Software for estate agents, aimed at the first reply.

A vendor enquiring on a Sunday evening is comparing three agents. The one who replies within minutes with a viewing slot is starting from a position the others spend a week trying to recover.

Most agencies know this and still cannot act on it, because enquiries arrive when the branch is closed and the portal notification lands in an inbox nobody is watching.

After enquiry speed, the biggest recoverable cost is landlord reporting. It is repetitive, it is expected monthly, and it is usually done by somebody senior enough to be doing something else.

Automating it also improves retention, because a landlord who receives a clear report without asking is a landlord who does not shop around.

Enquiry response and viewing booking as a focused build sits at the lower end of the £8,000 to £30,000 application range, because the scope is narrow and the integrations are few. Adding landlord reporting, maintenance triage and renewal tracking moves it up that range as each one is a phase.

If the site itself is the weak point rather than the process behind it, that is web development at £4,000 to £16,000. Where you are unsure which of the two is losing you instructions, an audit at £2,500 to £6,000 answers it in one to two weeks and the report is yours regardless of who builds.

Three numbers decide whether this worked. Time from portal enquiry to first meaningful reply, measured including evenings and weekends rather than working hours only. Proportion of enquiries that convert to a booked viewing. Hours per month spent producing landlord reports.

Record all three for a fortnight before anything is built. Agencies that skip this step end up arguing about whether the change helped, which is a worse outcome than a modest gain that is provable.

A 30-minute call to hear how the operation runs today, then a paid discovery step: interviews with the people doing the work, a look at the systems and data you already hold, and a ranked list of what would pay back, each with a price, a timeline and the monthly running cost once live. In most lettings or sales agency engagements the first thing built is instant enquiry response with viewing booking, at any hour, because it is measurable inside a month and it funds the rest.

The build runs in weekly demos against your real inputs, including the messy ones. Integration with the systems you already run comes before anything clever, because that is where most of the value and most of the risk sits. Go-live is followed by handover: the code, the provider accounts and the credentials in your name, a runbook, documentation and a recorded walkthrough, plus a session for the people who will use it daily. Every price is fixed in writing before work starts, with a list of what is not included.

Three sets of obligations shape what can be automated. Consumer protection rules on how properties are described and how enquiries are handled mean anything an AI says to a prospective buyer or tenant has to be accurate and traceable, so property descriptions generated from photos and notes are drafted for a person to approve, not published unseen. Anti-money-laundering checks and right-to-rent checks are decisions with legal consequences, so automation gathers the documents, checks their completeness and chases the gaps, while a named person makes the call. And tenancy deposits, gas safety, electrical safety and energy performance carry deadlines that a system can track and chase far more reliably than a spreadsheet.

Personal data is everywhere in an agency: applicants, tenants, landlords, guarantors. Anything that reads or writes it runs on a business plan, under a data processing agreement, with a lawful basis written down. Our GDPR guides set out the position for the AI tools most agencies already use informally.

Our published prices apply to every sector: an AI adoption audit at £2,500 to £6,000 fixed, credited in full against any build; a first AI implementation at £4,000 to £15,000; a custom AI system at £8,000 to £25,000; applications at £8,000 to £30,000 per phase; websites at £4,000 to £16,000; training from £1,200. For a agency that usually means an enquiry-response and viewing-booking agent as the first implementation, then landlord reporting and maintenance triage as a custom system, with the CRM you already run kept as the system of record.

The running cost is stated before go-live, per feature, and it scales with volume rather than headcount. From operating our own AI products, the model is rarely the expensive part; the channels around it, telephony and messaging, usually are, and a well-designed workflow sends most of its work to the small, cheap models. Every system we build reports cost per feature from day one and has spending ceilings that were tested by watching them fire.

Applicants and vendors phone. An enquiry that rings out on a Saturday afternoon is an instruction that goes to the agent who answered. An AI receptionist that answers, qualifies the enquiry, books the viewing into the negotiator’s calendar and hands anything complicated to a person is one of the few automations that pays for itself in the first month. Our receptionist page sets out how it works and where it falls short, and our guide to AI calling publishes the outcome data we stand behind.