Answering service for UK letting agents

The applicant who is ringing four agents

Lettings enquiries are unusually perishable. Somebody who has just found a property they like is not deliberating, they are contacting everybody with a similar listing and arranging viewings with whoever picks up. The agent who answers shapes the conversation, gets the viewing in the diary first, and frequently has the application in before the others have returned the call.

Around 85% of callers who reach voicemail never call back, and roughly 80% will not leave a message. The applicant has not gone away. They have gone to the agency down the road with a comparable property, and you will never know the enquiry existed.

The timing is what makes it hard. Portal enquiries peak in the evening, because applicants search after work. Weekend viewing requests arrive when the office is shut. By Monday the property has been let by somebody who answered on Saturday.

How letting agencies avoid missing calls from prospective tenants and buyers

The short answer is that agencies stop relying on office hours and put something in front of the phone that answers every time.

In practice that means four things. Calls are answered outside office hours, not diverted to voicemail, because that is when applicants ring. Enquiries are qualified during the call rather than in a callback, so a negotiator is never starting from a name and a number. Viewings are booked while the applicant is still on the phone, because an applicant who has to wait for a callback to arrange one will often have booked elsewhere by then. And every call is logged, so the agency can see how many enquiries arrive outside hours and what proportion were being lost before.

An answering service handles all four. The alternative, extending office hours or rotating an out-of-hours mobile, works but costs considerably more and tends to lapse within a few months.

What Voco does on a lettings call

Voco answers in your agency name, in a voice you choose, and works from information you configure rather than improvising. On a typical call it will:

• Establish which property the caller is enquiring about
• Take full contact details, spelled back and confirmed
• Qualify the applicant against the criteria you set, such as budget, move-in date, employment status, whether they have pets and how many people will occupy
• Answer the questions you have configured, such as whether the property is furnished, what the deposit is, whether bills are included and what your referencing requirements are
• Book a viewing into your diary where you have enabled calendar booking
• Recognise when a caller is an existing tenant or is reporting a fault, and route accordingly
• Send your team a structured summary by SMS and email within seconds of the call ending

Where it does not know something, it says so and takes details rather than guessing. It will not confirm a property is still available if you have not told it so, and it will not commit to a viewing slot that does not exist.

Applicants qualified before your negotiator rings back

The least productive call in a lettings office is a cold callback to a name and a number. The negotiator has no idea whether the applicant can afford the property, when they need to move, or whether they have already viewed three others.

Voco captures the enquiry as a record. Budget, area, bedrooms, move-in date, employment status, pets, occupancy, whether they have seen the listing and how soon they want to view. Your negotiator opens the callback already knowing whether this is a viewing worth arranging.

That changes how the morning runs. Instead of working a list of names in the order they arrived, the team works a list of qualified applicants in order of how well they fit what is available. Applicants who do not meet the criteria for a property can be redirected to something that suits them, which is a better outcome for them and a saved viewing slot for you.

Viewings booked without the back and forth

Arranging a viewing usually takes three calls and two voicemails. The applicant rings, the negotiator calls back, the applicant is at work, and the property is let in the meantime.

Where you have connected a calendar, Voco offers the slots you have made available and books directly. Where you have not, the enquiry arrives with the applicant's availability already captured, so the booking takes one call rather than four.

Tenancy and referencing questions

A large share of lettings calls are not new enquiries at all. They are applicants partway through referencing wanting to know what happens next, people asking what documents they need, and prospective tenants checking whether a guarantor is required.

These are the calls that consume a negotiator's afternoon and generate no new business, and they are almost entirely answerable from information you have already written down. Configured properly, Voco handles them in full and only escalates the ones that genuinely need a person.

Existing tenants ringing your office

Not every call to a lettings office is about letting a property. Existing tenants ring the number they have, and often that is yours.

Voco can recognise a maintenance report and route it separately rather than dropping it into your applicant enquiries, so nothing gets lost between the two. If maintenance triage and out-of-hours emergency handling are the bigger problem for your agency, that is covered in detail on our property management answering service page.

Landlords ringing to list a property

New landlord enquiries are the highest-value call a lettings office receives, and they arrive unpredictably. Voco can identify them at the front of the call, capture the property, the postcode, whether they are currently let and their timescale, and flag them for a same-day response. Valuation and vendor calls on the sales side are covered on the estate agents page. If you are a landlord letting your own property rather than an agency, the page for landlords managing their own properties is the right one.

Caller data and compliance

Agencies process a large volume of personal data belonging to people who are not yet, and may never become, their clients.

Call data is stored in UK and EU data centres. Voco Digitals Ltd is registered with the ICO. A data processing agreement is available covering your agency as controller and Voco as processor. Recordings and transcripts are encrypted in transit and at rest, retention periods are configurable, and deletion requests can be actioned against an individual caller. Callers can be told they are speaking to an AI assistant, and that is a setting you control.

Fitting around the systems you already use

Nothing to install and no new number. Calls forward from the number on your listings and your website, and you choose when: only outside office hours, only when the line is engaged or unanswered, or every call.

Voco books into a connected calendar where you have enabled that, and otherwise delivers every enquiry as a structured record your team enters once. If you run a specific agency CRM and want enquiries to land inside it, tell us which one. Integration priorities are set by what customers ask for rather than by a list on a website.

Getting started

You can be live in minutes. Signing up walks you through a short setup flow covering your agency details, your stock, your hours and the questions your team answers most often. Choose a voice, confirm, and the assistant is ready to answer.

Getting your qualifying criteria right takes a little longer and is worth the time. Budget around an hour to set the questions you want asked on every applicant call, decide how maintenance reports are routed, and test it on your own line.

There is no setup fee, no contract, and a 30 day money-back guarantee. Plans start from £49/month.

Related: answering services for property professionals, how call handling works, compare answering services, work out the cost of missed calls.