A leading letting agency expert is warning owners that burying their heads in the sand on AI – whether out of fear, scepticism, or simply not getting round to it – is making their business suffer.
Sally Lawson – former president of ARLA and founder of Agent Rainmaker – says AI is moving faster through the letting sector than any technology she’s seen, and agencies that aren’t already using it properly are lagging behind.
She says: “Let’s kill the fantasy first. AI is not going to run your agency for you. It’s not going to build trust with a landlord who’s been burned before, it’s not going to educate prospects on what they need to know (and why you’re the person they should be listening to), and it’s not going to lead your team through the RRA shakeup that’s rewriting the rulebook mid-sentence.
“None of that is a software problem. That’s the job – your job – and no tool changes that.
“But – and it’s a huge but – what it will do, and what doesn’t get talked about enough, is give you back the hours you need to do all the human-led parts of your job properly, instead of drowning in the admin .
“Like answering queries or booking appointments – that’s currently stopping you doing any of it very well.
“None of that admin is glamorous. And no agency owner or senior manager should still be knee-deep in the day-to-day operations that someone, or something, else could be handling. Whether that’s because they can’t put the tools down and focus on strategy, or because they like being needed, it’s holding the business back either way.”
Lawson believes AI adoption is now moving at the fastest pace the industry has ever seen, and that the gap between agencies embedding it properly and agencies ignoring it is about to become very visible, very fast.
“This isn’t a ‘wait and see’ moment,” she added. “It’s about giving yourself the time and freedom to focus on the big picture. The growth decisions that need you as a leader. And it’s about giving your people the time back to do the parts only they can do: the human relationships that actually drive retention and delivery quality.
“That’s the whole argument. AI doesn’t replace the agent. It buys the agent their time back. What you do with that time is still entirely down to you, but agencies who aren’t even having this conversation yet are the ones who’ll be scrambling to catch up in twelve months’ time, when things will look even more different.
“It’s exactly what we’re bringing to the stage at Agent Rainmaker Live this year, with Daniel Priestley as our headline speaker. We’ll hear from agencies who’ve actually embedded AI and can show the before and after. Real call volumes, real conversion numbers, real hours given back to owners who thought they’d never see their evenings again.”
