Letting agencies are pouring money into AI and automation tools that will make their businesses worse, not better, according to Sally Lawson, founder of Agent Rainmaker.

Lawson says the rush to automate, driven by tighter margins and the compliance burden of the Renters’Rights Act, is hiding a deeper problem: most agencies were never ‘designed’ in the first place.

“You can’t automate what you never built” she says. 

“Most agencies didn’t get planned, they just happened. Someone was good at letting property, the phone kept ringing, so they hired help.

“Ten years later there are twelve people, six hundred properties on the books, and no processes that anyone in the business could lay out in the exact same way. Automating that just makes a broken business break faster.”

She warns that agencies which grew by accident also tend to have hired by accident too, and have ultimately ended up with teams built for yesterday’s business rather than today’s.

“People get taken on for the job which needed doing at the time. The business moves on, the job changes shape, and the person is still there. Often loyal, often great at something, just not the ‘something’ that the agency now relies on to grow sustainably.

“Nobody wants to have that conversation, so they buy software instead and hope it fills the gap. It rarely does.”

Lawson insists she’s not against technology – in fact, the opposite, providing it’s planned and implemented properly.

“I’ve built my career on systems that bring in business while people sleep. But every one of them worked because the thinking came first. Automation is a multiplier. Multiply a well-built agency and you get scale. Multiply a mess and you get an even bigger mess, with a monthly subscription.”

She’s urging agency owners to map how their business really operates and decide which roles actually need filling, as well as why it’s important to consider whether it’s physical staff needed in the office, or if external resources like virtual assistants and AI tools are better suited. 

A framework she calls ‘The Freestyle Business’.
 
She and the Agent Rainmaker team will expand on the theme “Unbroken: The Letting Agency Reborn”, in London next month where Daniel Priestley is headline speaker.

Lawson’s five signs your agency grew by accident: 

• Nobody can write down your process from the first landlord enquiry to signing the management agreement, and if they did, the next person would write a different one;

• One or two people are holding the business together because they’re the only ones who “just know” how things work;

• Your team structure looks the same as it did when most of your income came from new lets, even if it now comes from management and renewals;

• You’ve bought software in the last two years that half the team doesn’t use;

• There’s at least one role in the office you’d struggle to explain to a new hire, because it’s really just “whatever needs doing”