Breaking Property News 19/10/26
Daily bite-sized proptech and property news in partnership with Proptech-X.
Last week Sourced Living began rolling out Genifea across its branches, the platform’s first commercial CRM integration.
By Author Andrew Stanton CEO Proptech-PR
Andrew Stanton spoke to founder Pragati Dhingra about what the Genifea platform actually does, where AI fits in an estate agency, the build-or-buy question facing larger groups, why agents need to adopt AI now, and how.
Congratulations on the Sourced Living launch Pragati. (Q) For readers meeting Genifea for the first time, what is it?
Thank you. Sourced Living is a forward-thinking group, and going live with them has been a proud moment for us.
Genifea is a multichannel AI platform that runs across an agency’s front office, day, and night. It is easiest to explain by what it does.
It answers every enquiry, on every channel. Genifea takes phone calls in a natural voice, holds real conversations on WhatsApp, and picks up portal leads from email. When a Rightmove or Zoopla lead lands, Genifea sends a personal WhatsApp reply in under a minute, while the applicant is still looking at the listing, evenings and weekends included.
It qualifies, books, and finds new business. It works out what the customer wants and qualifies them against the agency’s own criteria, whether that is budget, timing, cash offers or, in lettings, income against rent. It books the viewing or valuation on the spot, offering real slots that fit the diary and optimize the travel time between appointments. The buyer who also has a home to sell is offered a valuation, and mortgage and conveyancing referrals are surfaced to the branch.
It remembers every relationship. A returning contact is recognised the moment they call or message, even if the last conversation happened on a different channel. Each conversation picks up where the last one ended, so customers are never asked for the same information twice and the relationship keeps moving forward.
It keeps the CRM and the diary in order. It writes the lead, the notes, and the appointment straight into the CRM, and picks up the notes and edits the team makes by hand, so Genifea and the negotiators work from the same memory. It manages the whole office’s diary across negotiators, spreading appointments across the day and the team and planning around real travel times.
It takes instructions like a colleague. The branch runs Genifea from an ordinary WhatsApp chat. To reschedule an open house, send one message and Genifea contacts every confirmed attendee and moves them to the new slot. If a staff member has to take a day off, tell Genifea and it moves their appointments to colleagues in line with your working preferences. Where an appointment can’t be moved, it contacts the customer and agrees a new time.
It follows property-specific rules. Tell it a property has an open house, and it stops offering individual viewings for that property. Set criteria for one listing, cash buyers only for example, and every lead for that property is qualified against them. Out of the box it surfaces valuation opportunities, and it will follow any qualification script you want it to use. It adapts to your way of working, rather than asking you to adapt to the tool.
It watches for what matters to your business. Give Genifea your own list of what counts as urgent, and it screens every conversation against that list and alerts the right person. For a sales-only agent, that might be a valuation opportunity. For a firm with a large managed portfolio, it might be a tenant locked out, or a fire reported at a property.
It knows your stock, including what is not advertised. Genifea pulls properties from the CRM, and the branch can add more directly, including off-market inventory. When someone describes what they are looking for, Genifea matches them against everything you hold, advertised or not.
We are adding new capabilities almost every week. An agent who chooses Genifea gets one platform that already handles a great deal and grows more capable every month, rather than another single-purpose tool.
(Q) Pragati, that is a lot of moving parts. What does it take for an agency to get started, and to run it day to day?
It takes about five minutes Andrew, and no IT skills. There is nothing to install and nothing to migrate. We also offer a human guided setup for those who need additional assurance.
The branch decides how Genifea works alongside its people. It can take every call, or only the calls nobody picks up within about ten seconds, which covers out of hours and the moments when the whole team is busy. Portal leads reach it when the branch forwards its Rightmove and Zoopla lead emails to Genifea, so no portal integration is needed. It connects to MS 365 Calendar, Google Calendar, and our first CRM integration, with Nest, syncs both ways. More CRMs are coming.
From then on, the branch runs it over WhatsApp, the way it would brief a new colleague. “23 Station Road, open house Friday 3 to 5pm” is all it takes to set up that open house. The branch can tell it that certain staff cover certain postcodes on certain days, that junior negotiators take viewings while seniors take viewings and valuations, or that viewings run from 11am to 6pm and valuations from 8am to 8pm. Changes take effect straight away, and every qualification decision Genifea makes is visible to the agency for review.
(Q) You come from an AI and technology background. What drew you to estate agency?
I have worked in AI since 2007. When I moved to the UK, I found myself on the other side of the counter, trying to find a home and often hearing nothing back. Around the same time, I was helping Homesfy move toward responding to leads in under 60 seconds, so I knew it could be done differently.
Over about 18 months we built Genifea with input from hundreds of agents, much of it from sitting in their branches. I saw negotiators stretched thin while phones rang out and inboxes overflowed. They did not need a faster version of the same process. They needed a different way of running the front office.
(Q) Many agents say they want a person handling every call, for the personal touch. Where do you stand?
It is a personal choice, and I respect it. Estate agency runs on people: the valuation, the viewing, the honest word when a chain wobbles.
But look at it from the consumer’s side. Picture a buyer who enquires about three homes on the same street, each listed with a different agent.
- The first agent’s AI answers straight away, learns they also have a house to sell, and books a viewing and a valuation.
