Real estate
It's 8:48 on a Wednesday. The branch shut two hours ago and it's ringing.
It moves the viewing before anyone sets off.
It answers, reads back only what's written on your own listing, gets the viewing or the market appraisal into the diary — and asks the one question a voicemail never asks: have you got somewhere to sell?
Free for 14 days. No card needed.
“I'm stuck at work. Can we do half six instead of half five, or have I blown it?”
Finds the viewing under the number she's ringing from, moves it, and gets it to the negotiator who is already in the car — because the vendor has hoovered and is sitting there waiting.
It's 8:48 on a Wednesday. The branch shut two hours ago and it's ringing.
Their words
Say it the way your callers say it, and watch what it reaches for
The agent has fourteen tools. It has the same fourteen on every one of these pages — what changes with your trade is which one a sentence lands on, and how much of the job is done by the time it puts the phone down.
It hears
“is the Milton Road one still on”
It reaches for
search_knowledge
Reads your own listing back as written. If the file doesn't say it's still on, neither does it.
The words on those chips are the trade’s, not ours: market appraisal, instruction, vendor, applicant, proceedable, AIP. Get one of them wrong on the phone and the person on the other end knows within a sentence.
Run it
Every line on the job card came from a second you can point at
One call, on a rail. Drag it forward and it fills in. Drag it back and it comes apart — the slot empties, the tool leaves the log, and the confirmation un-writes itself.
Agent
Ridley Kane — you're through to the answering assistant. The branch is shut till nine. What's it about?
Tools it ran
- get_call_context80 ms
Appraisal card
- What she rang to ask
- The house
- Onward purchase
- Market appraisal, provisionalPro · Google Calendar connected
An hour of Thursday that Rosalind can take back out, and nothing else. No figure was given, nothing was promised, and Nuala knows about the loft and the bungalow before she knocks.
Played back in 14 seconds, or listen to the whole call (1:20) at its own pace. The clock on the rail keeps the written call’s time.
Build this agentThe wall
It will not put a figure on your house
Lean on it. The words change as the caller pushes; the answer does not. Push all the way and the only thing that gives is that it stops arguing and fetches a person.
Pressure 1 of 4
Caller
“Go on, roughly. What's a three-bed up our end going for these days?”
Agent
I'd only be guessing, and a guess is the expensive kind of help — too high and it sits on the portal going stale, too low and you've handed somebody forty thousand pounds. Nuala can stand in it on Thursday.
One thing does get through it: a person. A caller who needs a figure tonight — probate, a divorce, a lender's deadline — stops being asked questions and is put through, or gets a name and a time on a message the branch sees at once. The figure still waits until somebody has stood in the house. She doesn't wait for anyone to ring back.
The relay
The negotiator on that property, or whoever you marked for transfers knows in 11 seconds
Three calls here are finished by a person or they are not finished: anyone angry, anyone in a chain — a solicitor, a surveyor, the agent four links up — and anyone whose call has quietly become a bereavement. In branch hours it puts them straight through. At twenty to nine at night there is nobody to put them through to, so it takes the call down properly instead and the team is notified the moment it lands.
0.0s
The caller is still talking. They never hear a hold, and they are never told to ring back.
Your rules
It starts briefed for your trade. The brief is yours to change.
Your trade decides what it knows on day one. You decide the rest — and every line you change shows up in how the next call goes, not in a settings page nobody reads.
Ask every caller whether they've got somewhere to sell
The question goes into every inbound call, including the ones that sound like nothing, and the answer lands on the card.
Vendors on a live instruction go to their own negotiator, nobody else
It asks which property before anything else — it can't tell from the number — then says who is ringing back and by when, and puts it in front of them inside a minute.
Out of hours, put anything about a chain through to my mobile
Off. The call goes ahead without it.
Same agent, your vocabulary. The trade seeds the prompt; everything after that is yours, and you can read the whole of it in the dashboard rather than guessing at what it was told.
Go live
A number of its own, briefed for your trade, this afternoon
Everything on this page works on some plan. Here is exactly which, so nothing you just watched turns out to be behind a wall you did not know about.
On any plan
Nothing to connect beyond saving a contact and adding your documents.
- Answers questions from your own documents
- Tells your team, during the call
- Puts the caller through to a person
- Takes a message, in the caller's words
- Writes down the details you asked for
- Knows the date, your hours and the caller's number
Pro — $249 a month
Needs Google Calendar connected. Until it is, these calls become messages instead.
- Reads your real diary before it offers anything
- Finds an existing booking to change
- Cancels and frees the slot
- Holds someone for a cancellation
- Puts the job in the calendar
Your agent gets a new number; we cannot port your existing one, so the new number sits alongside your line and you forward to it when you are ready. Local numbers only — no mobile or toll-free yet.
What you just proved
Six claims. You operated the ones that are filled in.
- Three kinds of call come in, and it knows which is whichTry it
- It understands how your callers actually talkTry it
- Every line on the paperwork came from a second of the callTry it
- It will not say the thing that would land you in troubleTry it
- When it can't finish a call, a person knows while the caller is still thereTry it
- The brief is yours to changeTry it
The one we did not demonstrate
About one call in five goes unanswered while the branch is open
Our figure, not a study. Our estimate, from the shape of the week rather than a published figure: the 16:00–18:00 caller peak lands exactly on the after-work viewing run, and Saturday nine till one is the most concentrated demand of the week staffed by the fewest people, because the whole negotiating team is out in other people's houses. In those two windows we'd put it nearer a third. Evenings are a separate and much larger claim — see the study below. The real number for your branch is already sitting in the Saturday call report your phone provider emails you and nobody opens.
