The Problem for Estate Agents

My version of awesome, is different to yours. In the Estate Agency world it’s hard to create a product that’s flexible enough to meet what everyone considers to be important.

I’m in slightly unusual position in that I’m both a client of Greenhouse OS and an owner. So this weekend I decided to do a bit of customisation.

I’ve been using Zapier quite a bit for my Flexible Fees Mastery program. I haven’t really used it much within Greenhouse OS but it has a FULL integration. When I say full, I mean everything. Every field (even ones you create – which takes 5 minutes) and every object – you can read from it and write to it.

A couple of things to understand about Greenhouse OS.

1. It’s the only Estate & Letting Agency software in the UK that’s build on Salesforce and works out of the box (you don’t need an implementation)
2. Every version of it is unique to the agent, so if you customise it, it doesn’t change other peoples version.

Zapier for Estate Agents

When a new Rightmove Local Valuation Alert (LVA) lands in Salesforce, our Greenhouse OS system instantly springs into action.

Within seconds, a Zapier workflow:

1. Reads the new message record in Salesforce.
2. Runs a short Python script to extract the customer’s phone number from the email.
3. Uses JavaScript to reformat it into the correct structure for Twilio.
4. Sends an SMS inviting the customer to book a valuation through our self-service Greenhouse OS Valuation Booking Tool.
5. Logs a task in Salesforce to record that the message was sent.

No waiting, no manual follow-up—just instant, on-brand communication that converts leads while your office sleeps.

The first valuation from this workflow was booked at 6:34 p.m. on a Sunday, just hours after setup.

It’s not that this idea is unique or clever, it’s the fact that I was able to do it.

As Alex Rhodes (my co-founder) pointed out to me all of this can be done in Salesforce – the point about Zapier is that I can try stuff to see if it works before then dismantling it and moving it into Salesforce.

Why Zapier Should Matter to Estate Agents

Zapier is the world’s most widely adopted no-code automation platform, connecting over 7,000 apps.

Because Greenhouse OS is built natively on Salesforce, it can integrate with Zapier at a deeper level than any stand-alone proptech system. That means you can connect your CRM to virtually anything: Twilio, Bitly, Google Sheets, Mailchimp, Facebook Ads, or even your own website forms—without writing a line of code.

There is no doubt that Salesforce doesn’t need Zapier to integrate, the point is that because it’s no code you can try an idea that you have without having to wait for there to be space in the dev queue to get it done.

There will always be ideas that you have that you can’t implement because you are waiting for developers to make time. Now as a semi-competent business owner / operations manager you can take an idea and literally make it happen in a couple of hours.

The Freedom to Grow Philosophy

The reason Greenhouse OS exists is that we believe that agents are limited by the technology that’s available. A lot of it is good, but it’s not yours. We have ideas that have to end up on the shelf because we don’t have the flexibility to implement these ideas within our own tech stack.

Greenhouse OS recently did an interview with the incredibly well respected Karl Judd from Ashtons about his journey with Greenhouse OS and what it has allowed him to do.