If any of these sound familiar, your phone is costing you instructions
Ask tenants what frustrates them most about letting agents and the answer is usually the same: you can never get hold of them. You do not need a survey to know the moments where it bites:
- A tenant's boiler dies at 9pm, or a pipe bursts above the kitchen. The call hits voicemail, the tenant keeps ringing, and by morning it is an angry thread, a bigger repair bill and a landlord asking why nobody answered.
- An applicant calls about a new listing on Saturday morning. Nobody picks up, so they book a viewing with the agency that did, and your landlord's property sits on the market a week longer.
- A landlord weighing up who to instruct rings your office to see how quickly you answer. That test lasts one call, and there is no second attempt.
- A marketing push or a new block of instructions floods one front desk, and the third and fourth callers ring out while your negotiators are mid-viewing.
- The unanswered repair line is how a grumble grows into a one-star review, and how a one-star review grows into a formal complaint.
Each of those calls is won or lost in the seconds before someone answers. The AI Call Agent makes sure someone always does.
What the agent actually does on a letting call
This is not a message pad and it is not a phone menu. It is trained on your agency and connected to your systems, so the job gets done during the call:
- Triages maintenance properly. It takes the repair, asks the right questions and logs a structured repair report (property, tenant, fault, access notes, urgency) straight into your property management platform via API. A dripping tap is logged for the morning; a burst pipe or total loss of heating is escalated to your agreed on-call process immediately, with the details already captured.
- Books viewings and valuations during the call. Connected via API to your booking or property management platform, it looks up live availability and books the slot while the applicant is on the line, instead of promising a callback that arrives after they have booked elsewhere.
- Captures applicant details cleanly. Requirements, budget, move-in date and contact details, recorded consistently every time, so your negotiators start the follow-up with a complete record.
- Routes landlord enquiries. A prospective landlord or an existing client is passed to the right person or branch with the context already gathered, not left in a general voicemail box.
- Hands over with full context. When a call needs a human, your team picks it up knowing who is calling, which property and why. The caller does not start again from scratch.
It captures, books, routes and escalates. It does not improvise answers on deposits, notices or tenancy disputes; those go to your team with the details recorded. And every call is logged with a full transcript, so you can hear exactly how your agency sounds on the phone.
A letting agent call answering service that never clocks off
A front desk works office hours and takes one call at a time. Evenings, weekends, the lunchtime rush and the overflow during a marketing peak all go unanswered, and salary, NI, pension, holiday and sickness cover are payable whether the phone rings or not.
The AI Call Agent answers 24/7 and handles multiple calls in parallel, so the Saturday applicant, the 9pm emergency and the landlord ringing at lunchtime are all answered at once. It does not call in sick during a cold snap, and what it knows about your properties, your process and your emergency rules is retained and versioned in its knowledge base, not lost when a negotiator moves on.
This is coverage, not redundancy. Your team keeps doing what people do best, viewings, negotiations and the difficult landlord conversations, while the agent absorbs the volume, the out-of-hours calls and the routine repair reports that currently ring out.
Hire, out-of-hours call centre, or DeskCrew
Letting agencies really choose between three ways to handle the phone:
- Another hire on the front desk: full human judgement, but one shift, one call at a time, plus salary, NI, pension and cover, and the phone is still dark on Sunday evening when the boiler fails.
- A traditional answering service or out-of-hours call centre: real people, but usually message-taking and transfer from a generic script. They cannot see your diary, book the viewing or log a structured repair into your property management platform, so your team still re-keys and chases every message the next morning.
- DeskCrew: answers 24/7, handles calls in parallel, logs the repair or books the viewing during the call using live data from your systems, escalates genuine emergencies to your on-call process, and reports the outcomes to you monthly.
On price, DeskCrew starts from 199 pounds/month on the 12-Month Plan (setup waived) or 229 pounds/month plus a 399 setup on rolling Flex monthly, typically a fraction of the cost of a full-time hire covering the same hours.
A managed service with one accountable company behind it
Self-serve AI voice tools leave you to assemble, prompt, integrate and QA the thing yourself, which is the last thing a busy branch needs.
DeskCrew is a managed, QA-tested system with an owner:
- A dedicated UK number for your agency and an SLA behind the service.
- One accountable UK limited company, The Technology Framework Ltd (England and Wales, co. no. 13918137, trading since 2022), Bristol-based and serving the whole UK remotely.
- Every call logged with a full transcript, so the service is auditable, which matters when a tenant disputes what was reported and when.
- Senior people on every engagement: the person who scopes it delivers it, in plain commercial English.
- Live in 2 to 4 weeks, with the integration and QA done for you, not by you.
We report the number that matters every month, the calls answered and the outcomes, from repairs logged to viewings booked, so the value is measured, not assumed. The 12-Month Plan carries a Day-90 performance exit against KPIs agreed at kickoff.
Simple, predictable pricing
All prices exclude VAT.
12-Month Plan (billed monthly, setup waived, price locked for the term, Day-90 performance exit against agreed KPIs):
- Essential: 199 pounds/month, 500 minutes included, then 0.55/min.
- Professional: 549 pounds/month, 1,800 minutes included, then 0.40/min.
Flex monthly (rolling, 30 days notice):
- Essential: 229 pounds/month plus 399 setup, 400 minutes included, then 0.65/min.
- Professional: 599 pounds/month plus 999 setup, 1,500 minutes included, then 0.45/min.
Enterprise and multi-branch groups are custom-priced. Outbound calling agents are also available: confirming appointments and chasing overdue invoices. If you are not sure which tier fits your call volume, a quick call is the fastest way to size it.