I’ve undertaken a lot of interviews for Estate Agency Leaders, the most recent release was with Verona Frankish. In that interview, she expressed her view that service was going to become a lot more personal and that a high street office doesn’t necessarily build trust.

I agree with the first point, on the second point it’s certainly true it’s less important, but still is a massive signal that you are local and serve their area. It has moved from an operational asset to a marketing asset.

What is of huge interest to me, is how easy and low cost it is for agents to build their own digital experiences.

I’ve returned from my three week summer holiday. In the second half of the holiday I started work on a listing app to support the execution of the listing process that I train in my courses about how to charge more and how to charge up front for Estate Agents.

Working for a couple of hours a day I was able to:

1. Build a working iOS app
2. Integrate it into our telephony system
3. Use AI to score every valuation booking call against our standard
4. Prepare an AI brief for the valuer before they make their pre-call so they have a summary of the actual conversation, not whatever notes are typed on the CRM
5. Allow valuers to make a ‘pre-call’ from their mobile phone so that it’s recorded and it’s added to the infromation that we have about the customer
6. Integrated buyers who would be interested
7. Created a ‘First Look’ video creation that can then be sent to the initial buyers to test the price, collecting digital feedback on the intial price before it goes live to portals
8. A click to call for mobile valuers where they get a AI briefing about the follow up
9. Text message functionality at every stage
10. Transcription of the follow up calls, which automatically sets the follow up date and adds the contact note onto the CRM.

There is a bit more to it, but those are the headlines.

Over the weekend, I was adding a fully branded customisable digital presentation into the app.

Whilst I know my conifidence and familiarity with technology is greater than other peoples, I think this is a glimpse of how much Estate Agency service is going to change in firms who want to embrace how relatively easy it is to create digital experiences for their teams and their customers.

Effectively the gap between the idea creators (those of us with context about how our teams work and what we want to deliver for customers) and the ablity to create it has collapsed.

This will lead to an explosion of creativity in how our customers experience our service and marketing. There are three key principles that I use when building

Data + AI + Action.

AI without Data is a novelty. AI without action just creates more work for your people.

Whilst I’m hopelessly biased, this is the whole reason for Greenhouse OS to exist. It is a CRM that allows you to build on top of it, add new fields or automation and plug AI like Claude directly into it.

The team and I show you how to do it. There’s no doubt we can package and create products out of what we build so it’s plug and play. However in the medium term I see agents taking a different path. They will build and customise their own digital experience.

So to return to the start, Estate Agency service is going to become much, much more personal.

We will free people up so that the key elements they will do will be:

1. Marketing
2. Listing
3. Physical viewings
4. Negotiating
5. Keeping clients informed from beginning to end

Elements like lead handling, creating viewings, viewing feedback, servicing buyers and applicant management will become more and more automated.

It won’t be the sort of automation that you would expect it will be hyper personalised. I won’t recieve a generic email match, the webpage and advert will be customised just for me. The AI will know about every piece of marketing that I’ve touched and every interaction I’ve had with the business. In other words it will be better than us at rembering and being relevant. It won’t forget and it can see things that we can’t.

It can work as capably with 10,000 people as it can with 10.

So I agree with Verona completely when she says Estate Agency will become more personal. A much, much more personal service delivered through hyper personalisation at scale. Much more personal care delivered to sellers through our teams as they focus on actually caring for their clients.

My biggest problem is finding the time to make all of this happen, with Greenhouse OS and the technology availble today every tool I need is already here.

I’m going to be talking about (some) of this later this week in London at Fulham pier on this Wednesday afternoon with my friends Zoopla. If you are an estate agency leader who is considering the future and would like to combine hearing about this in more detail alongside witty stories from Harry Redknapp then frankly, there is only one room to be in.

https://events.business.zoopla.co.uk/estate-agency-growth-forum-london-2026/begin

If you want to chat about how you get started on a Data + AI + Action strategy, then drop me a message on Whatsapp.