A day of ringing people who are also busy
Your progressor starts the morning with a list of sold subject to contract files and a phone. Has the buyer's solicitor received the contract pack? Have searches been ordered? Is the survey booked? Has the lender issued the offer? Each question means a call to someone who is also juggling a caseload, and half the calls end in a voicemail or a promise to ring back.
By the afternoon the vendors start ringing too, asking the same questions. Your progressor gives the answer they got that morning, which may already be out of date, and writes a line in the CRM notes if there is time. On a busy week there is no time, so the notes stop being a record of anything.
The information exists, it just is not asked for properly
The solicitor's case system usually knows when searches came back. The broker knows when the valuation was instructed. Nobody is hiding anything. The trouble is that your process relies on a person noticing it is time to ask, then asking in a way that gets a free-text reply, then retyping that reply into the CRM.
There is also no shared picture of what a normal sale looks like at each stage. Without an expected date for each milestone, a file that has been quiet for three weeks looks the same on the list as one that went quiet yesterday. So the progressor rings everyone, in list order, every few days.
| Milestone | Who knows first | How you usually find out |
|---|---|---|
| Memorandum of sale received | Both solicitors | Assumed, rarely confirmed |
| Searches ordered and returned | Buyer's solicitor | Phone call from your progressor |
| Mortgage valuation and offer | Broker or lender | Buyer mentions it, or nobody does |
| Survey booked and reported | Buyer and surveyor | Often only when there is a problem |
| Enquiries raised and answered | Both solicitors | Phone call, sometimes days late |
What the phone chasing is really costing you
The obvious cost is the progressor's day. The larger cost is that problems are found late. A mortgage valuation that came in short, or enquiries that have sat unanswered for a fortnight, only surfaces when someone happens to ring the right person. By then the buyer may be getting cold feet and the vendor has lost patience with the agent, not the solicitor.
It also caps how many sales one progressor can hold. When every file needs the same manual round of calls, adding more sales means adding more people, and your fee income depends on sales actually reaching completion.
How we build milestone tracking around your CRM
We keep your CRM, whether that is Reapit, Alto or another system, as the record of each sale. What we add is the part that asks, listens and flags.
- Milestone model: we agree with your team the stages a sale moves through and a sensible expected gap between each one, so the system knows when a file is overdue rather than just quiet.
- Structured update requests: on the right day, each party gets a short email or text with one-click answers (searches back: yes, no, not yet) and a free-text box. No login, no portal to learn.
- Reply reading: free-text replies from solicitors are read with a language model such as OpenAI or Anthropic Claude, which pulls out the milestone and date and marks anything unclear for a person.
- CRM write-back: confirmed milestones are written to the sale record in your CRM through its API where one is available, with the original message attached.
- Stuck-file queue: your progressor gets a short list each morning of files that are overdue or have gone silent, with the missing milestone named, instead of the full list to ring through.
Nothing is sent to a solicitor or broker that your team has not approved as a template, and the tracker never changes a sale status on its own when a reply is ambiguous.
What changes for your progressor
The morning starts with the files that need a person, not all of them. Calls become targeted: you ring the solicitor on the three sales where enquiries have been open too long, and you already know which enquiries they are. Vendors can be told something current, because the record was updated when the reply came in.
Branch managers get a view of the whole pipeline by milestone, which makes it easier to see which sales are at risk before the week of the expected exchange.
Does this sound like your office?
- Your progressor's day is mostly outbound calls asking for the same few updates.
- CRM notes on sold subject to contract files are patchy or weeks old.
- You usually learn about a down valuation or slow enquiries from the buyer, late.
- Vendors ring for updates more often than you ring them.
- You cannot say at a glance which sales are behind a normal timeline.