The most qualified agent in the market?

High quality service requires high quality people. 

That's why we've investing heavily in qualifications: we want to be the most qualified agent in the market offering the best service.

More than 55 members of our team have passed the NFoPP Technical Award in Residential Letting and Property Management so far.

This is a huge number but we're aiming for more.

The initiative was the brainchild of Director Frank Webster, who said in April:

“We were the first letting agent in the UK to gain Investor in People status and we saw the NFoPP qualifications as a further chapter in our drive for excellence. Another 17 people are now attacking Modules 1 and 2, and by the end of 2011 97% of our customer-facing staff will be qualified.”

Carly Jarvis, a Property Department Manager in the North Oxford office, commented: “It is great that all the office is doing the award as we can talk about issues and share our views on different matters. The biggest benefit for me has been that you can talk to a tenant or a landlord about a tricky situation and know with real confidence that you are 100% correct in your advice.”

In terms of logistics, we put people through the examinations in ‘waves’ of 14-16 people. For each of the four modules there was one day of intensive training by an external expert using the Technical Award manual. Each person then received half a day of study leave per module and half a day off to take the examinations for two modules.

For the people involved it has been a somewhat nerve-wracking experience, as Senior Letting Manager Deborah Blanchard describes: “Some of us haven’t taken an exam for a while and nobody wants to fail an exam in front of their peers. However, as the training progressed – and we started to understand the style of the questions – our confidence grew and the idea of an exam became less daunting.”

In fact, Chairman Mary Channer put herself forward to be the first person in the company to take the Technical Award.

We have a track record of investing heavily in training. In 2010 we became the first letting or estate agent in the UK in five years to win a National Training Award.

Maryse Davies explains why the ongoing training programme was recognised: “We know that clients hate the disruption of their contacts leaving and several years ago our Property Manager turnover was too high. We decided to design a bespoke training programme for each person with a 1:1 training needs analysis each autumn. We used internal and external trainers across a carefully selected range of topics.

“We have concentrated on building the confidence of our younger Property Managers. Our turnover has dropped and we have saved tens of thousands of pounds in both recruitment fees and the hidden costs of on-boarding new staff.”

All this training might explain our long service statistics. At the Annual Staff Meeting awards were given out for a total of 110 years for 10 people, and 18% of the company have been with Finders Keepers for over 10 years with the average tenure being over 6 years.