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Maeby

For estate & letting agents

Portal enquiries go cold in minutes, not days

Maeby answers every property enquiry the moment it lands, qualifies the caller on budget, position, and timescale, and books the viewing before they ring the agent down the road.

UK & EU data residency · Recording off by default

Property listings funnelling into a single qualified enquiry
Response to enquiries arriving evenings and weekends
InstantResponse to enquiries arriving evenings and weekends
Budget, position, and timescale captured on the first call
QualifiedBudget, position, and timescale captured on the first call
Applicant data processed and stored in Ireland
EU onlyApplicant data processed and stored in Ireland

Where the phone costs you money

Enquiries decay by the hour

A portal enquiry is worth the most in the first few minutes and very little by the next morning. Applicants contact several agents at once and commit to whoever engages first.

  • Evening and weekend enquiries sit untouched until Monday
  • By the time you call back, the viewing is booked elsewhere
  • The same lead costs you the same in portal fees either way
Bar chart showing enquiry value decaying over time

Negotiators spend the day on unqualified calls

A large share of inbound calls are people who won't proceed — wrong budget, not yet on the market, or ringing about a property that's already under offer. Every one of those interrupts someone who should be closing.

  • Basic qualifying questions get asked over and over
  • Viewings get booked for applicants who were never in a position to buy
  • The team is least available exactly when enquiry volume peaks
Incoming call signal meeting a closed panel

Applicant records get filled in later, badly

Details are taken on the call and typed into the CRM afterwards, if there's time. Matching applicants to new instructions only works if the data was captured properly in the first place.

  • Requirements captured inconsistently between negotiators
  • Applicant records too thin to match against new stock
  • Follow-up depends on someone remembering
Details being re-keyed from one system into another

What your agent handles

Tools are switched on per agent and configured with your details — no bespoke development.

Answers property questions

Price, tenure, council tax band, EPC, chain position, availability date — answered from your listing data rather than guessed.

Qualifies the caller

Budget, whether they've sold or have an agreement in principle, timescale, and what they're actually looking for.

Books viewings

Offers real slots from the diary and confirms the appointment on the call, while the applicant is still interested.

Captures lettings requirements

Move-in date, tenancy length, pets, guarantor position — the fields that determine whether a viewing is worth anyone's time.

Routes valuation enquiries

A prospective vendor is your most valuable inbound call. Those transfer straight to a human, every time.

Writes back to your CRM

Applicant matched by phone number, with requirements and call summary logged against the record.

Speed to lead is the whole game

Every agent knows this and very few act on it, because acting on it means staffing evenings and weekends. An applicant browsing at 9pm on a Sunday sends enquiries to four agents. The one who engages first gets the viewing, and the viewing is what turns a portal fee into a fee.

The uncomfortable version: you are already paying for those leads. Portal costs don’t drop because nobody was available to answer. The marginal cost of responding to an out-of-hours enquiry is close to zero; the marginal cost of not responding is the entire lead.

Qualification is the part worth automating

Answering the phone is not the bottleneck. Asking the same six questions two hundred times a month is.

Those questions are identical across every enquiry and every negotiator:

  • What’s the budget, and is it evidenced?
  • Have they sold, are they under offer, or are they yet to market?
  • What’s the timescale?
  • Are they cash, mortgaged, or dependent on a chain?
  • What are they actually looking for, beyond the property they rang about?

Asked consistently, they produce an applicant record you can match against new instructions. Asked inconsistently — which is what happens when a negotiator is on their fourth call in an hour — they produce a name and a phone number.

Where the line sits

There is a category of call an agency should never automate, and it’s worth being explicit about it: the prospective vendor.

Someone ringing to ask what their house is worth is the highest-value inbound call you get. That call is a relationship, and the correct handling is a person, immediately. The agent’s job is to recognise it in the first fifteen seconds and transfer — not to handle it well.

Everything upstream of that — applicant enquiries, viewing bookings, property questions, lettings requirements — is repeatable work that benefits from being done the same way every time.

What it means for your data obligations

You’re collecting financial position and personal circumstances over the phone, which is meaningful personal data. Two defaults keep this manageable: everything is processed and stored in the EU, and call audio is discarded after transcription unless you turn retention on. What’s retained is the text you need for the applicant record, not a recording of someone discussing their mortgage.

Compliance

Built for UK & EU rules, not retrofitted to them

The constraints that make voice AI awkward in regulated markets were designed in from the start.

Processed and stored in the EU
Calls, transcripts, and summaries stay in Ireland. Storage residency and processing residency, not just one of the two.
Recording off by default
Audio is transcribed in-flight and discarded unless you deliberately enable retention.
AI disclosure on every call
Enforced by the platform, not by your prompt. Required under the EU AI Act from 2 August 2026.
Retention and erasure controls
Set how long transcripts live and action data-subject deletion requests from the dashboard.

Frequently asked questions

Can it answer questions about specific properties?

Yes, from the listing information you give it — price, tenure, EPC rating, council tax band, availability, and chain position. If it's asked something not in your data, it says so and takes a message rather than guessing.

Will it book viewings for time-wasters?

It qualifies before it books, using criteria you set — budget, position, and timescale. Callers who don't meet them are captured as applicants for follow-up rather than given a diary slot.

What happens with valuation enquiries?

Those transfer to a human. A prospective vendor is the highest-value call an agency receives and isn't a call to automate — the agent's job there is to recognise it immediately and route it, not to handle it.

Does it work for lettings as well as sales?

Yes. Lettings enquiries have a different qualifying set — move-in date, tenancy length, pets, guarantor position, right-to-rent status — and the agent can be configured for either or both.

How does this fit with our CRM?

Calls are written back as activity against the applicant record, matched by phone number, with requirements captured as structured fields. Tell us which CRM you use when you sign up.

Is applicant data handled compliantly?

Call data is processed and stored in the EU (Ireland), audio recording is off by default, and you set the retention period for transcripts. You remain the data controller; we act as processor.

Stop losing the calls you never hear

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