Before getting into the costs of AI agents, it’s worth pausing for a minute to consider the other upsides.

If you work in any property market around the world, the single biggest challenge is the moments of fast change.

When a market suddenly booms, or more likely suddenly crashes you are left needing to either scale or descale fast.

A lot of the argument I’ve made for traditional estate agencies to have a hybrid self-employed / employed model is to create a cost base that moves with the market.

Consider that in a boom 100% of leads are answered, 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. Even if it lacked ‘the personal touch’, who cares about that when their enquiry is ignored? 50% of all leads going into EA are ignored according to the mystery shopping from the Best EA guide.

In times of rapid decline, your costs descale directly in proportion to the reduction of the speed of the market. For these reasons alone AI Agents are a technology that property businesses can’t ignore.

The rising fixed costs are created from rising portal costs and labour cost, with the rise in minimum wage, putting huge pressure on entry level jobs.

Peter Knight has long promoted his AOP model. When faced with a resourcing question, first consider Automation, then Outsourcing and only finally People.

In the context of AI agents, AI is a sophisticated Automation. Where we draw the ‘human line’ will become one of the great debates of our time. Every business and business owner judging their client experience, against the capability of the AI against the cost.

The Future of the Industry

Ultimately I believe there will be less people servicing the property industry as a whole as this technology develops. Most business owners don’t instinctively want this, preferring to imagine that we will have the same number of people doing higher value tasks. This is a possible outcome, but I suspect that because of the cost reductive nature of what is about to happen, one of two things is almost certain to occur.

1. An Outside Competitor Comes in with a 80% AI Service – Purple Bricks 2.0

This service is better than virtually every agency currently and can be delivered with a team of listers doing the work in the living room. An existing national brand could be leveraged or a new one created with huge media spend.

2. Agents adopt the technology and drive fees down

Estate agents have shown time and again, no regard for their own margins and profitability. If the market leader in your town discovers they can remove 60% of their staffing costs, they may bank the profit for a while. When someone threatens their market share, they cut fees as they can do due to the super-normal profits they are making.

So what’s the cost?

Cost per Action

Salesforce is already moving it’s charging model to a cost per action which it is going to be pricing at 10p per action. It is important to remember this is instead of a cost per user model that CRM’s such as Greenhouse OS have at the moment. Their will become a blend of the two models, with the AI Agents incurring a cost per action charge and the human team members as a cost per user model.

Cost Comparison

	Human	AI	Difference
Actions per Day	50	50	100%
Cost per Day	£138.68	£5.00	-96.4%
Cost per Action	£2.77	£0.10	-96.4%
Annual Cost	£33,282	£1200	-96.4%

The actions per day are interesting – Alex (my co-founder in Greenhouse OS) but this together as to what we see for strong negotiators performing. Agree or disagree the cost gap is still massive.

Final Thoughts

I can’t see any other outcome other than an arms race for businesses to build and deploy this technology. If either one of the two suggestions I’ve made above turn out to be accurate, there is no doubt that the future is going to be very dynamic and very messy.

Imagine competing against someone who can respond to every lead, prospect every piece of data and do it for 97% less than you?

It will become the nuclear weapons of estate and lettings agency.