Automation for real estate
Brokerages, teams and property management. This is the sector where response speed has the most direct and best-documented effect on outcomes, and where the administrative load per transaction is high enough to cap how many an agent can carry.
1. Speed-to-lead routing — $8,000 to $12,000
The single highest-leverage automation in real estate. Portal enquiries, website forms and inbound calls routed instantly by area, price band and agent availability, with an acknowledgement sent inside a minute and a task created for the agent.
What we build: ingestion from every lead source into one pipeline, deduplication against existing contacts, round-robin or rules-based assignment respecting availability, immediate response, and escalation if the agent has not engaged within a defined window.
Why it matters here specifically: real estate leads shop several agents at once, often within the same hour. Being first to respond is a large share of the outcome, and it is the thing automation is best at.
2. Listing syndication and updates — $9,000 to $16,000
A listing published once, pushed to portals, the website and social channels with per-channel formatting, and — the part that actually causes problems — price changes, status changes and withdrawals propagated everywhere rather than to whichever channels someone remembers.
Common failure it removes: a property under offer still showing as available on one portal, generating enquiries nobody wants to field.
3. Document collection and compliance packs — $10,000 to $18,000
Transaction checklists generated per deal type and jurisdiction, documents requested from the right party automatically, receipt tracked, chasers sent, and the compliance file assembled as it goes rather than reconstructed before closing.
Where the hours actually are. Chasing paperwork is the largest administrative cost per transaction in most brokerages, and it is almost entirely mechanical.
4. Transaction milestone tracking — $9,000 to $15,000
Key dates derived from the contract — inspection, finance, appraisal, closing — with reminders to every party ahead of each deadline, escalation when a date passes unmet, and a pipeline view of every live transaction and what it is waiting on.
Risk reduction, not just time saving: a missed contingency deadline has consequences well beyond the admin time it would have taken to track it.
5. Commission calculation and splits — $9,000 to $16,000
Calculation from the closed transaction against the agent's split schedule, including caps, tiers, referral fees, team splits and brokerage deductions, producing a statement per agent that shows the working.
Cost driver: plan complexity, not volume. Caps that reset annually, graduated splits and team overlays each add branches. This is an exception logic build.
6. Showing scheduling and feedback — $8,000 to $12,000
Self-service booking against agent and property availability with access instructions issued at the right time, plus automated feedback requests to the showing agent afterwards, collated per listing for the seller report.
7. Seller and owner reporting — $8,000 to $13,000
Recurring reports assembled from live data — portal views, enquiries, showings, feedback themes, comparable activity — delivered on a schedule instead of written by hand the night before the vendor call.
For property management: owner statements combining rent received, expenses, maintenance and arrears, generated per period.
The systems you probably have
| Layer | Common tools | Integration reality |
|---|---|---|
| CRM | Follow Up Boss, kvCORE, Salesforce, HubSpot | Generally good APIs |
| Transaction management | Dotloop, SkySlope, Brokermint | Varies; some are portal-only |
| E-signature | DocuSign, Dotloop | Good webhooks, easy triggers |
| MLS / portals | Regional MLS, Zillow, Rightmove | The hard part. Access rules are restrictive and vary by region |
| Property management | AppFolio, Buildium, Propertyware | APIs exist but coverage is partial |
| Accounting | QuickBooks, Xero | Fine, but trust accounting has its own rules |
MLS data access is governed by rules that vary by region and by your membership, and those rules — not the technology — determine what a syndication build can legally do. Establish what your MLS permits before scoping anything that touches listing data. We will ask about this on the first call.
A note on trust accounting
Client and trust accounts are regulated, and the rules on segregation, reconciliation and record-keeping differ by jurisdiction. We automate the preparation and reconciliation-matching around trust accounts. We do not build anything that moves money out of one without human approval, and we would treat any request to do so as the high-stakes-with-no-error-signal case described in what should not be automated.
What we would do first
Speed-to-lead, then document collection. Speed-to-lead is cheap, fast to build, and has the most direct revenue effect of anything on this page. Document collection is where the hours are. Commission calculation is worth doing once the transaction data is reliable, which the milestone tracking build tends to fix as a side effect.
How fast does a portal enquiry get answered?
If the answer is "when an agent sees it" — that is the cheapest build on this page and the one with the clearest return.