Services

An answering service for estate agents

You cannot answer the office phone from somebody's kitchen in the middle of a valuation. A real person picks it up in your agency's name, takes the valuation request, the viewing or the offer down properly, and has it with you in writing before you are back at the car. From £59 a month.

Estate agent seen from behind measuring the bay window of an empty Victorian terraced front room, their phone face down on the floorboards

What does an answering service for estate agents pick up?

An answering service for estate agents answers your agency's number, in the agency's name, when nobody in the office can. Four kinds of caller make up the bulk of it: an owner who wants a valuation, a buyer or tenant who wants to view, a buyer with an offer, and a tenant or landlord with a problem. Each is handled by the rules you set, and each one reaches you as a text and an email.

Those four calls are not worth the same, and they should not be handled the same. This page takes them one at a time.

Why does an agency phone ring out at the wrong moment?

Because the work is somewhere else. A valuation happens in the owner's front room. A viewing happens on the doorstep. In a small agency, the person who would answer the phone is the person standing in the property, and stepping outside to take a call in the middle of a valuation is no way to win the instruction.

The caller does not see any of that. They see a board, a number and no answer, and the next board along the road has a number on it too.

The valuation request is the call that pays for the others

A buyer rings about one property. An owner rings to choose an agent, and a new instruction is the thing every other call depends on. So this caller gets the most care. On Growth and Premium, where detailed enquiries are included, the questions are yours to set. They might be:

The address, and whether it is a sale or a let.
The type of property and the number of bedrooms.
Whether the owner is ready to go on the market or finding out what it is worth first.
Whether they have somewhere to move to, or need to sell before they can look.
Days and times that suit a visit.

From Growth, the valuation can go into your calendar there and then. On the two smaller plans the request reaches you as a message with the caller's name, number and what they said, for you to ring back and arrange.

Can viewings be booked while you are out on one?

From Growth upwards, yes. You share the calendar and the slots you are happy to offer for each property, and the appointment is fixed before the caller hangs up. They can also be asked the things you would ask yourself before giving up an hour: whether they have a property to sell, whether it is on the market, and how they would be paying.

What nobody on our side does is describe a property beyond the details you have published. Questions about the boundary, the lease, the neighbours or why it is being sold are written down and sent to you. A guess about a property, made in your agency's name, is still your agency's statement.

What happens when a buyer rings with an offer?

It is taken down exactly and sent to you straight away, marked as an offer. The law is the reason for the care. The Estate Agents (Undesirable Practices) (No. 2) Order 1991 lists it as an undesirable practice for an agent to fail to forward accurate details of an offer to the client promptly and in writing. An offer left on a voicemail until Monday is neither prompt nor written down.

As an example of the message, and not a real buyer:

3.42pm, offer. 14 Example Road. £212,000.
From. Name and mobile. Viewed last Saturday.
Position. First-time buyer, nothing to sell, mortgage agreed in principle.
Read back. Figure repeated to the caller and confirmed.
Told. The offer will be put to the seller and the agent will be in touch.

The caller is not told whether other offers exist, what they are, or what the seller might take. The same Order covers misrepresenting the existence or details of an offer, so those answers come from you and nobody else.

What is different about lettings calls?

Mostly what the law now says about rent and about who may view. In England, the government's roadmap for the Renters' Rights Act put its first phase into effect on 1 May 2026. Two of those measures change what can be said on the phone.

The first is rental bidding. Landlords and agents cannot ask for, encourage or accept an offer above the advertised rent. A caller who says they will pay £50 a month more to get to the front of the queue is told the rent is the advertised rent, and the extra is not passed on as a bid.

The second is discrimination. The same phase made it illegal to discriminate against renters who have children or receive benefits, and the roadmap names blocked viewings as one form of it. So a viewing is not refused on those grounds on a call we answer, and no question is put to a caller as a way of screening them out.

Tenants ringing about repairs are a different call again: what has gone wrong, where, since when, and how to get in. You decide which faults count as urgent and how those reach you.

Which plan fits an estate agency?

The plans differ in calls per month. Light covers 30 for £59 and Essential covers 50 for £129. Those two answer in business hours and do the same thing: the caller dealt with from your notes, the message taken, and a text and an email to you after each one.

Growth is where an agency gets its time back. For £249 a month and 100 calls it brings in booking for valuations and viewings, the qualifying questions, call transfers for the caller you want straight away, and out-of-hours options for the people who ring once their own working day is over. Premium is £399 for 150 calls, and its extras are outbound: ringing viewers back for feedback, following up a valuation that went quiet, and keeping your CRM current.

Calls over the allowance are charged one by one, and there is a single setup fee, from £49.50, normally £99. The detail is on plans and pricing. How a call is answered, from greeting to message, is explained on the telephone answering service page.

How do you put it on your own number?

With a seven-day free trial and no card. Your number, your boards and your listings stay as they are, and calls come to us only when you divert them. Our guide to diverting your mobile has the codes if the agency number is a mobile.

To ask something first, ring 01709 222834 or use the contact form.

Common questions

Can a caller be told whether a property is still available?

Only from a list you keep up to date with us: available, under offer, sold subject to contract, let agreed. If a property is not on the list, or the list is a few days old, the caller is told you will confirm, and the question comes to you.

Somebody rings about a board but does not know the address. What then?

They are asked for the street, what the house looks like and roughly where on the road it is, and that is checked against your current instructions. If it still cannot be placed, the description goes to you with their number so you can work out which one they mean.

A seller rings wanting to know how Saturday's viewings went. What do they hear?

That you will ring them with it, and when. Feedback on a viewing is yours to give, because you were there and you know what the viewer said. On Premium, viewers can be rung afterwards and asked, and their answers sent to you before you speak to the seller.

Do you work in the software our agency already uses?

Bookings go into the calendar you share, and CRM updates are part of Premium. Agency systems differ, so name yours before the trial starts and you will be told plainly whether we can work inside it or whether updates would reach you as messages to enter yourself.

A landlord rings to give notice or change the rent. Is that acted on?

No. It is recorded in the landlord's words and sent to you. Nothing is said to the tenant and nothing is confirmed back to the landlord beyond the fact that you have the message, since notices and rent changes have their own legal procedures and those are yours to run.

The rest of what we answer

Hear it for yourself, free, for a week.

Seven days of a real person answering in your business name. No card, no contract, and nothing to cancel if you'd rather not carry on.

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Or call us on 01709 222834