How a Mystery Shop is Performed

After being contacted and requested to mystery shop a suburb, we contact 3 agents in the area as a potential buyer or tenant.

The first step is to send a rental/sales enquiry asking for an inspection and further information on a property.

The agent will then be rated on their response time and their knowledge and detail of the response. If they don’t respond to this email enquiry with an email or call, the mystery shop is ceased and the review is given in a bad light.

If they respond we discuss the property in question, asking them questions like what’s the age of the property, rates or inclusions, rental appraisal information and so on. The questions are standard questions that your agent should know when selling or renting a property.

We ask for their marketing brochure and any further information and when we can inspect.

From this we can give a rating on the agency’s knowledge, response time, and email standards.

We then look at all the agent’s marketing.  We rate the photos, scripts, spelling, floor-plan and the resources that are implemented to market the property. The more information they have available, the more work they have done on the listing and therefore are better score is awarded.

We then look at the ratio of listings they have and the number of properties they have rented or sold in the area to calculate their market share for that suburb.

At this stage we should have had 2 to 3 conversations with the agent and gathered quality information on their level service from a tenant or buyer’s point of view, without revealing the nature of the enquiry or who we are.

We do not communicate with the agency for one day, and after that period we email them as a potential client stating that we are considering selling our property and ask them a series of questions to gauge there experience and fees.

After this process we then put all this into a nice package for you to look over and decide the best agent to call.