What changed when Marsh Property replaced four subscriptions

The agency now opens one screen in place of four. Contacts, the daily call list, SMS, social posts and listings sit together. The software drafts each SMS and post, and a person approves it before it is sent.

It runs in accounts the agency owns. When the agency wants a new field or a new report, we make the change.

Like most agencies its size, Marsh Property ran on rented software. Each tool did part of the job.

• A CRM that held the contacts.
• An AI tool that did prospecting and SMS follow-up.
• A service that ran call campaigns.
• A scheduler that published the social posts.

That meant four logins and four invoices. The bigger problem was the data. Each tool held its own piece, so no screen showed everything the agency knew about one person. The gaps were filled with spreadsheets.

We built one system and moved the agency onto it. It does six jobs.

• Contacts with one timeline. Every call, SMS, appraisal and inspection sits against the person.
• A daily call list, ranked overnight. This replaced the call campaign service.
• SMS through an Australian gateway. Replies land on the contact's timeline, not in a separate inbox.
• Social posts for Facebook and Instagram, drafted from the listing and scheduled on a calendar the agency controls.
• Listings that feed the property portals, with a choice per listing of what is sent.
• The appraisal form on the public website, which feeds straight in.

The morning starts with a list. The call list is ranked overnight, so the first job of the day is already in order. A seller who fills in the appraisal form at night is on that list the next morning.

A reply to an SMS shows up on the contact, next to the calls and the appraisal. Nobody checks a second inbox to find out who wrote back.

A new listing gets its posts drafted from the listing details. Someone in the office reads them and approves them, and they go out on schedule. ListingMate, our own product, does this one job for other agencies.

Changes work differently too. With rented software, a missing field is a support ticket and a wait. Here it is a change we make.

A person still approves everything that leaves the building. The software writes the SMS, the post and the call list, then stops. Someone at the agency reads it and says yes.

A message sent in the agency's name to the wrong person can lose a customer. So nothing is sent until someone at the agency has read it.

For the first weeks, the images for the social posts came out in the wrong font. No test caught it, because the tests only checked that the image file existed. It is one reason a person still approves every post.

Replacing subscriptions is not always right. If software you already pay for does the job, keep it. We will tell you so in the first conversation.

It suits a business where the tools do not talk to each other and staff retype details from one into the next. It does not suit a one-person business.

The Marsh Property project page has a short film of the system. It was filmed on a demo account, and the contacts in it are made up.

If you run an agency, read what we build for real estate agencies. If you have a job you want off your team, tell us what it is.