A sales meeting spent scrolling a spreadsheet is a meeting where nobody sees the project. A stack plan — floors down, unit lines across, each unit a coloured tile — makes a whole building readable in a few seconds, and more importantly makes anomalies obvious: a held unit in the middle of a sold floor, a blocked unit nobody remembers blocking, a line of unsold units that all share an orientation.
The states worth tracking
| State | Meaning | Set by |
|---|---|---|
| Available | Sellable now | Default |
| Held | Reserved for one named buyer, with expiry | Sales executive |
| Booked | Booking money received | System, on receipt |
| Agreement signed | Sale agreement executed | Legal or admin |
| Registered | Deed registered | Admin, with deed reference |
| Handed over | Possession given | Admin, with handover record |
Plus blocked as a separate flag with a mandatory reason: landowner share, management retention, legal issue, or structural change. Blocked is not a stage in a sale, which is why it belongs as a flag rather than a state — a blocked unit can be released back to available without pretending a sale was reversed.
What the board should show at a glance
- Status by colour, with a legend nobody has to memorise.
- Hold expiry, because an expiring hold is the most actionable thing on the screen.
- Price band, so a sales conversation does not require a second document.
- Ageing — how long this unit has been available — as an alternative colour mode.
That last mode is the one that changes decisions. Status colouring shows what has sold; ageing colouring shows what has not, and why. A north-facing line untouched for four months is a pricing question, and the board is where it becomes visible. See price lists and discount control.
Why it prevents double booking
The board is only useful if it is the same record the sales floor sells from. When it is, "available" means available, and two executives cannot commit the same unit because the state changes for everyone the moment one of them acts. A board generated from a nightly export is a picture of yesterday, and yesterday is exactly how double bookings happen — see two buyers, one flat.
What brokers should see
A filtered version: status and price band, without buyer names, discount authority or internal notes. Stale broker lists cause as many double bookings as internal ones, so a live filtered view is worth more to you than to them. Broker portal lead attribution covers what else belongs in that view.
Using it in the weekly meeting
Three questions, answered from the board, are usually enough to run a sales review:
- What moved this week, and from which categories?
- Which holds expire in the next seven days, and who owns each?
- Which units have been available longest, and what is our position on them?
Meetings run this way take twenty minutes instead of ninety, because nobody has to be told what they are looking at.
What to do next
Take your current inventory and lay it out as a grid — floors down, lines across — even on paper. If the pattern of unsold units follows an orientation, a floor band or a size, you have found a pricing decision that a list was hiding — see the live board against a project.