Property and Estate Agents
Estate agents and letting agencies juggle sales pipelines, tenancy management, compliance documentation, and landlord relationships simultaneously. We build CRM systems that unify these workflows rather than fragmenting them across tools.
Sector Challenges
Most agencies run separate systems for sales and lettings, leading to duplicated contact records, inconsistent communication, and no single view of a landlord who both sells and lets through your agency.
EPCs, gas safety certificates, EICRs, deposit protection confirmations, and right-to-rent checks live in different folders and systems. Tracking expiry dates manually is a compliance accident waiting to happen.
TPO membership demands structured complaint handling, transparent fee disclosure, and record-keeping that generic CRMs do not support without extensive customisation.
What Goes Wrong
UK letting and estate agencies operate under a web of tenancy, consumer-protection, and client-money rules that generic CRMs were never built to support. These are the six patterns UK agencies describe most often when their current system stops being usable.
Tenancy deposits must be protected within 30 days, with prescribed information served in the same window. When the CRM does not flag the deadline, penalties can reach three times the deposit plus loss of Section 21 rights for the landlord.
The annual Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations check is a legal requirement. Certificates tracked in spreadsheets inevitably lapse on busy portfolios, putting the agency and the landlord in breach simultaneously.
The Immigration Act right-to-rent duty applies to every adult occupier in England. Generic CRMs have no structured workflow for identity verification, follow-up checks, or documentation retention, so agencies rely on paper folders that inspectors cannot validate.
Client Money Protection scheme rules and the Tenant Fees Act place strict obligations on how client money is held and reconciled. Without automated trust-account controls, agencies drift into mixing client and operating funds.
Tenants report issues by email or phone. Without a structured workflow, requests get lost between the tenant, property manager, contractor, and landlord. Serious issues (damp, category 1 hazards) escalate to formal complaints.
The Property Ombudsman expects structured complaint logging with eight-week resolution deadlines and clear final response letters. Generic CRMs do not model the TPO process, so member agencies fail on record-keeping at inspection.
What We Build
Unified pipelines for property sales and lettings with stage-specific workflows, automated milestone tracking, and cross-referencing between sales and rental portfolios.
Track tenancies from application through referencing, move-in, periodic inspections, renewal negotiations, and eventual check-out. Automated reminders at every stage.
Centralised storage for EPCs, gas safety certificates, EICRs, and deposit protection confirmations. Automated expiry alerts and renewal workflows.
Coordinate viewings across properties, agents, and applicants. Automated confirmation emails, feedback collection, and calendar integration.
Give landlords secure access to property performance, tenancy updates, maintenance requests, and financial statements. Reduce inbound calls and build trust.
Structured maintenance request handling from tenant submission through contractor assignment, completion tracking, and landlord notification.
Compliance in Practice
UK letting and estate agencies answer to The Property Ombudsman or Property Redress Scheme, to the Tenancy Deposit Scheme provider, to a Client Money Protection scheme operator, to Trading Standards under the Tenant Fees Act, and to the ICO for data protection. A bespoke CRM should make five specific obligations cheaper to meet daily.
Complaints are recorded against the tenancy or sale with acknowledgement within 3 working days and substantive final response within 8 weeks tracked automatically. The Codes of Practice workflow (sales, residential letting, buying agents) enforces the right process for the right code, and the TPO annual return is produced from the data.
Every deposit is protected within the 30-day window by workflow, with prescribed information served and logged against the tenancy. End-of-tenancy disputes route through structured evidence collection (inventory, check-out report, correspondence) and deposit disputes are prepared from the CRM rather than assembled from email.
The CRM enforces permitted-payment rules at the point of raising a charge: only the 14 permitted categories can be invoiced to a tenant, and default fee calculations are capped and evidenced. Attempts to raise a prohibited payment are blocked at source rather than caught at audit.
Applicant and tenant data is tagged with lawful basis (legitimate interest for prospecting, contract for active tenancies) and retention period. Unsuccessful applicants are archived or deleted per policy; active tenancies retain data for the statutory period post-termination. Subject access requests are fulfilled from one dashboard.
Annual gas safety checks, five-yearly electrical installation checks, and ten-yearly EPCs are tracked per property with automated alerts at 60, 30, and 14 days before expiry. Missing or expired certificates block new tenancy creation, preventing the most common route into unintentional non-compliance.
