Their Story
Meet Holland Properties
Holland Properties is an independent agency specialising in Canary Wharf and the surrounding Docklands, with two UK offices and overseas representation in South Africa and Hong Kong. A small team handles lettings, sales and property management with over 200 properties running on MRI. Chris Didd, who heads up property management and came in from an IT background, had long suspected the tools the industry relied on were holding agencies like his back.
The Challenge
The 24-48 Hour Gap Between an Enquiry and a Reply
Holland managed work orders out of Excel. The state of any given job lived across a spreadsheet, an inbox and the CRM, which meant reconstructing what had happened (i.e. who was contacted, when, what was agreed) took hunting through multiple systems rather than opening one record.
Enquiries had the same shape of problem. They arrived through the portals and landed in two places at once: the team's inboxes and the CRM. Someone had to spot them, pick them up, and work back through them by hand. With a small team juggling viewings, inspections and management, the wait for a client to hear back ran to one or two days. Enquiries arriving outside opening hours waited longer still. Whilst the emergency line covers urgent management issues, there was no efficient system covering new applicant enquiries.
Felicity in Action
What Changed When Felicity Went Live
Felicity now answers the calls, emails and messages, including the ones that come in after the office closes. Each enquiry comes back qualified, with the details the team would otherwise have spent the first call collecting. Urgent items get flagged through a link so they can be dealt with straight away, rather than sitting in an inbox until morning.
For the team, the morning starts in a different place. Instead of cold-calling a list to find out who's who, they walk into conversations already knowing the applicant, their position and what they're after. The junior staff who used to feel awkward asking the qualifying questions no longer have to. Felicity has already asked them.
Felicity sits in front of the agency's MRI system, fielding the calls and emails as they land. The team still makes every decision that matters: anything Felicity is unsure of reaches a person, fully briefed, so nothing important is left unnoticed. For a small team stepping into AI for the first time, that, plus the LightWork team on hand when something needs a steer, made it far less daunting.
See what Felicity would handle for your team
Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
Enquiry turnaround | 24-48 hours | Instant first response, day or night |
Out-of-hours enquiries | No coverage | Answered and qualified on arrival |
Work order management | Excel spreadsheets | Live data in one view |
The Results
Time Back Where It Counts
Since going live, the change Chris points to first is time. Roughly 10 to 15 minutes per enquiry, per person, per day, no longer spent on the tick-box questions every agent runs through. Out of hours, issues arrive already triaged, so the team picks them up in minutes rather than starting from scratch.
That time goes somewhere useful, such as finding new instructions, door knocking, doing inspections, and chasing new business opportunities a small team rarely has spare hands for.
Off the spreadsheets, onto live data
The Excel work orders are gone. Felicity holds the same information in one view and updates it as things happen, so the team can see the state of every job without piecing it together. Chris says it's enabled his team to come away from the spreadsheets entirely, because the data sits in one place and is live.
An audit trail, ready for the Renters' Rights Act
Every job now carries its own record: when it came in, who was contacted, the questions asked, the works order, the message back to the landlord. For a sector heading into the Renters' Rights Act and PRS reform, where visibility is the whole game, that record is worth more than the time it saves.
About the Customer
Chris Didd
Head of Property Management
Chris leads property management at Holland Properties and came into the industry from an IT background, which left him with little patience for the outdated systems agencies tend to put up with. He brought Felicity in to give a small independent team the kind of cover that used to belong only to the big firms.
