“If your agency is doing more than 10 deals a year, you need Kato”

- BDG Sparkes Porter 

Why are so many London leasing agents adopting Kato to get ahead of the competition and turbo charge their agency? This article explains how the bespoke commercial agency workflow tools on Kato streamline administrative tasks, create better communication channels and ensure overall business efficiency!
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Efficiency is key for agencies of any size. With the backdrop of an uncertain economy and rising costs, ensuring productivity of fee earners is paramount. Kato saves fee earners an average of 9 hours per week - allowing them to reduce administrative tasks and constant chasing, whilst enabling them to focus on impactful tasks (read more about impactful tasks here).

So how does Kato streamline internal and external workflows for agents? We’ve spoken to the market for their feedback - and here is what we’ve learnt:

External Workflows

External workflows are client facing tasks, either tenant representation or landlord disposal. Kato has your back for all of these tasks, including marketing, reporting and new business generation. 

Marketing 

Marketing is at the centre of all leasing agency work. Kato allows you to create and publish professional marketing material at the click of a button. These can be pushed to property portals directly from Kato, ensuring consistency of material, automated updates and maximum exposure in the market instantly!

Will Ewing from BDG Sparkes Porter said: “Drafting marketing details was becoming tedious and time consuming. One of the biggest headaches for us was updating our website - we were carving out an afternoon a week to keep on top of it!”. In a competitive market place we’re hearing that it is essential to go to the market quickly with a high quality of particulars. Read on to find out more.

Reporting to Clients

Reporting to clients is a frequent and time consuming process. It is an important element of client care, but often a draw on time, away from core leasing activities. Some clients, be that landlord or tenants, can be more challenging than others, right? This is why it is important for agents to have the necessary data available instantly so that reporting is seamless. 

Kato allows you to connect to the society marketplace for acquisitions, pull across direct enquiries from your website and portals, and collaborate with your joint agents. You can create professional client reports in a few clicks, allowing you and your team time to build relationships with clients - over lunch perhaps?

New Business 

Let’s face it, agency is all about winning instructions and within the hierarchy of impactful activity, winning new business should be a priority for all commercial property agents. Business development is a numbers game. The more energy you put in, the more new business you will gain. This is one of the reasons we built Kato - to help leasing agents improve efficiency so they can focus resources and energy on business development. 

Going to launches, pitches, viewing tours, or dare I say the pub? Winning new business probably means you are out and about. This is why we introduced the market leading AgentsGo mobile app - you can read more about this here. Now you can keep on top of all of your activity, wherever you are.

Internal Workflows

Internal workflows are the way you use insights to make quick and effective business decisions. Kato empowers agents to use their own data and intel to win new business. The daily dashboard allows all fee earners to unlock their data and use it effectively - whether that be deal data, market intel, or client contacts. Use Kato to surface your data and become your agency's one-source-of-truth. ‍

Demand tracking

‍Kato allows agents to name and track marketplace demand, capturing information from all sources. You can add layers of detail to the demand, and ensure your team has the latest intel. Many leasing agents still keep this crucial data in an Excel spreadsheet - but there's a better way. Using Kato allows you to centralise marketplace data from Agents Society and build it into your internal intel hub, enabling your agency team to access this data when they need it most.

Constant Improvement

Kato enables you to track where your leads are originating from. London leasing agents use a number of portals to get market coverage of their disposals. It is essential to understand your return on investment from these portals in order to constantly improve your internal processes and the advice you give to clients. Kato also prompts agents for feedback from inspections which automatically feeds into your interest schedules - helping you improve the quality of your client reporting! 

Deal Data 

Keeping on top of your deal data usually gets pushed to the bottom of the to do list - and who would enjoy doing this anyway? You have completed a deal, onto the next one! However your deal data is important. Logged and tracked well, it will result in new business opportunities. We hear London agents bemoan the cost of deal data providers. Kato helps agents log their deals easily - you can now organise lease event dates - rent reviews, breaks, lease expiries. Be in the know so you can pick up the phone at the right time!   

“But we have always done it this way… why should we change now?”

You might have heard these benefits of efficiency and thought: 'well what are the next steps?'. Or you might be concerned about the upheaval of onboarding and the risk of yet another tech system. Our onboarding process is straightforward. We can transfer data across from existing systems (or those Excel spreadsheets) and we provide a comprehensive customer service to get up and running with minimal disruption.

“The onboarding process was smooth - Kato offered continuous training to all of our team members and the reality is it only took a few workshops. They imported all of our data into the platform so it was oven ready.”

- Henry Bacon, RIB

Interested to learn more on how leasing agency teams are improving efficiency and winning new business? Click here for a Kato demo.