The unit cost of a buyer-services call (and how a quarterly film changes the maths)

The numbers in this article are illustrative. Every developer’s customer liaison cost base is different. The point is not the exact figures. The point is the order of magnitude, and the fact that quarterly films are usually compared against the wrong line item.

The category mistake

Quarterly buyer update films get budgeted from marketing. That is the wrong cost centre. Most of the value lands in customer liaison and after-sales. When the spend sits on the marketing line, it competes with brochure photography and launch event hospitality. When the value sits on the after-sales line, the comparison is invisible. The film looks expensive against a brochure shoot. It looks cheap against the wage cost of a customer liaison team fielding the same questions for two years.

The fix is straightforward. Cost the calls. Compare like for like.

What a buyer-services call actually costs

A typical London residential developer running an active off-plan programme has a customer liaison or after-sales team between three and eight people, depending on scale. Their job for the duration of the build is to handle the inbound from buyers. The volume is steady. The questions repeat.

A working assumption that most after-sales managers we have spoken to recognise:

• A typical buyer-services call runs eight to twelve minutes. Some are quick. Some pull in the project manager and run to half an hour. Twelve minutes is a reasonable blended average across an active build.
• Add five to ten minutes of pre and post work per call. The CRM note. The follow-up email confirming the answer in writing. The check with the project manager when the answer needs a site fact. Twenty minutes total per call is conservative.
• A customer liaison officer in central London on a permanent contract sits at a fully loaded cost of sixty to eighty pounds an hour once you include salary, employer NI, pension, holiday cover, desk, software, management overhead and IT.
• Twenty minutes at seventy pounds an hour is roughly twenty-three pounds per call, fully loaded.

Now the volume. A scheme with two hundred off-plan buyers, two years out from completion, typically generates three to six inbound calls per buyer per year. Some buyers call once. A small number of buyers call every fortnight. Three to six per buyer per year, blended, is what most after-sales managers will confirm if you ask them.

Take a midpoint of four calls per buyer per year. Two hundred buyers. Eight hundred calls a year. Eighteen thousand four hundred pounds a year in fully loaded customer liaison time, on one development, just to handle the standing question. Across two years of build, thirty-six thousand eight hundred pounds.

That is the cost line that quarterly films should be compared against.

What a quarterly film costs to land

A premium quarterly buyer update film on a retained two-year programme is around three thousand pounds per quarter. Eight episodes across two years. Twenty-four thousand pounds total.

The film is one shoot, one cut, one delivery. Distributed to the whole buyer base via the quarterly buyer email. Hosted on a private link. Forwarded to the sales suite, the investor pack, the board deck, the lender update.

Set against the customer liaison cost line. Twenty-four thousand pounds across two years against thirty-six thousand pounds across two years on the conservative version of the maths. The film is cheaper than the call load it was supposed to displace, before any other value is counted.

That is the wrong way round from how most marketing directors are told to think about it.

The displacement is real

The argument only works if the film actually reduces call volume. Sales teams across the Ballymore programmes report measurable drops in call volume in the weeks following a strong quarterly film. The film answers the three questions buyers are calling about. What has changed. Who is building it. Where is my unit. The buyer watches it. The question is answered. The call does not happen.

We do not have a controlled experiment that proves a precise reduction percentage. The honest framing is that customer liaison teams notice when the film lands. The phones go quieter. Specific repeat questions stop appearing for two or three weeks. Confidence in the build, measured anecdotally through the conversations the team does still have, sits visibly higher.

A reasonable working assumption: the film reduces the standing call rate by twenty to thirty percent across the quarter it is distributed in. On a two-hundred-buyer scheme, that is two hundred to three hundred fewer calls a year. Roughly five thousand pounds of customer liaison time saved a year, on a conservative wage base. The film pays for itself on the call displacement alone, before any of the other value is counted.

The other line items the film also displaces

The customer liaison number is the easiest one to defend. The other lines are harder to count cleanly but real.

Sales suite assets. The film replaces a separate sales suite content piece that would otherwise need commissioning. Most developers spend three to five thousand pounds a year on sales suite films and stills. The quarterly film, with a couple of cut-downs, covers that line entirely.

Investor and lender packs. Most developments produce a quarterly investor update with stills and a written progress note. The film slots into the investor pack as a substantive content asset. Some lenders specifically welcome a quarterly visual progress record. One developer we work with reports the lender now opens the quarterly update with the film.

Board deck content. The same film, end of quarter, supports the board pack. The clip is forwarded to the chair, the non-executives, the strategy team. No additional production cost.

Completion archive. At handover, eight quarterly films cut into a single sequence become the developer’s permanent record of the build. Useful for AGMs, the next launch, planning permission renewals, insurance claims, and the corporate marketing archive. There is no easy way to put a unit cost on this. It is a real asset and most developers wish they had it on previous schemes that completed without one.

Where the maths breaks

Two scenarios.

The buyer base is small. On a forty-unit scheme with a small buyer base, the customer liaison call volume sits at the lower end of the model. The film still has value but the displacement argument is weaker. The premium tier is rarely justifiable on call cost alone. The standard tier, at one thousand pounds a quarter, still works on the same maths.

The build is short. A nine-month build does not deliver eight quarters of meaningful change. Three quarterly films across the build is the right cadence at that scale. The unit cost calculation runs cleanly on the shorter programme.

In both cases the right answer is to scale the programme. The maths still works. The number of episodes scales with the build.

What we would recommend, briefly

If you are evaluating a quarterly film for the first time, the honest test is to ask the after-sales team three questions.

1. How many calls per buyer per year are coming in on the standing question of “is everything alright with my build”.
2. What is the fully loaded cost of a single call.
3. If the calls were twenty percent lower for two years, what would that be worth in time the team can spend on more useful work.

The answers, multiplied out, will sit close to the unit cost of a quarterly retained programme. The film does not have to find its budget from marketing. It pays for itself out of customer liaison.

That is a much easier conversation to win at board.

---

If you want help building the cost case for a specific development, a 20-minute call covers the buyer base, the call load and the right tier. We send a written proposal within five working days.

Book a 20-minute call or call 0207 458 4997.