Giving one fee-earner the chasing power of a big-firm sales team

When a sale is agreed, the hard part is only just beginning, and almost all of it is chasing. Every deal has at least four parties to keep moving at once: the buyer, the seller and a solicitor on each side, plus lenders and surveyors when they are involved. Multiply that by around 26 live chains and the chase is a full-time job on its own.

The stalls are always the same. The seller's information pack that sellers put off for weeks, holding up the draft contract. Local authority searches that can take up to twelve weeks and that no solicitor will chase, because the buyer has to pay for them first. The run of enquiries at the back end where one small outstanding item quietly parks the whole deal.

Roughly a third of chains get hit by something nobody can control, a lender pulling a rate or an adverse survey. Most of the rest live or die on one thing: communication. The single biggest complaint against estate agents is that nobody told them what was happening. The bigger firms answer this by hiring dedicated sales progressors. This agency could not, not without breaking the single point of contact that wins it instructions in the first place. So the chasing fell on one person, alongside winning new business, under the constant, low background worry of whether something had slipped.

The chasing was being held together by hand: email, business WhatsApp, and a long mental list of follow-ups that had to be diarised one at a time. It worked, right up until volume made it impossible to be certain nothing had been missed.

Some solicitors offer client portals that are meant to show progress automatically. In practice they are only as good as the person entering the data, and that is usually no help at all. Hiring a sales progressor, the route the larger agencies take, was off the table on both cost and brand: it would have put a stranger between the agency and the client it had promised would always deal with the same person.

From a single discovery call, and within a few days, we built a working version and demoed it back. No fee, no commitment.

It reads the agency's CRM, the deals, the activity on each one and the contacts on both sides, and every morning sends one WhatsApp digest: a single line per live chain, the specific thing holding it up, and the one action that would move it on. Something to scan over a coffee.

For each stall it drafts the chase email, referencing the actual outstanding items on that specific deal, written by a named, professional progression persona rather than a generic template and without pretending to be the agent. Nothing sends on its own. Every message is a draft the agent approves from WhatsApp before it goes out, and each chase is written back to the CRM so there is a clean record of who was chased about what, and when.

The guardrails are built in. There is a Property Ombudsman line on every email, and the moment a complaint, an anti-money-laundering red flag or a sign of a vulnerable client appears, the assistant stops, does not draft anything, and hands that chain straight to a person with the reason attached.

In the demo, the assistant produced a full morning's chase list and eight draft emails across four sample chains in real time. The founder's reaction, in her words, was that the same work would have taken her and a colleague the best part of a week. The drafts read as the agency, not as a robot.

The agency signed on as Sortd's founding design partner. This is an early engagement and we will not pretend otherwise: the numbers that matter, time to exchange, chains held together and hours handed back, are what we will measure once it is running on the live pipeline. What we can say already is that a single discovery call became a working system the agency wanted to keep.