I am three weeks into working with our first fully autonomous AI agent. It’s incredibly early to tell the effectiveness of the agent but the early signs are prompting me to rethink how estate and letting agency businesses will look in the future.

I don’t believe it is hyperbolic to consider us on the edge of a revolution which I hope to be able to speed up with Greenhouse OS

A Prospecting AI Agent – Ethan

Part of the thinking has been to deploy our first agent into the space that agents know they should be doing, but somehow find a reason not to.

The case for the human. The best human is currently much more effective than the best AI. One of my top agents Jess, who consistently prospects, books one valuation from outbound prospecting for 40 dials. That’s between 10-15 conversations depending on pickup rate.

Ethan has booked two valuations from 118 messages sent out. That’s one in 59. Not as good as Jess. Both of them have now listed.

He’s only working on stock listed with a competitor – touting. Which as we know is a tough gig.

AI is 68% as effective as the best human – in it’s first three weeks

What percentage of opportunities in your business are actually called?

In my business it’s less than 50%, in some it’s much, much less than that.

Let’s imagine that you have a mid-sized business – I would suggest you would have the potential to have around 2.5 full time people working your database, roughly one for every branch and they would call roughly 100 people per day

Human Team (2.5 FTE – full time prospecting)

250 Prospecting Calls daily

6.25 Vals Booked per Day (48 weeks per year)

40% MA Conversion

600 Listings per year

£1.2m revenue

Costs £100,000 p.a.

AI Team

500 Conversations per day

8.5 MA’s booked per day (52 weeks per year)

40% MA conversion

881 Listings per year

£1.76m revenue

Costs £24,000

An AI team requires virtually no management, no recruitment and will improve with time. It costs a quarter of the amount of a human team. Assuming that you are only calling 50% of the opportunities in a mid sized business it will generate an additional £556k of revenue.

Final Thoughts

I’ve heard a number of industry commentators respond to my recent posts commenting about how they believe that this business won’t work if it doesn’t have a human touch. My point is that human is best. Especially when highly skilled, the issue is that the economics of estate and lettings agency are that we can’t deal with every opportunity.

Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

If you deal with 10% of opportunities perfectly and ignore the other 90% that makes much less sense than dealing with 100% of the opportunities in a way which is a little bit less than perfect.

The best 10% can and should be dealt with by you and your team.

The agents who use this technology wisely and quickly will create a huge competitive advantage. It still has a long way to go, but the early results, when scaled will allow agents to contact every opportunity on time.

Alex, my co-founder in Greenhouse OS, shared a stat that of all the responses that Ethan has had, 78% of them have been out of office hours.

The first valuation he booked was a 10pm on Saturday night. It shows that the flexibility of AI gives it another super power, the ability to interact with our customers at exactly the time our customers want.