About £60 for each call you get back, or $75 in the US
Our figure, not a study. The working, so you can argue with it. An average UK sale at roughly 1.4% inclusive is about £4,150 of gross fee; TwentyEA put 23.7% of agreed sales through the floor in Q1 2026, so an instruction realises nearer £3,100. Then two assumptions that are ours rather than anybody's research: that a third of booked appraisals become instructions — that ratio is on your own whiteboard and you should substitute yours — and that about one recovered call in twenty is a genuine appraisal request rather than a cancellation, a solicitor chasing a form or somebody asking whether it's still available. A third of a twentieth of £3,100 is £52, and we add a few pounds for the recovered lettings applicant and the recovered viewer, both of whom are worth far less than an agency calculator claims. The dollar figure is worked separately from a listing side on a median US sale, not converted at today's rate, which is why the two don't line up. The industry's own missed-call calculators put £2,000 on a missed call by assuming every unanswered ring was a vendor; it wasn't. And we have not multiplied any of this by a call volume — the headline annual loss is the oldest move in this category and the first thing a principal stops believing.
- After the door is locked, the phone is answered by almost nobody in this trade.
- InStep AI, 2026-08-05. 3,047 unique UK sales and lettings agency numbers called on weekday evenings 18:00–21:00 between May and July 2026, each left to ring until the receiving line ended it: 93.8% reached nobody, 4.1% were answered by a person. InStep AI sells voice AI to estate agents, and the study tested evenings only — it measures a closed office, not a failing team.
- Nearly a quarter of agreed sales never complete, which is why a fee is not a fee until exchange.
- TwentyEA, 2026. Agreed sales tracked to completion or collapse across TwentyEA's national record of UK residential listings, for Q1 2026: a 23.7% fall-through rate, against 24.0% a year earlier. We have the quarter the figure covers and not the day it was published, so the year is all we will assert. TwentyEA sells this data to agents by subscription, and the fall-through series is its headline number.
Questions
What real estate owners ask first
My vendors ring me because they want me. It's a relationship business. If Mrs Ackroyd rings for her feedback and gets a robot, she'll tell the whole school gate I've stopped answering my own phone. And no machine is booking a val on my behalf.
He's right, and it should be conceded before anything else — call him Ellis Kane, because his is the Kane on the board. The vendor feedback call is not the call to automate: it is fifteen minutes that turns into the price reduction conversation, and his fee depends on him having it himself. So the agent doesn't try to have it. It asks which property in the first ten seconds, tells Mrs Ackroyd that Ellis is out on a viewing and will ring her back within the hour, and puts it in front of him inside a minute with the address on it. That beats what happens now, which is a voicemail box he clears at twenty to seven. The value was never Mrs Ackroyd anyway. It is the 8:48pm applicant who found the Milton Road house on Rightmove, rang, got nothing and rang the agent marketing the house down the road — and in InStep AI's evening study of 3,047 UK agency numbers, 93.8% of weekday evening calls reached nobody, so that caller was never choosing between Ellis and a machine. On the second objection, the one about his redress scheme, the answer is to agree rather than reassure: an agent that improvises material information is a liability, and one that improvises a price is a worse one. So it doesn't improvise and it doesn't price. The pitch is not that it answers his buyers' questions. It is that it will never answer his buyers' questions — it catches the caller, asks the one question a voicemail never asks, gets them in the diary and hands him somebody worth ringing back.
Will it answer my buyers' questions about the property?
No — and that is the pitch, not an apology for it. It reads back what is written on the listing file you gave it and nothing else. Tenure, lease length, ground rent, service charge, council tax band, flood history, cladding: all of that is material information, all of it is a regulated statement under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act since 6 April 2025, and the CMA can now fine directly rather than through a court. So ask it how many years are left on a lease and, unless that number is on the file, it will not produce one — not eighty, not “about eighty”, not a number softened with “roughly”. What it produces instead is “I'll have that confirmed for you in writing” and a person's name. In the US the refusal is the same and the reason is different: a voice agent is an unlicensed assistant in every state, and discussing price, terms or condition is unlicensed practice.
If it won't give her a number, doesn't she just ring the next agent?
Some will, and those were never yours — the caller shopping for the highest number over the phone is the one who over-prices, sits for four months and reduces. The refusal buys the only thing that converts an appraisal call, which is somebody standing in the hall with the comparables in her hand. The number that decides whether this is worth anything to you is how many of your booked appraisals become instructions, and you already know yours better than any vendor of software does.
Someone will try to put an offer in over the phone. Then what?
It takes the name, the number and the offer in the caller's own words, says it will go to the vendor, and stops. It does not say whether there are other offers, what they are, whether the vendor would take it, or why the vendor is selling. Under the Estate Agents Act 1979 every offer goes to the vendor promptly and in writing, and that is an agent's job rather than a phone's.
What actually happens to the calls at half eight at night?
It answers them. It can read the listing, register the applicant, put a viewing or an appraisal in the diary and get a message to whoever is on call. What it cannot do is ring anybody back by itself — a call out happens only when someone on your team starts one from the dashboard — so what the caller gets is a slot and a name, and what you get at nine is a card instead of a voicemail light.
Does it work on the lettings side?
For catching, qualifying and calendaring, yes: applicants, viewings, and a waitlist for the queue that forms behind every rental home. It will not quote a tenant a fee — charging one is an offence under the Tenant Fees Act — will not take a holding deposit or card details, will not do Right to Rent or any ID check, and will not tell anybody what notice they can be given while that law is mid-reform. A tenant reporting damp, no heat or a lock-out is an escalation, not a message.
Start
Put it on your real estate line
Fourteen days free, no card. Point your calls at it when you are ready, and take them back the moment you are not.
It answers on the first ring and tells the caller it is an assistant.
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