Open House Bedford: 30% More Viewings From the Same Enquiries
The Problem
Open House Bedford manage around 800 properties. Enquiries arrived all day from four places at once — Rightmove, Zoopla, their own website, and an AI phone assistant emailing through call summaries — all into one shared inbox. Around 50 enquiry emails a day turned into roughly 150 email exchanges, because every one needed a person: work out which property they meant, check it was still available, send the questionnaire, wait, do the affordability maths by hand, decide whether a guarantor was needed, then write back. A reply took anywhere from 2 to 24 hours, depending what time the enquiry came in. The ones that landed in the evening or at the weekend waited longest — and by then the good applicants had booked a viewing somewhere else.
The Constraint That Shaped Everything
Their CRM, 10ninety, is an ASP.NET application with no public API. The obvious build — plug into the CRM and read the leads — was never available, and Rightmove's real-time data feed is gated to CRM partners. So we inverted it: every enquiry already lands in one Google Workspace mailbox, and nobody needs a vendor's permission to read a mailbox. That decision is why the system went live in under three weeks instead of waiting on an integration that was never coming.
What We Built
Three phases, delivered in order, each one live before the next began:
Enquiry capture across every channel
Each email is read, parsed and matched against the live website listings. Where the match is certain, the reply carrying the pre-qualification link auto-sends within about a minute. Where anything is uncertain, it drafts and a human presses send.
Pre-qualification scored to their own rules
A branded form on their own domain, one question at a time, built for a phone. It never re-asks what the portal already answered. The server then scores affordability, guarantor, adverse credit, right to rent and parking against rules Open House signed off.
Viewings booked into the CRM diary
Qualified applicants are offered real slots read live from the 10ninety diary and book themselves in, against the right property and the right negotiator. Where a property still has a tenant, the tenant is asked first, with proper notice periods.
Dead enquiries turned back into leads
When a property is already let, nobody gets an apology. They get three genuinely similar homes — same area, same or more bedrooms, within £150 a month, parking if they need it.
Nobody is ever automatically declined. The four outcomes are qualified, qualified with a guarantor, needs a quick human look, and not the best match — here are three that might be. When the system is not certain, a person decides.
Built to Be Handed Over, Not Held Hostage
Every account the system touches belongs to Open House: their server, their Google Workspace, their WhatsApp Business account, their AI keys — billed directly to them at cost, with no markup. One toggle pauses everything, a health check takes thirty seconds, and a one-page handover doc means any competent developer could pick it up.
The qualification engine carries 287 automated tests, including every worked example the client signed off — so a later rule change cannot quietly break the maths on somebody's tenancy application. Mail access is least-privilege: the system can read and draft, and was deliberately never given a blanket send permission it did not need.
The Results
All figures reported by the client, September 2026
More appointments
Lead-to-appointment conversion up 30% — same enquiries, same portal spend, same team
Faster by a day
Enquiry to booked viewing in 5–10 minutes for 70% of enquiries, down from 2–24 hours just for a first reply
Admin returned
2–3 hours a day given back to the team
Pre-qualified on arrival
Around three quarters of enquiries reach staff with the affordability already worked out
Nothing typed twice
The system works across email and the CRM, so nobody re-keys the same details
Always open
Enquiries answered overnight and at weekends, with nobody in the office
“It's one of the best tech investments you can make. There's no need to worry handling enquiries on the weekend — it's been dealt with as you sleep. As a busy agency our lead conversion to appointments has increased 30%.”— Mujahid Ali, Managing Director, Open House Bedford
“Very professional, personalised service to suit your business. Ali Amin is a quick thinker and finds solutions with ease. We are very lucky to have Ali working with us and his contribution has been huge. We look forward to doing more business with Ali Amin.”— Mujahid Ali, Managing Director, Open House Bedford
Run a lettings book?
If you have been told your CRM cannot be automated, that constraint matters a lot less than you think. The first call is free, and you will leave knowing whether this is worth doing for your book.
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