Management tool for an estate agency

The problem

The agency has held its patch for years, and its work lived in three tools at once: a business package for listings and adverts, a marketing platform to create buyer profiles, a spreadsheet for follow-ups. The same contact was entered two or three times, each time slightly differently. A buyer's criteria, property type, rooms, floor area, storey, outdoor space, budget, ran to some thirty lines that had to be copied across. The weekly update to sellers was written from memory on a Friday afternoon. And nobody on the team had a single view of what the agency actually held.

What we built

One tool with the property at its centre. A buyer is entered once, with the thirty or so criteria the agents really use and several search areas across the city. Listings and valuations sit on a map alongside those areas, and from any property the list of people to call appears with their contact details. Valuations draw on comparable sales in the neighbourhood, and propose a price as soon as there are enough of them to be credible. Viewings, calls and exchanges stack up in a timeline for each person. Follow-ups come back on their own at one month and at two. On Friday at noon the tool asks whether the sellers have had their update, and drafts each one a message built from the week's viewings, ready to be read over and sent.

How it went

We started by following the agency's selling process exactly as it runs, from valuation to signed listing, then on to viewings and buyer follow-up. That path set the build order: first the property record and the map, then buyers and matching, then the calendar and the Friday updates. The agents reviewed each batch with their own files in front of them, and that is how the real gaps surfaced: the six criteria planned at the outset became thirty, because thirty is what they fill in every day.

Today

The tool is used every day by the agency's five agents, on the live portfolio. It brings onto one screen what used to take three tools and constant re-entry: the day starts with a list rather than a search, a buyer is entered once, and the Friday update reaches every seller without anyone having to remember who has already had theirs.