One bad afternoon outlives a decade of good ones.

A reputation in a property town is basically the sum of the stories people tell, and a transfer that registers on time produces no story at all. Nor does a deposit returned with its interest, or keys handed over on the agreed day. Nobody mentions those in a queue at the bank. A bad afternoon is different. An agent who forgets to put a second offer in front of a seller, and a seller who hears about it a month later from a neighbour, give the town something to repeat for years, and every person who hears it carries it into their own sale. In a place the size of Tzaneen, that is a lot of people, and they talk at church and at the taxi rank.

So the arithmetic is lopsided by nature. Careful work builds a name slowly, one satisfied seller at a time, while a single lapse travels at the speed of a good story. That is less unfair than it looks, because people protect themselves with the warnings they hear, and a property sale is the largest thing most families ever sign. The practical effect is that careful habits matter most on ordinary days, the Tuesday afternoon with offers on the desk and a phone that will not stop, because that is when the one story that outlasts all the others gets written.