AI? It is Not for Me
Thought Leadership by Robert Horwood – Co-Founder of Prevou
‘Why estate agents who think they do not need AI might actually have the most to gain.
Estate agency is a people business. You are dealing with people’s homes, their money, their families and sometimes one of the biggest decisions they will ever make. So, when people start talking about AI taking over everything, I can understand why some agents switch off. It is all too much noise sometimes. But I think we are looking at it the wrong way.
I do not think the question is whether AI can replace an estate agent. I do not think it should. The question I am more interested in is: Can AI make a good estate agent better? That is what we have spent the last 12 months trying to work out at Prevou, and things have moved incredibly fast since we first started. When we started building Prevou, I do not think I fully appreciated just how quickly AI was going to develop.
Today it can have a natural conversation with a customer, respond to an enquiry instantly, answer questions about a property and the surrounding area, qualify a buyer or tenant, speak different languages, and even book a viewing, and that is just the half of it.
And the most crucial point of all?
It does not go home at 6pm.
Imagine someone sitting at home at 9:30pm on a Friday night looking at one of your properties.
They want to know if it is still available.
How far is the train station?
What are the schools like?
Can they bring a dog?
Can they view it on Sunday?
But they do not want to spend the next hour scrolling through property after property, filling in form after form, and then waiting for someone to get back to them.
They just want answers
And if that property is not right for them, they want to be able to say what they are actually looking for and see what else might be available. Traditionally, they fill in a form, and somebody gets back to them the next day.
With Prevou, the conversation can start right there and then at 9:30pm, not the following day. I do not see that as replacing the estate agent at all. I see it as a win-win for both the agent and the customer. The customer gets a better, more immediate, immersive experience, while the agent receives a genuine, qualified opportunity rather than just another enquiry.
The Cost of Not Having AI?
Everyone talks about generating more leads, but what about the ones you have just paid for? Agents spend a lot of money generating enquiries through Rightmove, Zoopla, their websites and marketing, and we all know it is not cheap. What happens when an enquiry arrives at 10pm, the office is busy, or a buyer just wants a couple of questions answered before booking a viewing?
How many of those opportunities simply disappear, and at what cost?
That became a big part of what we wanted Prevou to solve. Respond quickly, answer the questions, understand what the customer wants, qualify the opportunity and, where possible, get the viewing booked. Then hand it back to the agent. The aim is simple, make sure fewer opportunities are missed.
Because that is where the human being really matters, getting in front of as many people as possible, building relationships, winning instructions, negotiating deals, and getting transactions over the line. Correct me if I am wrong, but that is what we think agents would prefer to spend their time doing, right?
Where the FOMO comes In
I am not trying to say to agents, use AI or you are finished. I do not believe that is the case. But I do think there is something worth considering.
What if the agency across the road starts using AI and you do not?
Their enquiries are being answered in seconds.
Their customers can get answers in the evening and at weekends.
Potential buyers are being qualified before the negotiator picks up the phone.
More viewing opportunities are reaching the team.
And their staff have more time to concentrate on valuations, instructions, and deals.
That is when it stops being about whether you like AI or not and becomes a business question.
The biggest threat probably is not AI replacing estate agents. Because it is the agency across the road embracing AI while you are still deciding not to.
So, Is AI for You?
Sam, my wife and I, along with the whole team at Prevou, like to think the answer is yes, but to a particular type of AI. Artificial intelligence that does something incredibly simple, it makes sure every enquiry has the chance to become a conversation. And sometimes, the simplest ideas are the ones that make the biggest difference. We have spent the past 12 months focusing on a very simple question:
(Robert Horwood Co-founder Prevou)
How can we use AI to genuinely help an estate agent run a better and more profitable business?
Sam Bowles part of the Prevou team comes at it with years of experience inside estate agency. He knows how agents work, where the frustrations are and where opportunities get lost.
My wife and I have approached it more from the customer-facing side. What does the person looking for a home actually want? What frustrates them? And what sort of service do people now expect when practically everything else in their lives is available instantly? Those two sides have helped shape Prevou. We are not interested in putting AI into an agency simply so somebody can say they are using AI. It has to actually do something useful.
So can Prevou:
Help an agent respond faster?
Convert more of the enquiries they are already paying for?
Free their team from repetitive work?
Give their customers a better experience?
Make sure profitable opportunities are not being lost simply because nobody can be available 24 hours a day?
When we started, if you had asked me whether I was 100% certain we could answer yes to every one of those questions, I probably would have said no. It was maybe one or two, but not all of them, mainly because we were still learning.
We were building, testing, speaking to agents, getting things wrong, changing things, and finding out what agents actually wanted from us. Twelve months later, after all those conversations and all the feedback we have received, I feel very differently.
Now my answer to every one of those questions is a huge YES.
And that is probably the biggest thing I have learned on this journey. AI does not need to change what makes a great estate agent great. It needs to give them more opportunity to be one.
So, where does it all go from here?
I obviously do not know exactly what the estate agency industry will look like in five years. Nobody does. But I suspect we will look back at the debate about whether estate agents should use AI in much the same way we now look back at the debate about whether agencies needed websites.
The winners will not necessarily be the agencies using the most AI. I think they will be the ones that work out where people matter most and use AI everywhere else to give those people an advantage.
At Prevou, we are still at the beginning of our own journey. We are an AI company built specifically for Estate Agencies, but our ambition has never been to take the people out of the industry. Quite the opposite. We want to help agents do more of the things that actually make them good estate agents, while making sure fewer opportunities are being lost along the way.
And hopefully, five years from now, when we look back at how AI changed estate agency, all of us at Prevou will be able to say, ‘We were there at the beginning, and we made a difference.’ Hopefully, if you have read this far you are now thinking “AI? Might be for me,”
Please book a free Prevou demo and decide for yourself using this LINK
Andrew Stanton CEO Proptech-PR
