This quick and informative guide is going to show you one of the best tricks for finding a match for your surplus assets on the estate.

It’s really important to try and find a match for your surplus assets before they get moved to storage, as to avoid double-handling, or having the asset sat gathering dust in a corridor somewhere, or even worse, outside!

I’ve spoken to customers in the past with all sorts of dilemmas. One that sticks in my mind is when a customer had 20 orthopaedic chairs to get rid of. These chairs are worth about £500 each, and my customer knew they were going to get replaced, but she didn’t know when, so not having a deadline was causing a huge problem in finding new homes for the chairs on the estate.

How do you resolve that?

I told her ‘You can add them to the system right now, then put a fictitious deadline on the chairs for say, two months time’.  At least then you’re advertising those chairs out across the estate, and staff can click on them and watch the item (book the item for when it becomes available), then they’re going to be interested once the deadline arrives and they become available.

She was a little confused, she said ‘But, it’s a fake deadline?’. I agreed, adding ‘Sure, because in two months time, or six weeks, however long you want, you’ll have a clearer view about when the real deadline will be, and you can change that deadline in the system’. People will begin showing interest in the chairs, and if you change the deadline, it’s unlikely their interest will evaporate, plus, they’ll get a notification when the real deadline arrives.

Increased chance!

You’re going to massively increase the chance of matching items if you use the watchlist, rather than wait until the last minute when you finally know the deadline, and only have perhaps a few days to find new homes for your assets. This is the true power of the watchlist.

You shouldn’t let the fact that you don’t know the deadline for an item stop you trying to find a future home for it. Here’s how:

1. Go into the system
2. Add the item
3. Put the available ‘to’ and ‘from’ dates
4. It’s not available now, so put the dates further ahead
5. Advertise the items
6. Move the dates when you get new information

Another top quality tip

Here’s another pointer for when you want to list items well in advance of the time that they’re actually going to be available. If you have a clearance coming up in say, six months, you can add the vague number of assets and different types right now, and just start advertising the fact that you’ve got those assets available for the future. You can still advertise them across the estate and find claimants for them now. Then, they can plan their own behaviour for when the assets are available six months down the line, and hopefully you’ll have found new homes already. By using the watchlist, they can see when they need to act, but they’ll also get a notification when the day does arrive.

Just remember, it’s much better to find homes for things while they’re still in their first point of use, as it cuts down on transport costs, hassle and double-handling.

Download the Wishlist Graphics here