Enquiries
An enquiry is somebody asking about one of your properties. It is the output of everything else on this platform, so it is worth understanding precisely.
Where they come from
Every enquiry is marked with the channel it arrived through.
Marketplace is the form on a Skautik listing.
Your portfolio site is the contact form on your own site.
The mark matters because the two answer different questions. Marketplace volume tells you whether a property is priced and photographed well. Portfolio volume tells you whether your own site is earning its keep. Added together they tell you neither.
The five states
| State | What it means |
|---|---|
| New | Nobody has opened it |
| Read | Somebody has |
| Replied | Somebody answered |
| Closed | Finished, whatever the outcome |
| Spam | Not a real enquiry |
Read and replied are separate on purpose, and the gap between them is the number worth watching. An inbox where everything is read and little is replied to is a team that is triaging rather than answering, and buyers can tell.
Marking spam is worth doing rather than deleting. It keeps the record and keeps your response rate honest, and a deleted enquiry is indistinguishable from one that never arrived when you are trying to work out where the week went.
What is recorded
Every enquiry carries the sender's name, email, an optional phone number, the message, and the property it is about.
It also records what the sender agreed to and when: the exact wording they were shown, and the timestamp. That is deliberate. If somebody later says they never consented to being contacted, the answer is the sentence they were shown on the day, not a policy that has since been rewritten.
A person can enquire without an account. Those are ordinary enquiries and are not worth less: somebody who will not create an account to ask a question is still somebody asking a question.
Answering
Answer from the enquiry rather than starting a new email. The reply is attached to the property and to the thread, so anybody else in your organisation picking it up can see what has already been said.
The single biggest determinant of whether an enquiry becomes a viewing is how long it takes to answer, and the effect is measured in hours rather than days.
Contact details in listings
Do not put a phone number in a listing description. Agents ask us why, and the reason is not that we want to intermediate: it is that a call routed around the enquiry form arrives with no record of what property it was about, no consent record, and no way for a colleague to see it happened.
If somebody rings you from a listing, record the enquiry yourself. It is thirty seconds, and it keeps the property's history complete.