Every growing branch hits the same fork in the road. Demand for viewings, inspections and inventories is outrunning the team, and the instinct is to hire. But a salaried hire is a fixed cost stacked against demand that is anything but fixed. Before you post the job, it's worth doing the actual maths on hiring versus buying flexible cover per visit — because the answer is rarely as obvious as it feels.
The real cost of a hire
The salary is the headline, not the total. A viewings or field role costs you far more than the number on the offer letter once you add it all up:
- Employer's National Insurance and pension contributions on top of salary.
- Holiday, sick pay and cover for the days they're not available.
- A vehicle, fuel or mileage, plus phone and equipment.
- Recruitment and onboarding — agency fees or your time, then weeks to get productive.
- Management overhead — someone has to schedule, supervise and review them.
Loaded up, a field hire often costs a third to a half more than base salary. And every one of those pounds is committed whether the diary is full or empty.
The utilisation trap
Here's the number that decides the whole question: how many hours of that hire will actually be productive visit time? Be honest. A full-time field role is rarely doing billable, value-adding visits for anything close to forty hours a week. There's travel, gaps between appointments, quiet mid-week mornings, and all the admin that fills the slack. If the genuinely productive share is half the paid hours — and for many branches it's less — then your effective cost per visit is double what the salary maths suggested.
You don't pay for the hire. You pay for the hours they're not on a job.
This is the trap. A hire makes sense when demand is high and steady enough to keep them busy. The moment demand is lumpy — peaking on evenings and Saturdays, sagging on Tuesday mornings — you're paying full whack for the troughs to cover the peaks.
The flexible-cover comparison
Flexible, per-visit cover inverts the economics. You pay a known price for each visit you actually need covered, and nothing for the gaps. There's no NI, no holiday, no idle Tuesday, no vehicle on the books, no recruitment cycle. The cost moves up and down exactly in step with demand.
The crossover is straightforward to work out. Take your loaded annual cost of a hire, divide by the number of productive visits they'll realistically do in a year, and you have your true cost per visit for the hire. Compare that to the per-visit price of flexible cover. If your visit volume is high, steady and predictable, the hire may win. If it's spiky, seasonal, or you're not yet sure it'll hold, flexible cover almost always wins — and it wins without the commitment.
It isn't all-or-nothing
The smartest branches don't choose one or the other. They size their permanent team to the reliable baseline of demand — the volume they're confident is there every week — and buy flexible cover for everything above it: the evening and weekend peaks, the seasonal surge, the holiday gaps, the one-off instruction that needs five viewings this week. The fixed cost stays lean and fully utilised; the variable cost flexes with reality.
That blend means you're never paying for idle capacity and never turning away a viewing because no one's free. It also de-risks growth: you can take on more instructions and prove the demand is real before you commit to a permanent salary.
What to actually measure
Before you decide, pull three numbers for the last quarter: total visits done, how they're distributed across the week and the day, and how many requests you delayed or declined for lack of cover. Those three tell you whether your demand is hire-shaped (high and steady) or cover-shaped (spiky and uneven). Most branches are surprised to find it's the latter.
How Seeky fits
Seeky lets you buy vetted, insured, per-visit cover at a price you see before you book — viewings, inspections, inventories, key access, instant video — with no NI, no idle hours and no recruitment cycle. Size your team to your baseline, flex Seeky over the top, and stop paying full salary for spiky demand. Run the staffing maths for your own branch.
See how Seeky covers your branch
Vetted, insured Seekers handle the viewings, inspections and visits you can't staff — at a price you see before you book.
Seeky for agents