Property Portal With Agent Enquiry Workflow

Property portals tend to assume listings arrive from a feed and enquiries arrive by email. In practice, listings arrive through several channels including spreadsheets, and enquiries that reach the wrong agent are the main source of lost business.

The portal normalised listings on entry so the same property appearing through three channels is one record, with the duplicates merged rather than shown three times. Merging is manual and logged, because an automatic merge on two addresses that are genuinely different is a serious defect.

Enquiry routing is the part that mattered most. Each enquiry is assigned by area, price band and agent availability, and the assignment is visible to the agent, so a missed enquiry is a visible gap rather than a silence. Where routing is uncertain it goes to a coordinator instead of being guessed, and the enquiry is never left unowned.

The CRM handoff happens once, at the point where the enquiry is qualified, and carries the full enquiry history so nobody starts from a blank record.

Search was tuned on real queries rather than on a specification, and the map view was kept subordinate to the list because a map is useful for area and misleading for price.

Testing covered duplicate listings, the unassigned enquiry path and the case where an agent’s availability changes mid-enquiry.

Handover included the routing rules, since they are business policy rather than code and will be changed by the client.