AI admin agent for an estate agency
Stow Brothers · workflow measurement and agent blueprint
OpenKit measured 172 hours a month of admin across the agency’s five workflows and designed an agent that acts only when a person replies yes. A year later a re-check of the CRM found the write access the first design had worked around.
Overview
Stow Brothers is an independent estate agency in North London, running five offices off one shared CRM. Its admin team pushes every valuation, sale, exchange and price change through a single shared Outlook inbox. Two earlier AI experiments had gone live and then been switched off, so the agency wanted evidence before anything else.
OpenKit timed the admin work on screen, tested the technology on the CRM the team uses every day and wrote a strategy report and a specification for an admin agent, which the agency reviewed. No agent was built.
172 hrs
of admin a month, timed across five workflows.
~50 hrs
a month reclaimable in the letters, where every step can sit behind a reply.
4
write endpoints found when OpenKit re-checked the CRM a year later.
Workflows
The five admin workflows
The agency went over the volumes and minutes per task three times until the numbers settled. The letters follow fixed rules, so OpenKit put them first.
- Price reductions need a fixed letter to a short recipient list, with one field to change, and go first.
- Valuations are covered end to end: confirm the booking, send the pre-visit pack, write the follow-up.
- A memorandum of sale sets off letters to buyers, sellers and both solicitors at high volume, with the compliance step kept manual.
- Exchanges bring a final round of letters and a status change in the CRM, with the portal step left manual.
- Brochures are the time sink, with visual judgement in every step from image choice to vendor amends. They follow once the letters have proved themselves.
Approach
The agent OpenKit designed
- It works the CRM through the same screens the admin team uses.
- Nothing sends, files or updates until a person replies yes in the shared inbox, where each approval stays as a threaded email with a sender and a timestamp.
- Its own Microsoft 365 mailbox sits under the agency’s access controls, with outbound email locked to the agency’s domain.
- Anti-money-laundering and proof-of-ownership checks need a person at manager level before anything moves past them.
Before recommending anything, OpenKit ran two contained tests on the live CRM. An AI model logged in and read a property record, and an image classifier picked a defensible best six photographs against the agency’s own visual rule.
Result
What the CRM re-check changed
The first review found the CRM effectively read-only, which was true of its old export feed. A year later OpenKit re-read the vendor’s documentation and found the vendor had since put a modern integration API in front of the CRM, with four write endpoints covering file notes, documents and reference checks. OpenKit wrote the correction down for the agency in plain terms, then built a connector that offers those actions as nine tools an assistant can call.
The initial review
With no write access, every action goes through the CRM’s screens and waits for a person’s reply.
The re-check
A build can file a letter or attach a compliance document through the CRM’s own API, and the rest of the design stands.
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