Omnia Vastgoed sells homes, guides buyers and manages property in the Antwerp region. The agency has built its reputation on open communication and taking the whole job off your hands, which is exactly what comes under pressure once more work arrives than a single inbox can handle.

The challenge

Enquiries from prospective buyers came in through the agency's own site and through the property portals, and they all ended up in the same place: the owner's inbox. He read them, worked out which property they were about and passed them on to the right colleague. Every single day.

That is not a forwarding problem, it is a distribution problem. As long as one person is the sorting step, every buyer waits on that one person's diary. And anyone who does not hear back simply rings the next agency. The office wanted to handle more properties without taking on more people, and for that the follow-up had to become dependable.

Our approach

We began by mapping how enquiries arrive and who deals with them. Around that we built a single workspace with the properties at its centre, and left in place the systems the team already knew.

New enquiries are collected automatically. The address of the property is read out of the message, and that address links the enquiry to the right property and therefore to the right agent. It sounds simple, but the same property is written slightly differently in every email, and that is precisely the bit an ordinary inbox rule cannot manage. Alongside it we built a portal where owners can follow what is happening with their property themselves.

The result

Manual copying dropped by eighty per cent, and each member of staff now handles two to three times more properties than before. Enquiries reach the right person immediately rather than the owner, and property owners no longer have to ring up to find out where things stand.

"The manual copying has largely disappeared. Above all, their solutions brought more structure to our company," says owner Marvin Trentels.

Where it goes from here

The workspace has become the fixed point where enquiries, properties and owners come together. We stay involved for follow-up, training and the next steps.