The Challenge
Robert Watts has been selling homes across West Yorkshire since 1979. Five offices between Bradford, Kirklees and Calderdale; the founder's three children running the firm now; listed in the Best Estate Agent Guide. A serious, grown-up business — not a startup looking for gadgets.
The problem they came to us with was narrower than "our tech is old". Negotiators were spending hours every week on cold outreach — valuations and enquiries that had gone quiet and were never going to convert. Cold leads got worked the same way as warm ones, in the same order, because the software couldn't tell the difference. And because each office's enquiries sat in that office's inbox, a buyer who rang Cleckheaton on Monday and Eccleshill on Thursday looked like two different people.
Our Approach
We didn't start with a product pitch. We sat with two negotiators at two offices and stopwatched the actual work — how long the team spent on lead chasing versus talking to warm buyers, what a cold-outreach call cost in minutes per week, what the firm was paying in staff hours for work that wasn't converting.
Then we put the numbers on a single page next to what an automated system would cost to build and run. The sums were blunt. James said yes that afternoon.
What We Built
Lead scoring. Inbound enquiries are ranked automatically by conversion likelihood — engagement signals, property-value bracket, how quickly someone replies. Negotiators work the warmest leads first instead of clearing the queue chronologically.
Communication automation. Multi-touch nurture sequences (email and SMS) fire on schedule for cold leads without anyone chasing. The moment a lead replies, the sequence stops and a human picks it up. Leads stop dying quietly in someone's inbox.
Unified data hub. One view of every lead across all five offices, with full interaction history, source attribution and outcome tracking. No more "which negotiator spoke to this person last" and no more branch-by-branch silos.
The whole thing shipped in a week.
Results
Staff hours spent on cold outreach dropped by 90% — that was the headline number the maths was built around, and it held. Average response time on web enquiries went from hours to under a quarter of that. Valuations booked from previously-cold leads lifted 22% in the first quarter.
Qualitatively: negotiators stopped resenting the cold list, because they weren't working it any more — the system was. And management got a single screen that showed where every lead sat across the whole business, rather than five separate inboxes and a weekly spreadsheet.
"We needed someone to look at what my negotiators were actually spending their time on, not someone to sell us a CRM. Reshape put the numbers in front of us. The platform they built in a week has paid for itself in staff hours alone — and my team are spending that time on valuations, not chasing dead leads."
— James Watts, Director, Robert Watts