- The second agent’s call goes to voicemail.
- The third agent’s call reaches a message-taking service.
Leaving a message with a person does little more for that buyer than leaving one on voicemail. The relationship does not move forward, the buyer still has to chase, and no new business comes to light for the agent. Ask yourself where that customer feels served, and which agent walks into a valuation the next day.
(Q) Agents are hearing that they need to build their own AI agents to stay competitive. Is that fair?
Agents already have enough on their hands. Asking them to become AI specialists as well, just to keep up, is asking too much. A system like Genifea would likely cost millions of pounds and years to build.
Smaller, band-aid LLM wrappers are more realistic to build, and for those I use the analogy of an iceberg. The part above the water can go live quickly. Underneath sits everything you then own securing it, upgrading it, handling model drift and providers downgrading models without notice, keeping pace with new model releases, and complying with AI regulation as it comes into effect.
Even after going to all those lengths, you would be holding one more siloed tool with a limited, static set of capabilities.
We rely on our depth in AI and technology to deliver something that works out of the box and fits how each branch already operates.
We believe that agents should spend their time with customers and still get the head start instead of spending time worrying about their home-grown solution dragging them down.
(Q) Larger groups have the budgets to build in-house Pragati. Should they?
I understand the temptation. The catch is that large language models are probabilistic by nature. So how do you deliver a reliable customer experience on a foundation that works on probability? That is where years of technical experience matter, and it’s where we have put an extraordinary amount of focus. Genifea has guardrails and specific architecture choices that make it far more accurate and dependable than a thin layer over an off-the-shelf model.
A product like this also runs several models working together. Each one has to be evaluated continuously. Any of them can drift or be downgraded by its provider, and better alternatives keep arriving. Moving to them without dropping a single enquiry is permanent specialist work.
This does not mean it is not doable. If a group has a few million pounds and a couple of years of runway, they should absolutely try. There is tremendous advantage in having operational AI on your side. But the build is only the beginning. After that they own the security, the infrastructure, and the constant evolution, just to stay competitive.
(Q) Most of the big software providers now build AI into their own products. How should agents weigh that up?
Most providers offer AI features that agents switch on one task at a time. They are LLM-assisted speed-ups. If an agent wants to run faster on the same treadmill, that is a viable option.
Buying AI from one software vendor also limits you to what that vendor’s system can see and do. A typical branch runs half a dozen systems, and the CRM is one of them. The data is spread across all of them. To build something transformational for operations, you need an intelligence layer on top of those systems, not inside one of them.
Genifea is built to bridge those silos. Today it works across the front-office channels, the diary, and the CRM. Over time it will cover property management, prospecting, lead generation and more, becoming one connected brain that understands the business it serves.
Genifea also keeps its own memory of every relationship. When a known contact gets in touch again, Genifea doesn’t ask for details it already has. It asks only for what’s missing and moves the conversation on. That memory stays with the agency when it moves from one CRM to another: the same customer is recognised the next day, with their history intact. So Genifea protects agents from being locked into one CRM, and from silos that stop them getting full value from their own data.
(Q) AI pricing can be hard to follow. How do you charge?
In pounds and pence, and it’s published on our website. There are two plans. Self-Employed is £99 a month. Agency Branch is £499 a month per branch, manages the whole team’s diaries together, and includes £100 of usage. Usage is 1p a second for calls and 50p per WhatsApp conversation. We charge no setup fee and no CRM integration fee.
We make it easy for every agent to see what their bill will be for their volume of business. They don’t have to worry about cost overruns because some flow started consuming more tokens after a change in the background. Choosing the models, balancing cost against quality and absorbing a provider’s changes is our job, not theirs.
For most agents, Genifea pays for itself out of budget they already spend. Call handling services that cost more and do less become unnecessary. So do certain kinds of VA support, and potentially a few single-purpose tools. The new revenue it brings in through valuations and referral fees is the cherry on top.
We also don’t use contracts or any other kind of tie-in. AI is moving so fast that no agent should be trapped in technology that could leave them less competitive next year. They need the freedom to adopt whatever is best for their business.
So, customers can walk away any day, with a full export of their data. We want them to stay by choice, not because of a paper they signed or because we’re holding their data to ransom. The only thing that should keep a customer with us is that we’re still the best choice for them, and that keeps us sharp.
(Q) What’s next for Genifea?
Andrew – more capability, every month. Some larger features are in the works and will be revealed in the coming months, and new operational abilities are being added every week. For example, we are building specialist tools for networks and large multi-branch setups that allow them to leverage their scale for uplifting every single branch performance.
Then there are features that look small on their own, like rescheduling an open house with one message, or rearranging a day’s appointments when someone is off sick. Put hundreds of those together and the time and money an agency spends on day-to-day operations falls a long way, while its customer service rises sharply.
The agencies that pull ahead will meet customers when and where they are ready, and free their people for the work only people can do, and we will be building continuously towards that vision.
Andrew Stanton Executive Editor – moving property and proptech forward. PropTech-X
You May Also Enjoy
Four in ten homes see asking price reduced
Breaking Property News 19/10/26
Mixed signals in UK construction as contract awards rise, but starts fall
Estate Agents Brace for Rising Compliance Costs
The £2m Mansion Tax, ‘Renting for Now’, and Life Under the Renters’ Rights Act
