How automated sales progression actually works

Step 1 — The transaction becomes a structured model

An accepted offer is entered with the property, the price, and whoever is known so far. The system builds a model of the transaction: the participants and their roles, the applicable milestones, and the dependencies between them.

The workflow is conditional from the start. A cash purchase never generates mortgage milestones. A leasehold sale adds the management pack. Nothing is a generic checklist that someone has to mentally filter.

Step 2 — Milestones open when their dependencies clear

Enquiries cannot be raised before the draft contract pack is issued. Contract approval waits on both enquiries and searches. When a milestone’s dependencies are satisfied it opens, gets an expected date based on a working-day SLA, and the responsible party is asked a single plain-English question.

Working days matter more than people expect. A five-day SLA set on the Thursday before a bank holiday weekend is not five calendar days, and treating them as the same is how software starts chasing people unfairly.

Step 3 — The reply is read, not just stored

This is the part that distinguishes automation from reminders. A solicitor writes: “We received the searches yesterday but are still awaiting replies to enquiries 4 and 7 — they should respond by Friday.”

That single sentence contains three facts: one milestone complete, one outstanding with specific enquiry numbers, and a promised date that needs resolving against the calendar. The extraction layer produces those as structured facts with a confidence score. It does not decide anything.

Step 4 — A deterministic engine decides

The facts are applied by ordinary, auditable code: mark the milestone complete and attach the source message as evidence; record the outstanding items; store the promised date and cancel the chase that was scheduled before it; recalculate risk and the exchange forecast.

Keeping the decision in deterministic code rather than in the model is the single most important design choice. It is why every status can be explained, and why the system behaves the same way twice.

Step 5 — Chasing follows a restrained ladder

A date was promised

Nothing is sent before it. Chasing someone three days early is how a firm stops reading your emails.

Promised date passes

A polite follow-up on the next working day, referencing what they said.

Still silent

A firmer follow-up making clear it is now holding up the transaction.

Still silent

Escalation to the agent with the full history and a recommendation to call.

Where automation should stop

Renegotiation after a bad survey, a complaint, a chain collapsing, a legal question, a participant who is distressed — none of that should be automated, and any vendor claiming otherwise is overselling.

The design principle is to automate the predictable and escalate the exceptional. Low-confidence extractions and contradictions between parties go to a human queue rather than into the record.

Common questions