Regulatory Compliance
UK property agencies operate under consumer protection, tenancy deposit, and client money regulations. Your CRM must keep you compliant across all of them, and it should reduce the administrative load on branch managers rather than adding to it.
The Property Ombudsman (TPO) requirements supported through structured complaint handling workflows, fee transparency records, and communication audit trails.
Tenancy Deposit Scheme (TDS) compliance with automated deposit registration tracking, prescribed information deadlines, and end-of-tenancy dispute documentation.
Client Money Protection scheme alignment with trust account reconciliation workflows, client money movement logging, and regulatory reporting support.
Investment Guidance
Every agency is different, but there are clear market bands for what a purpose-built property CRM costs. The ranges below reflect typical investment for a UK-led build, with TPO, TDS, and Client Money Protection considerations built in. For single-branch agencies with 1 to 3 staff, established platforms like Reapit, Alto, or Street are usually the better commercial answer, and we will tell you so during discovery.
Single-branch agencies, focused workflow
A single focused workflow: landlord portal, tenancy compliance tracker, or maintenance request workflow. One to two integrations with existing property software. For agencies adding a focused capability rather than replacing core agency software.
Multi-branch agencies, 5-25 staff
Full sales and lettings CRM with unified pipelines, tenancy lifecycle management, compliance document tracking, landlord portal, and three to five integrations (portals, accounting, e-signature, inventory systems).
Multi-brand or regional agencies, 25+ staff
Multi-branch, multi-brand platform: brand-specific workflows, centralised client money controls, automated regulatory reporting, integrations with portals (Rightmove, Zoopla, OnTheMarket), and custom reporting for group finance and compliance.
Fixed-price build, with ongoing support and enhancement delivered on a monthly retainer. Indicative ranges for a UK-led build. Actual cost depends on portfolio size, integration count, and the scope of your compliance requirements. See full pricing detail.
Questions Answered
The questions UK property agencies ask us most often during discovery. If yours is not here, book a discovery call and we will answer it directly.
Reapit, Alto, and Street are well suited to agencies whose workflows fit their product. A bespoke CRM makes sense when your brand differentiates on service experience, when you operate multiple brands or formats (residential and commercial, estate and letting), or when the off-the-shelf platform forces workflow compromises that are costing you transactions. Most single-branch agencies under 5 staff should stay on off-the-shelf.
Complaints are logged against the tenancy or sale with timestamped acknowledgement, escalation, and final response. The TPO 8-week clock runs automatically. Final response letters are generated from templates with the right Codes of Practice references. The TPO annual return is produced from the data, not compiled manually.
Yes. Every deposit triggers the 30-day protection workflow, with TDS / DPS / MyDeposits registration automated via API where available. Prescribed information is generated with the right schedule, served electronically with acknowledgement logging, and stored against the tenancy permanently.
Yes. Portal integration is standard at the Standard and Advanced tiers, using the portals’ official feeds. Cross-portal performance reporting, automated re-listing workflows, and applicant matching across portals are common additions.
Yes. We have migrated from Reapit, Alto, Jupix, SME Professional, Acquaint, Expert Agent, and bespoke legacy systems. Migration includes property records, applicant/buyer records, tenancies, landlord records, documents, and financial history.
You do. Code is delivered to your GitHub or GitLab organisation under a permissive licence, the database runs in your cloud account (AWS, Azure, or GCP), and there is no vendor lock-in. We offer ongoing support contracts, but you are free to engage any competent development team to maintain the platform after handover.
Right-to-rent checks are a structured workflow with document type, check date, outcome, and the staff member who performed the check. Follow-up checks are scheduled where the initial check was time-limited (for example, a visa with a future expiry). The chain of checks is producible for a Home Office audit.
Tenancy law is in flux (Renters Rights Bill, ongoing Section 21 reform, evolving CMP rules). The architecture is designed to make rule changes cheap to implement. Fee calculations, notice periods, deposit rules, and complaint timelines are configuration rather than hard-coded logic, so regulatory change can be handled in days.
Services
Bespoke CRM Development
CRM Consultancy
CRM Data Migration
CRM Integration
CRM Support & Maintenance
CRM Training
Property CRM
Book a free discovery call. We will discuss your property management challenges, your compliance obligations, and whether a bespoke CRM is the right fit for your agency.
Book a Discovery Call