Estate agency chief reveals big AI rollout for branches
Boss of TPFG, which operates dozens of estate agency brands across the UK including Martin & Co, says tech is designed to both save costs and increase turnover for franchisees.
The boss of industry giant TPFG has told The Neg that his group has ambitious plans to roll out artificial intelligence (AI) across the 1,900 branches its franchisees operate.
Fourteen franchisees operating some 25 branches have already signed up to TPFG’s new AI package with another 50 franchisees in the pipeline, Gareth Samples (main image, inset) reveals.
The AI tech being rolled out is for both sales and lettings although it’s in sales that it has had a most marked impact with AI sales-agent trials by the group generating 25% more valuation appointments than the traditional process. The other AI tech are to focus on other areas of franchise productivity including inbound lead handling and improving lead progression for its growing financial services arm.
Jobs risk
Asked whether AI runs the risk of putting some jobs within estate agency at risk, or at least worrying some agents that this may soon happen, Samples says that he’s “putting the investment in to understand where AI complements and drives additional revenue within businesses and we’ve got a number of trials ongoing”.
“Remember that every day some 4,000 leads go unanswered across our estate agencies so if we can use ‘digital negotiators’ to process those, which we don’t have the capacity to do at the moment, is a big positive,” he says.
“And if you can’t handle that level of existing leads, there’s no point trying to use marketing to get more leads.”
Samples points out that while industry experts have been calling data the industry’s ‘unmined gold’ for many years, until AI came along it could never be accessed cost effectively. He also says that AI will bring about a revolution in the way in-bound leads are managed in a manner that has not been seen before.
Save staff costs
“For a group like ours with 18.5 million data points, this is very exciting,” he adds, saying that he’s working with his franchisees to develop technology like this so that, “most importantly, it drives turnover but also saves them money because they won’t need so many staff or can repurpose staff potentially, and therefore that’s something we need to look at – and that’s what the trials are designed to do with a view, next year, to adopting a range of other AI solutions”.
He also says that to date the AI tech rolled out already is more focussed on sales, while the lettings side will take longer and need more development before franchisees see products “in equal measure across the board for both landlord and vendor leads”.
Read about TPFG’s latest results.
