The AI email agent for property agents

The property inbox problem

Estate and letting agency email has a shape all of its own. A new listing goes live and the enquiries@ address fills with near identical questions: is it still available, when can I view, can you send the floor plan, is the rent negotiable, are pets allowed. Each one takes a negotiator two minutes to answer, and there are dozens of them, and they arrive at 9pm on a Tuesday and all through the weekend, precisely when nobody is at a desk.

Speed decides outcomes here more than in almost any other trade. An applicant emailing about a flat has usually emailed three other agencies about three other flats in the same sitting. The agency that replies first with the availability, the details and a proposed viewing time is the agency that gets the viewing. The one that replies on Monday morning gets a polite "we've already found somewhere, thanks".

The standard fixes both have problems. Hiring more front-desk staff is expensive and still does not cover evenings and weekends. Template auto-replies ("thank you for your enquiry, a member of the team will be in touch") answer nothing and fool nobody. What agencies actually need is the thing in between: a real, specific answer to the question asked, sent immediately, with the judgement to hand anything unusual to a person. That is what an AI email agent does, and InReply is one built for exactly this kind of inbox.

What applicants and clients actually ask

Most inbound agency email falls into a short list of repeating questions:

• Availability. "Is the two-bed on Elm Road still available?" The single most common enquiry, and the one where a stale or slow answer costs the most.
• Viewing requests. "Can I view this Saturday?" Applicants want a time, not an acknowledgement.
• Details and floor plans. Square footage, EPC rating, council tax band, floor plan, photos, furnished or unfurnished, parking, outside space.
• Money questions. Rent or asking price, deposit amount, holding deposit, permitted fees, what is included in the rent.
• Suitability questions. Pets, sharers, students, smokers, minimum tenancy length, move-in dates.
• Process questions. How to apply, how referencing works, what documents are needed, how long it takes, when the deposit is protected.
• Landlord and vendor enquiries. Valuation requests, management fees, what your service covers.

Every one of these has an answer that already exists somewhere in your agency: in the listing, in your fees schedule, in your lettings process document. The work is not composing the answer; it is retrieving it and typing it out, again, for the fortieth time this week. That is retrieval work, and retrieval work is what software should do.

How InReply handles the property inbox

InReply connects to your existing Gmail or Outlook inbox through secure OAuth. There is no new email client to adopt, no extension to install and no forwarding address; enquiries keep arriving where they always have, and replies go out from the address applicants already know. If your agency runs on Microsoft 365, the Outlook setup works the same way as Gmail.

You then teach it your book. Add your live listings with their details, rents and asking prices, availability, and links to floor plans and full particulars. Add your fees schedule, your application and referencing process, your tenancy terms, your valuation offer. This becomes the knowledge base, and it is the only thing InReply is allowed to answer from. When an applicant asks whether the Elm Road flat takes pets, the reply comes from what you wrote about the Elm Road flat, not from a language model's imagination.

That grounding rule has a hard edge, deliberately. If the answer is not in the knowledge base, InReply does not invent one. The email is left for a human and surfaced on the actions list. In a trade where quoting the wrong rent or confirming a property that went under offer yesterday does real damage, "I don't know, a person will handle this" is the correct behaviour, and it is built in.

Playbooks control how each type of enquiry is treated: the tone of voice, what the reply may and may not say, and whether it is sent automatically or routed to a person. A lettings availability playbook can be brisk and factual; a landlord valuation playbook can be warmer and always end by inviting a callback; an offers-and-negotiation playbook can simply route everything to a negotiator.

Scheduling viewings by email, honestly

A claim worth being precise about. InReply does not plug into your diary or calendar system, and it will not silently book appointments on your behalf. What it does is handle the email half of viewing scheduling, which is most of the work:

1. You keep viewing availability in the knowledge base, for example "viewings on Elm Road run Tuesday and Thursday evenings and Saturday mornings".
2. When an applicant asks to view, InReply replies immediately with those options and asks which suits.
3. The applicant picks a slot, and the confirmation lands with your team, flagged on the actions list, for a negotiator to confirm and enter in your own diary.

The applicant experiences an instant, specific response instead of a next-day reply. Your negotiator does one confirmation instead of a four-message back-and-forth. And your diary stays under human control, which, given how often viewings move, is how most agencies want it.

Ghost Mode or Autopilot: choose per scenario

Every InReply plan includes Ghost Mode: each reply the AI writes is saved as a draft in your Gmail or Outlook drafts folder, and nothing sends until a person approves it. For an agency starting out, this is the sensible default. Your negotiators spend a week or two reviewing drafts, editing the occasional one, and seeing exactly what would have been sent on real enquiries.

Autopilot sends automatically, and it is controlled per playbook, not as a single global switch. In practice agencies graduate the routine playbooks first: availability answers, details and floor plan requests, process explanations. Anything involving an offer, a negotiation, a complaint or a vendor relationship can stay in Ghost Mode indefinitely, or be routed straight to a human without a draft at all. You decide scenario by scenario, and you can change your mind at any time.

What stays human: the actions list

An AI that answers everything is a liability in this business. The valuable version answers the repetitive majority and makes the exceptions impossible to miss. InReply's actions list is where those exceptions live: every email that needs a person, whether because the knowledge base could not answer it, because a playbook routed it there, or because it needs follow-through rather than a reply, appears as an item your team can see and deal with, with urgent items flagged.

For an agency that means applicant follow-through stays with your negotiators: chasing references, progressing an application, negotiating an offer, handling a gazumping situation, calming an unhappy tenant. Team members have their own logins with per-inbox access, so the sales team sees the sales inbox and the lettings team sees lettings, and nothing sits unseen in a colleague's personal mailbox while they are on leave.

A note for US real estate agents

This page uses British vocabulary, because that is where much of our property audience is: lettings (rentals), applicants (prospective tenants or buyers), viewings (showings), tenancy (lease). The mechanics translate directly. If you are a US real estate agent or property manager fielding listing inquiries, showing requests and application questions through a Gmail or Outlook address, InReply works identically: your listings and policies go in the knowledge base, routine inquiries get instant grounded replies, showings are proposed and confirmed over email, and everything needing an agent's judgement lands on the actions list. AI for real estate agents usually means lead-generation tools; this is the other half, actually answering the leads.

Set-up and pricing for agencies

Getting started takes minutes rather than a project plan: connect the inbox via OAuth, add your listings and process documents to the knowledge base, and start in Ghost Mode. Most agencies begin with a single enquiries address on Starter (£39/month, 500 credits, one inbox). Growth (£79/month, 2,000 credits, three inboxes) fits an agency with separate sales and lettings addresses; Scale (£149/month, 5,000 credits, five inboxes) covers multi-branch set-ups, and Business is custom for larger groups with unlimited inboxes. Pricing is a flat monthly workspace price, not per seat, so adding negotiators costs nothing. Every plan starts with a 14-day free trial and no credit card.

If you are still weighing up the category, the email answering service guide compares AI with human outsourced options, and the AI email agent explainer covers the technology in depth. InReply also serves other enquiry-heavy businesses, including gyms and fitness studios and vacation rental hosts.

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