Freed 31 hours a week of lettings admin.

Brookline manages a growing lettings book, and growth had a hidden tax: admin. Every new tenancy meant referencing, right-to-rent checks, document collection and the same details keyed into three systems that didn't talk to each other — CRM, referencing platform, property software. The team's week was disappearing into copy-paste, and tenants felt it as slow, stop-start move-ins.

Operations Director Daniel Pearce added it up: across the team, a full working day per person per week was going on referencing admin and document chasing. Move-ins were being delayed not by anything difficult, but by a missing payslip nobody had chased on Tuesday. The team was hiring to keep up with admin rather than to grow the book — the clearest sign that the process, not the people, was the problem.

We mapped a tenancy from applicant to move-in and marked every manual touch: seventeen steps, most of them chasing or re-keying. The audit identified which steps were pure process (automatable end to end) and which genuinely needed judgement (exceptions for humans). The written projection targeted the biggest block first: referencing intake and document chase.

We deployed an agent that runs the referencing pipeline end to end. It takes applicants through intake, requests and collects documents, chases outstanding items automatically — politely, repeatedly, at sensible hours — and writes everything once into all three systems, keeping them in sync without a human re-keying anything. The team's job changed from doing the pipeline to supervising its exceptions.

The first thing the team noticed was silence — the background hum of 'has anyone chased the guarantor form?' stopped. Documents that used to take a week of intermittent chasing started landing in a day or two, because the agent asks the same day, every day, until they arrive. We spent the early weeks tuning edge cases with the team: self-employed applicants, overseas guarantors, the odd hand-written payslip.

Brookline has reclaimed around 31 hours of admin a week, three systems now behave like one, and move-in delays caused by paperwork have largely disappeared. The team spends its time on landlords, tenants and growing the book — the work they were actually hired to do.