Threll.ai
Estate agency

The bid cannot come by phone. Everything else does.

In an estate agency, the one call that matters most is also the only one the regulation forbids taking verbally. The rest of the phone volume is something few offices have decided who should handle.

5 min read
A woman in a dark coat stands alone on the pavement outside the entrance of a modern apartment building, a mobile phone to her ear and a folded paper brochure in her other hand, in flat overcast daylight

OBOS, Norway's largest housing cooperative, published its August figures on 1 September. Prices for second-hand OBOS flats in Oslo rose 0.8 per cent from July to August – an increase, but weaker than the August average since the series began in 2004. Nationally they rose 1.7 per cent. Eiendom Norge, the industry body, publishes its own August statistics today; the key figures on its front page currently show an average selling time of 62 days.

In the papers this is a story about prices. In an estate agency it is something else: every listing lives longer, more properties sit on the market at once, and the phone rings for more weeks per sale than it did when everything moved in a fortnight.

Estate agency is also the sector where the line around what a voice agent may do is drawn most sharply. In Norway it is written into regulation.

The call the agent must never take

Start there, because it is the first thing everyone asks about.

Section 6-3 of the Norwegian estate agency regulation says the agent shall only convey bids, acceptances and rejections given in writing, and that valid identification and a signature must be obtained from the bidder before a bid is passed on. An electronic message counts as writing, provided the content remains available afterwards.

So a voice agent cannot receive a bid. It cannot confirm one, read it back to the bidder as though it were registered, or say anything a caller could reasonably take to mean the bid is now in.

This is not a technical limitation someone builds around in the next release. It is a rule about what counts as a bid at all. The only correct handling is that the agent says what applies and points to the written channel – and does it the same way every time.

The specific rule is Norwegian, and the line sits in a different place in each market. In Sweden the obligation runs the other way: under the Swedish estate agency act the agent must forward every bid to the seller, including bids a prospective buyer did not submit through the prescribed channel, and record each one in the register of bids. A bid spoken on the phone does not disappear because it was spoken on the phone. Find your own version of this rule before you switch anything on.

But the phone rings during the bidding round anyway

The third paragraph of the same section gives the trade an unusually predictable window: in consumer sales the agent shall not convey a bid with an acceptance deadline earlier than 12:00 on the first working day after the last advertised viewing. Saturday does not count as a working day.

After a Sunday viewing, that means Monday morning. Everyone knows when it happens – including the people with no intention of bidding.

They are calling about something else. Has a bid come in? What are the monthly common costs? Can you email me the condition report? When does the deadline fall? Is there time for another viewing before then?

None of those questions requires a licensed agent. All of them compete for one in exactly the quarter of an hour when the bidders are calling.

What the volume is made of

It is more useful to sort the calls by what they require than by who is calling.

The call What it requires
“When is the viewing, and do I need to register?” Information already in the listing
“Has anyone bid on that flat?” Status on one listing – a lookup, not judgement
“Can you send me the condition report?” A document to an email address
“I want to place a bid” A written channel with identification. Never the agent
“What would it cost me to sell?” A valuation in an agent's calendar
“I can't reach my agent” A message passed on, with a time she will call back
“I'm the buyer, and I have a question about completion” The settlement department, not the agent

The top three rows need no access to the back-office system beyond a lookup and a send. The valuation needs write access to one calendar. That is the order that gets a voice-agent project into production at all – start where the integration is cheapest, not where the demo was most impressive.

Which way does the bid rule run in your market?

Fifteen minutes where we settle what your agent does with an amount spoken on the phone — refuse it, or capture it and hand it over.

Book Meeting (opens in a new window)+47 24 12 66 30

15 minutes · no obligation · pick your own time

The most valuable call is the one nobody gets to

Notice where the money sits in the table above.

Buyer-side calls are numerous, but they concern a property that will sell anyway – at worst to a different buyer. The seller ringing to ask what it costs to sell is something else entirely. He is a listing that has not been signed, and he rarely rings only you.

A seller weighing up three agencies rings three agencies. Whoever answers gets the valuation into the calendar. The other two get voicemail and a call back the next day, by which time the choice is usually made.

It resembles the problem in property management, where the person calling is rarely the person paying the bill. In estate agency it runs the other way: the most valuable caller is precisely the one who will pay – and he calls once.

Pace is an obligation, not just an ambition

The first paragraph of section 6-3 is easy to read past, but it is the most interesting part for anyone automating here. The agent shall facilitate a proper bidding round, and adapt the pace of the sales work to a level at which the client and interested parties are assured a sound basis for their decisions.

It is one of the few places in Norwegian law where slowness is a duty.

For an agency putting a voice agent on the phone, that gives a useful split. Access to information may well get faster: opening hours disappear, the queue disappears, and a prospective buyer gets an answer at nine in the evening. The bidding round itself must not get faster. An agent that does not distinguish between the two can end up pressing someone who should have been left to think.

In practice this is a question of what the agent says when a caller edges towards a bid – and of what triggers a handover to a human, and what the human is told. It should be settled before the agent answers its first call, not after the first complaint. The caller should also know what she is speaking to: the disclosure duty in the EU AI Act applies here as everywhere, and it is cheap to meet and expensive to ignore.

What makes the sector different

Most sectors have one customer at the other end of the line. An estate agency has two parties in every case, and only one of them is the client.

That makes the phone a place where the roles have to stay clear at all times. The prospective buyer calling is not the customer – but the agent owes her duties all the same, and a loose answer on the phone can become a claim later.

A voice agent does not help with that balance. What it does is take away the calls where no balance is involved: opening hours, addresses, common costs, documents, registrations. Those are the calls that eat Monday morning.

Threll.ai builds voice agents in Norwegian, Swedish and Danish. In estate agency the question is not how much of an agent's job a voice agent can do. It is how many of the calls were never an agent's job.

Frequently asked questions

Not necessarily, and that is the trap. The Norwegian rule voids a spoken bid; the Swedish one does close to the opposite, obliging the agent to forward every bid to the seller and enter it in the register of bids, including one that arrived outside the prescribed channel. In the first case a bid taken by phone is nothing. In the second it is an obligation you have now incurred without recording it. Read your own market's wording before you decide what the agent may hear.

Decide in advance, because the two regimes demand opposite behaviour and the agent cannot improvise between them. Where a bid must be written, the amount is not accepted, not read back and not promised onward, since reading it back is what convinces a bidder the bid is in. Where every bid must be logged and forwarded, the same amount has to be captured accurately and passed to the seller. Pick one and write it into the script.

Technically it is only a lookup, so the question is editorial rather than technical. The agency has to decide whether the agent says that a bid has arrived, how many bidders are in, or the figure itself, and the answer has to be the same to both parties in the case. Settle it before the agent answers its first call, not after the first complaint.

By letting only the access to information get faster. The agent can answer a question about common costs at nine in the evening, but it must not offer to shorten an acceptance deadline, chase a decision or imply that someone ought to make up their mind now. The duty to keep a sound pace attaches to the bidding round, not to the time a caller spends waiting.

Yes, and in practice it narrows what the agent should say. The prospective buyer is not the client, but a loose answer to her can become a claim against the agency later. Hold the agent to what is in the listing and the sales documents, and let it hand over rather than interpret, particularly on condition, encumbrances and what is included in the sale.

Related Articles

Continue reading more articles

See all articles