One of the great things about working with other businesses on a regular basis, has been the time it has given me to think.

The feeling I have when I visit another business is that I want the time to be really valuable for them. As business owners, we often see how the landscape is changing today, but it’s hard to find the bandwidth to consider the secondary consequences of those changes.

Clearly when you start to consider the second and third order consequences of change, your chance of getting it wrong increases a lot. So my opinion should be taken with that pinch of salt, but here is the landscape as I see it today:

Reactive Lead Handling (Valuations and about Properties)

1. Leads that get answered very quickly are much more likely to convert
2. Most leads that go into sales and letting agents don’t get answered quickly
3. AI and automation can do this and drive conversion of those leads

Prospecting (proactively contacting previous enquiries and clients)

1. Most estate agents have to be encouraged / coerced into doing it
2. It is very valuable and cost effect as a method of driving valuations
3. Thousands of opportunities every year in moderate sized businesses go uncontacted

If you can automate both of those ‘top of funnel’ processes then the conversion of leads will become cheaper and better for every agent that is able to get their hands on that technology to make it happen.

Clearly how well those bits of technology is built, whether it’s text / whatsapp or voice and whether the user can complete their journey (physically book an appointment) is very important. But let’s assume that over the next 12-24 months businesses like Greenhouse OS get this right. It is so commercially consequential that we are putting as much resource into this as possible. It has led to us raising hundreds of thousands of pounds in past few weeks to speed up this process.

What are the second order consequences of this change?

So this is the interesting bit. If and when lead handling becomes so brilliantly handled by technology so the process from lead to appointment becomes really well executed, how do agents who have similar technology grow market share.

Fundamentally this will come down to data and marketing.

The Argument for Data

At my agency we have organised our data to establish that we know 73,000 current owners of homes. This means that if I am new incumbent into the market with only 1000 property owners, my AI is going to be only a fraction as effective as generating valuations and mortgages from my database.

How well organised is your data? Have you cleaned it against land registry to see if that customer still lives there. This is part of our migration process when we move customers on to Greenhouse OS.

The Argument for Marketing

The second part as the volume and quantity of new leads. Let’s consider pay per click advertising from google. Your funnel now converts these leads better than before by a significant amount due to the use of AI. It then becomes more attractive and the competition from agents to ‘buy’ space as the top of the search results increases.

At some point the cost per click becomes too expensive and other forms of marketing need to be deployed.

There is now a plethora of self-employed agents producing highly personalised content, some of which is very good. As the self-employed sector grows and agents seek to get cut through the quality of what is being created has to achieve cut through.

I can imagine a place where the battle for market share will exist in the realm of agents seeking to drive leads to improve the size of their database to allow their AI to become more and more effective.

Final Thought

One scenario I haven’t considered is those firms where they continue to have people as their first line of defense. There is always an opposite strategy, and opportunity often exists in this space as a way of differentiating yourself. The challenge that I see is that it will be hard to offer something that is both more expensive and worse so the first step for all of us is to invest in AI that is truly better for the customer than their current experience.