of strangers, direct mail to people with no relationship to your brand. Contact rates fall, and the people you do reach are not in a position to think about it. If that is what prospecting means to you, then no, August is not the month.

It is also true that your own team is stretched. Whoever is in the office is covering for two people, dealing with the chains that are still moving, and has no capacity to take on a project.

So far, the received wisdom holds.

What the received wisdom misses

There is a difference between contacting strangers and contacting people who already know you.

Somewhere in your database is a vendor you valued in February who instructed another agent. Their property has been on the market since. It has not sold. Two weeks ago they cut the price.

That person is not on a beach not thinking about property. They are thinking about it a great deal, because it is costing them money and holding up whatever they were trying to do next. They are precisely the person for whom August is not a quiet month.

The market is producing a lot of those people at the moment. Rightmove’s July index recorded a 1% fall in the average asking price of newly listed homes, around five times the normal July movement and the largest drop for the month in a decade, with stock per agent close to a twelve year high. More competition for the same buyers, and more sellers having to move on price to get noticed.

None of that pauses for the school holidays.

So why does nobody work it?

Not because agents disagree with any of the above. Ask any agency owner whether there is value in their database and they will say yes without hesitating.

It does not get worked because of a capacity problem that is completely invisible in a marketing plan and completely obvious on a Tuesday morning.

Working a database properly means identifying which contacts have done something worth reacting to, checking each one against the live market, working out what changed and when, and then having the conversation. That first part takes hours, produces nothing visible, and is always the thing that gets dropped when somebody calls in sick or a chain falls over.

In August, with a skeleton team, it is not dropped occasionally. It is not attempted at all.

The honest answer

Is it worth prospecting in August? If prospecting means finding new strangers, no. Wait for September.

If it means noticing what is happening to people who already know you, then August is arguably the best month of the year for it, for one unglamorous reason. Everybody else has stopped looking. The vendor whose property has just been reduced is going to have a conversation with somebody about it in the next few weeks. In August, the field is thin.

The catch is the one above. Noticing takes capacity, and August is the month you have least of it.

Which is the actual problem to solve

The question is not whether to prospect in August. It is whether anything useful can happen in a month when nobody is available to make it happen.

That is a narrower problem, and a solvable one. It does not require more people or more hours. It requires the noticing to happen without anybody doing it.

Homesearch ReContact checks your CRM against the live market every 24 hours and identifies the contacts who have listed, reduced, relisted or sold nearby. Auto ReContact takes the next step and emails those people directly, in your agency name, so a conversation starts while the office is quiet.

Around 60% of what it finds is the same situation: a past contact, now on the market with another agent, who has just cut their price.

It runs on Reapit. It is free for the rest of August, and there is nothing to pay until September.

See how Auto ReContact works

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