Estate agency
The valuation is the sale. Everything before it is booking one.
Online valuation leads go to several agents at once, vendors and buyers need completely different conversations, and the listing you want most is often one that was on the market last year with somebody else.
You are competing to be in the room, not to win the argument.
An online valuation request is rarely exclusive. The homeowner has usually asked two or three agents, and the appraisal appointments will happen within days of each other. What decides the instruction is often who turned up first, best prepared, and who followed up afterwards — none of which is a pricing decision.
The second thing agency floors get wrong is treating vendors and applicants as one list. A vendor enquiry is a booking conversation. An applicant enquiry is a matching conversation. Running both through the same queue with the same cadence serves neither.
How leads actually arrive
What goes wrong today
Valuation leads are called when the branch is quiet
Branch staff are on viewings, in appraisals, or with walk-ins. An online valuation request arriving at 11am gets called at 5pm, by which point two competitors have booked.
Appraisals are booked without both owners
The same failure as home improvements, for the same reason. A valuation with one of two owners present is a conversation that has to happen twice.
Expired listings are never worked systematically
Everyone knows they're the best source. Nobody has a cadence for them, so they get called when someone has a spare afternoon.
Applicants are chased like vendors
A buyer who registered isn't a lead going cold — they're waiting for the right property. A daily retry cadence irritates them out of the database.
What the product does about it
Valuation requests ring immediately, whoever is free
The queue hands the call to any available agent rather than waiting for the branch that owns the postcode, which is what turns an 11am enquiry into an 11:01 conversation.
Vendors and applicants run as separate campaigns
Different cadences, different scripts, different outcomes — because they are different jobs sharing a database.
Expired listings work as a scheduled campaign
Import them, set the cadence, and they get called on a rhythm rather than on remembering.
Appraisal outcomes carry the detail that matters
Both owners confirmed, competing agents, asking price expectation — your fields, required before the booking saves.
Where compliance sits
Estate agency isn't regulated by the FCA or SRA, so the calling rules that bind you are the general ones — PECR on marketing calls, TPS screening, Ofcom's limits on abandoned calls, UK GDPR on the data. We've documented all four from the regulators' own material.
Redress-scheme membership and the rules on property marketing carry their own requirements and are determined by you rather than by your phone system.
This is not legal or regulatory advice. Your obligations under the rules that apply to you are yours to determine. What we can describe accurately is the calling rules that apply regardless of sector — PECR, TPS and CTPS, Ofcom's limits on abandoned calls, and UK GDPR — which we have researched from the regulators' own material and written up in full.
Read the UK calling compliance guide →A worked example
Illustrative figures for a three-branch agency, not a customer's real numbers.
Twenty-four percent of booked appraisals didn't happen. On these numbers that's seventeen appraisals a month of wasted diary — and it is a phone-room confirmation problem, not a valuer problem.
Work it through with your own numbers →Questions from this sector
How quickly should an online valuation request be called?
As close to immediately as the branch allows, because the same request has usually gone to two or three other agents who are also deciding when to ring. The appraisal diary tends to be won by whoever booked first.
Are expired listings worth calling?
Commercially that's your judgement. Operationally, they're the clearest example on this page of a list everyone agrees is valuable and almost nobody calls on a schedule — which is exactly what a campaign cadence is for.
Can we keep vendor and applicant calling separate?
Yes. They run as separate campaigns with their own cadences, scripts and outcome lists, so a buyer waiting for the right property isn't chased like a vendor going cold.
See it on your own leads.
Half an hour with someone who has run a floor. Bring a lead source and a question.
Book a demo