LIGHTNING
FOR ESTATE AND LETTING AGENTS

Keep the next viewing and the next action in sight.

Help people find the right property and make it easier for your team to respond. We scope websites, enquiry routing and portals around your property software, so listings, requests and updates do not need a second manual record.

None of it is broken. It is all just held together by somebody remembering

01

Viewing feedback chased on a Friday afternoon

The viewing happened Tuesday. The applicant has not rung back. The vendor has, twice, and a negotiator is working down a list of mobile numbers to find out what people thought of the kitchen. The feedback that does arrive lands in a text message rather than on the record, so whoever speaks to the vendor next starts from nothing.

02

The price is different depending on where you look

A reduction goes on the CRM on Monday. The portal feed takes it in minutes, but the website is still serving a cached page, the brochure in the drawer is the old one and the card in the window says the old figure. Some days the feed rejects the update instead, and the error sits in a report nobody has been asked to read. Nobody has done anything wrong. The property exists in five places and only one of them was told.

03

Out-of-hours enquiries go to whoever picks up

Portal traffic does not stop at half five. An applicant sees a listing at nine on a Sunday and rings three agents until someone answers. The vendor weighing up a market appraisal does the same, and so does the tenant whose boiler has gone out. By Monday you have a list of missed calls with no names on it and no way to tell which one mattered.

04

Compliance living in a colour-coded spreadsheet

Gas safety renewals, EICR dates, EPC expiry, tenant right-to-rent or right-to-let checks where they apply, deposit protection deadlines and where each referencing case has got to, all on one tab that one person maintains. It holds up until they are on annual leave, and it gives you no warning until the date has already gone.

A lettings negotiator at a branch desk with property details on screen, window cards on the glass behind her, phone in one hand and a labelled set of keys on the desk.

Four pieces of work that take the re-typing out of the week

01

One property record, pushed everywhere else

The CRM stays the only place a property is created and changed. We build the connections out of it: website listings, portal feeds, brochure data and the window cards. A price change or a status change is made once and pushed out from there. Where a feed rejects an update it surfaces as a job to fix rather than a silent mismatch. The negotiator types the reduction and then goes back to the phone.

Integration
02

Enquiries answered when the branch is shut

Enquiry handling can collect the property reference, contact details and reason for calling, then route a follow-up to the appropriate branch or negotiator. We check what your property software supports before promising a CRM connection. Identity checks, information that may be shared and the route to a person are agreed with your team.

Phone and enquiries
03

Listings straight out of the CRM, valuation requests straight to a negotiator

Listings pulled live from your CRM instead of re-keyed by hand, search that behaves on a phone in a car park and a valuation request that reaches a negotiator with the address, tenure and reason for moving already attached. Vendor and landlord pages written around the towns you actually cover rather than a generic catchment.

Websites
04

Chasing and certificate dates without a spreadsheet

Viewing feedback requested automatically the morning after. Vendors sent a weekly update drawn from what actually happened rather than assembled by hand on a Friday. A register that flags a gas safety or EICR date before it lapses instead of after. On the lettings side, a reported repair reaches the right contractor with the address, access notes and tenant details attached, and rent arrears surface on a list rather than in one property manager's memory.

Automation
An estate agent showing a property to viewers

We start at the property record and count how many times it gets typed

We start with a read-only look at how a property comes into being: who creates it, who is allowed to change the price and how many systems it has to be copied into before a buyer can see it. We sit with a negotiator for a morning and count the re-keying. What that count comes to decides where the first piece of work belongs, before anyone writes a specification.

Your CRM stays yours. Whether the branch runs Reapit, Alto, Jupix, Street or something older, we build around what is already there and we will not ask you to move off it to suit us. Where a system's data access is restricted or sits behind a developer programme, we tell you what that means for the work rather than quote around it. If the price push you want already exists in your CRM and nobody ever switched it on, we will say so and configure it rather than quote for building it. First work is scoped to one branch and one workflow, at a fixed price, with a named person on it.

Small enough to finish, big enough to feel in the branch

Start with the one workflow that is visibly costing you time or instructions: the feed that lags, the calls after six, the certificate tab. It gets scoped, priced and finished on one branch before anything else is discussed, so you can judge it on whether the negotiators stopped re-typing.

  • 01A map of every system a property touches, from instruction through to completion or move-in
  • 02One connection built and proven, CRM to website and portal feed
  • 03Out-of-hours call handling for a single branch, written into the CRM with a callback owner on the record
  • 04A certificate and renewal register (gas safety, EICR, EPC, deposit protection) that flags a date before it lapses
  • 05A written handover the branch manager can pass to a new negotiator, a named contact and what it costs to keep running
ONE PROPERTY RECORDcreated in the CRM, pushed everywhere else
AFTER-HOURS ENQUIRIESasked, named and written to the CRM
YOUR CRM STAYSwe build around it, not over it
NAMED OWNERSHIPone person on your branch, not a queue

Before you start. Practical questions, answered.

What to consider when deciding whether this work is right for your business.

01

Can Alto and Xero be joined up so rent and fees only get keyed once?

Usually yes, on the office side. Client money sits under its own rules and stays in the agency system, so what moves across is the office income: management fees, tenancy fees and commission, mapped onto your nominal codes as a scheduled posting. The client account reconciliation stays where your auditor expects to find it.

02

Our team keys the same tenancy details into the agreement, the deposit scheme and the listing. Fixable?

Yes. The tenancy record already holds the parties, the address, the rent and the dates, so every document should be generated from it rather than retyped beside it. We build the agreement, the prescribed information and the deposit submission from one set of fields, which means a corrected name is corrected in all of them.

03

Rightmove enquiries come in at night and we answer them the next working day. Can that change?

Often the honest problem is that the first agent to reply books the viewing. The mechanism is an auto-response that does more than acknowledge: it reads the property reference on the enquiry, replies with the viewing slots still open on that property, and writes the booking straight into the diary the negotiators already work from. automation we build

04

Tenants ring our office all day about repairs. Can they report and track maintenance themselves?

Often yes, and if you already run Fixflo, you should not pay us for that: it does the job. The work worth paying for is the join, so a repair raised by a tenant appears against the right tenancy in your agency system and the contractor sees the same reference the tenant was given.

05

We are moving off Jupix and want the tenancy history to come with us. Realistic?

Usually, with one warning: what exports cleanly is rarely everything. Properties, contacts and live tenancies come across in a structured export, while notes, attachments and old correspondence need a separate pass and sometimes a compromise. The step that matters is a reconciliation after the load, comparing what left the old system against what arrived in the new one. migration and integration work

06

Do our portal contracts and UK GDPR duties stop us pulling listing and applicant data around?

Often, in part, and it is worth reading the feed agreement before anyone builds anything. Portal contracts set what may be re-published and where, and the data protection duty for applicant records stays with the agency. We work to whatever your contracts allow, and keep a record of which system each field came from so a subject access request can be answered.

An agency does not lose an instruction because anyone was careless. It loses it because the vendor rang at ten past six, the price on the website was last week's and the one person who knew the answer was out on a valuation. Fix the plumbing and nobody has to remember which figure is the right one.

Start with the change you want to make.

Tell us what you use now, where the work slows down and what a better result would look like. We will explain the next step, with any paid work agreed before it starts.

Talk to Lightning