Estate Agency SOPs and a Weekly CRM Report Your Team Will Actually Use

Estate agency SOPs are short written procedures for the jobs your team repeats every day, such as answering a portal enquiry, following up a viewing or updating a vendor. Written well, each one names an owner, a time limit and the CRM record to update. Paired with a one-page weekly report, they show you where enquiries, viewings and vendors are slipping.

This guide gives you four SOP templates you can copy, a weekly CRM report built on eight metrics, and a handover note for remote staff. It is process advice, not a claim about any particular CRM. Whatever system you use, the procedure should work the same way, and a CRM virtual assistant can then run the repeatable parts inside it.

What makes estate agency SOPs get used?

An SOP gets used when it is short, specific and checked. Most agencies have a procedures folder nobody opens, because the documents describe policy rather than the next click. The fix is to write for the person at their desk at 4.45pm on a Friday.

• One page per job. If it runs past a page, it is two procedures.
• A trigger. “New portal enquiry arrives” is a trigger; “good customer service” is not.
• A named owner and a backup. Role titles are fine, as long as someone is accountable.
• A time limit. “Same working day” beats “promptly”.
• A CRM action. Say which field, tag or task changes. If nothing in the CRM changes, the report cannot count it.
• An escalation rule. What does the person do when the SOP does not fit?

Review each SOP after its first month. If the team skips a step, either the step is not needed or the CRM makes it awkward. Both are worth knowing.

SOP 1: how should an enquiry be handled?

Every enquiry gets a human reply, a CRM record and a next action on the day it arrives. Speed matters: the MIT and InsideSales.com lead response study of 1.25 million leads found that contacting a lead within five minutes made it around 21 times more likely to qualify than waiting 30 minutes. That study used US sales leads, so use it as a direction rather than a UK benchmark.

1. Log the enquiry with source (portal, website, phone, board, referral), property reference and contact details.
2. Check whether the person already exists in the CRM as a vendor, applicant or landlord. Merge, do not duplicate.
3. Reply by the channel they used, within the agreed window, and ask one qualifying question (timescale, mortgage or cash, property to sell).
4. Offer a viewing or valuation slot and book it as a task or appointment.
5. Record consent status for marketing separately from the enquiry itself, following your privacy notice.
6. Set the next action with a date before closing the record.

Template reply: “Hi [name], thanks for your enquiry about [address]. It is still available. Would [day] at [time] or [day] at [time] suit for a viewing? If you can tell me whether you have a property to sell, I can make sure the right person is at the viewing. [Negotiator], [branch], [number].”

SOP 2: what happens after a viewing?

Feedback is requested the same day, passed to the vendor within an agreed period and logged so patterns show up. This SOP does the most for vendor relationships, because vendors judge an agency by how quickly they hear what buyers thought.

1. Within two hours of the viewing, message the applicant for feedback (interested, maybe, not for them, and why).
2. Log the feedback in a consistent field with a short reason code: price, layout, location, condition, other.
3. Same day or next working day, summarise feedback for the vendor. Report the substance honestly, including negatives, in a calm tone.
4. If the applicant is interested, ask about funding and position, then pass any offer on according to your offer procedure.
5. If not interested, ask what they would like to see instead and update their applicant profile.

Template feedback request: “Thanks for viewing [address] today. Could you tell me what you thought? A quick reply is fine: keen, undecided or not for you, plus anything that put you off. It helps me find you better matches.”

Offers are the one place where you should not improvise. The Property Ombudsman’s Code of Practice for Residential Estate Agents (England and Wales, March 2026 edition) says sellers must be told as soon as is reasonably possible about all offers, each offer must be confirmed in writing to the seller and the buyer within two working days, and a contemporaneous record of offers with date, time and the seller’s response must be kept. Check the current code yourself and build your offer SOP from it.

SOP 3: how often should vendors be updated?

Set a minimum contact rhythm and make the CRM flag any vendor who has gone past it. For live listings, we suggest a weekly rhythm as a starting point, but your terms of business and the vendor’s preference decide. For the stages after an offer is accepted, we cover the cadence in detail in vendor updates during a property sale.

1. At instruction, ask how the vendor wants updates (call, email, text), the best days and times, and who else may be contacted.
2. Record the preferred channel and the agreed rhythm on the vendor’s CRM record.
3. Each cycle, send enquiries, viewings, feedback themes and any recommended action.
4. Log the update with date and channel. Create the next task.
5. If the vendor has not been updated within the agreed period, the system or the manager flags it.

Template weekly update: “Hi [name], this week at [address]: [x] enquiries, [x] viewings. Feedback so far: [two themes]. My suggestion: [action, for example a price discussion, new photographs or an open morning]. Happy to talk it through on [day].”

SOP 4: how do you match applicants to new instructions?

Matching is a daily job with a fixed order: new instruction in, search the applicant list, contact the best fits, log the result. It works only if applicant records carry usable criteria and a status.

1. When a property goes live, search applicants by price range, area, bedrooms, property type and must-haves.
2. Exclude applicants marked “under offer”, “not looking” or opted out of that channel.
3. Rank by readiness: funds confirmed or property sold first, then viewings held, then enquiries only.
4. Contact the top fits first by their preferred channel with the details and a viewing offer.
5. Record who was contacted and the response so the same people are not pestered about every listing.

Applicant data is personal data, so keep only the criteria you need and review the list periodically. Our estate agency CRM cleanup checklist covers the clear-out. Marketing messages to applicants fall under PECR as well, so the ICO’s electronic mail marketing guidance applies to any automated matching alert that is promotional.

Which weekly CRM report metrics are worth tracking?

Track a small set of numbers that map to the SOPs above, and cut anything nobody acts on. Here is the one-page layout we would start from, offered as a template. The targets are yours to set.

Add a line at the bottom headed “Decision this week”, for example “chase the six vendors past their update date” or “review the afternoon response gap”. A report that ends in a decision gets read; one that ends in a chart does not. Keep it to one page and send it the same day each week. If your CRM cannot produce a figure, say so in the report instead of estimating, and treat the gap as a task.

How do you hand work to remote staff?

Give remote staff the SOP, the access they need and nothing wider, then ask for a handover note at the end of each shift. Remote work fails at the edges: a task half done, a message waiting for approval, a question nobody saw.

• Done today: records updated, messages sent, tasks closed.
• Waiting on someone: who, since when, what is needed.
• Needs a decision: the question, the options and the VA’s recommendation.
• Exceptions: anything that did not fit the SOP, with the record link.
• Tomorrow: the first three jobs.

Be explicit about what they must not send without approval: prices, offers, legal or valuation opinions, complaints and anything to a vendor whose sale is at risk. Where personal data is involved, a remote team outside the UK raises transfer questions, which our post on offshore assistants and UK GDPR covers. For daily routines in the same spirit, see the daily lead follow-up checklist.

Where to start this week

Pick one SOP, not four. Enquiry handling usually pays back first because the data feeds every metric above. Write it on one page, test it for two weeks, then add the next.

If you would like help turning these into working CRM tasks and a weekly report your assistant can prepare, our CRM automation service and the UK page explain what a free consult can scope.