Telecoms and IT for Estate Agents
A missed call is a lost instruction, so the design question is answer rate: overflow between branches, weekend routing, and a mobile that behaves as an extension.
Talk to us about estate agentsAn estate agency's phone is its order book. A vendor deciding who to instruct will usually ring more than one agent, and the one who answers has an advantage the others spend money trying to buy back. The same applies to an applicant ringing about a property they have just seen on a portal, and to a tenant with a problem at eleven at night. So the question worth asking of a phone system here is not what it costs a month. It is what proportion of calls get answered, and where the ones that are not answered go — and neither of those is knowable without something counting them.
The second thing that shapes the design is where the people are. Negotiators spend the working day out on viewings and valuations, so the mobile is the extension and the desk phone is the exception. Business mobiles on EE, O2 or Vodafone are integrated with the phone system rather than run as a separate estate of numbers, so a call to the branch can ring a handset in a car without anyone being handed a personal number they will then have forever. Behind that sits the branch structure: each office keeps the local number printed on its boards and window cards, while extensions are internal across the whole business, so a call nobody in one branch can take rings in the next one instead of dropping into voicemail.
Weekends are trading days, which most phone systems are not configured for. Saturday viewings and Sunday portal browsing produce enquiries at exactly the hours an office-hours rule sends to voicemail, and lettings adds an emergency line that has to reach whoever is genuinely on duty rather than a diversion somebody set months ago. Rules for time of day, weekends, bank holidays and an on-call rota are held in the system so that nobody has to remember them. Calls can be recorded where what was agreed on a negotiation matters later, with retention and playback access set to your policy rather than left on a default. All of it runs on Evonex cloud telephony or Microsoft Teams calling, with SIP trunking and number porting keeping the numbers already on your boards — worth planning now, since stop sell is in force and the PSTN and ISDN network closes in January 2027.
How we help estate agents
Overflow to the next branch
A branch number rings a group of phones rather than one desk, and after a set wait the call moves to another branch or a monitored mailbox instead of ringing out.
The mobile is the extension
Business mobiles on EE, O2 or Vodafone integrated with the phone system, so a branch call reaches a negotiator on a viewing without an applicant being handed a personal number.
Saturdays, evenings and emergencies
Routing rules for weekends, evenings and bank holidays, and an on-call rota held in the system so a tenant emergency line reaches whoever is actually on duty this week.
What was agreed, on record
Call recording with DDI-level reporting on Evonex, with retention periods and named playback access set to your policy rather than left on a default.
Answering the phone across branches
The parts of the system that decide whether an enquiry reaches a person, wherever that person happens to be standing.
- Hunt groups so a branch number rings several phones instead of one desk
- Overflow between branches after a set wait, rather than a call ringing out
- Business mobiles on EE, O2 and Vodafone integrated with the phone system, with MDM device administration
- Local numbers kept per branch, with internal extensions and transfers across the whole business
- Evonex cloud telephony or Gamma Horizon, and Microsoft Teams calling for agencies already on Microsoft 365
- On-premise NEC systems where a branch is genuinely better served by one
- SIP trunking with full number porting ahead of the January 2027 PSTN switch-off
- Call analytics covering how many calls arrived, how long applicants waited and how many gave up before anyone answered
Out of hours, lettings and the record
Cover for the hours the branch is shut, the calls that cannot wait until Monday, and the data an agency holds on vendors, landlords and tenants.
- Routing rules for evenings, Saturdays, Sundays and bank holidays, set once rather than remembered nightly
- An on-call rota held in the system, so an emergency line reaches whoever is on duty without editing a diversion each week
- A separate emergency number routed differently from the sales and lettings lines
- Call recording with DDI-level reporting, retention periods and named playback access set to your policy
- Voicesafe fraud protection against out-of-hours toll fraud on a branch that stands empty all weekend
- Cyber security across vendor, landlord and tenant records, including MFA, email scanning and Zero Trust
- Business continuity and disaster recovery, with UK data centre hosting behind it
- 24/7 UK-based maintenance and support, and a named local director rather than a queue
Estate Agents — Common Questions
We run three branches. Can a call one office cannot take ring in another?
Yes, and it is usually the single most valuable change. Each branch number rings a group of phones rather than one desk, and after a set wait the call overflows to another branch, to a mobile, or to a mailbox somebody actually checks. That is configuration on a cloud phone system rather than an extra product to buy. It is also worth saying that three branches almost never justify a contact centre — a hunt group with overflow fixes the problem people are usually quoted a much larger platform to solve.
Our negotiators are out on viewings all day. How do calls actually reach them?
The mobile becomes the extension. Business mobiles on EE, O2 or Vodafone are integrated with the phone system rather than run as a separate estate of numbers, so a branch call can ring a handset in the field and be transferred back to the office without the applicant ever being given a personal mobile number. The honest limit is that no routing rule makes somebody answer while they are showing a property, which is why the cascade should end somewhere monitored — a mailbox that is genuinely checked — rather than ringing out.
What should happen to a tenant emergency call at midnight?
It should reach whoever is genuinely on duty, which means a separate number with an on-call rota held in the system rather than a diversion someone set months ago. The rota is the part that fails when it is managed by hand, because the person who edits it is eventually the person on holiday. What you are obliged to attend, and how quickly, comes from the tenancy and your management agreement rather than from us, and is worth confirming with your own advisers. What we set is where the call goes, who it reaches, and what the caller hears if nobody picks up.
Is it worth recording negotiation calls?
Where offers, fees and chain updates are agreed by phone, yes — those are the conversations that later become two different recollections. Recording itself is a licence option on a cloud platform and takes minutes to enable. The decisions that matter are how long you keep recordings, who is allowed to play them back, and what callers are told. Retention is the one that catches people, because every recording you hold is personal data you are then responsible for. Whether and how you announce it is a legal question as much as a technical one, so confirm it with your own advisers.
Will changing the phone system change the numbers on our boards?
No, and for an agency that is normally the first question asked. There are boards standing outside houses across the town, window cards in the office and a number on every portal listing, and none of it has to change. The number belongs to you rather than to the supplier billing you for it, and porting moves it unchanged across 01, 02, 03 and 08 ranges. Each branch keeps its own local number even though the platform is central and shared, so callers cannot tell that anything happened.
Will it integrate with our property CRM?
We would not claim an integration we have not checked against your system. Evonex lists CRM and business application integrations, and where one is in place the caller's details can be put on screen as the call arrives, which covers most of what people mean by the question. Anything deeper — pulling an applicant record up automatically, or writing call notes back into the property software — depends on what your particular package exposes, so we establish that before agreeing to it rather than after.
Services for estate agents
Let's talk about your estate agents setup
Tell us how many branches you run, where a Saturday enquiry goes and what happens to a tenant emergency at midnight, and we will map what a call does today before recommending anything.