What's new in July: live calls, email threads and simpler forwarding

Most of an agency's day happens away from a desk, and the questions that matter come up there: whether a seller is on the line right now, which rental enquiries still need a reply, and whether an open home time changed after a reply was drafted.

Releases through July put those answers in the app. They change how calls and email are shown, how listings feed the assistants, and how much it takes to point an agent's phone at AgentFront. If you are new to AgentFront, our launch post explains what each assistant does.

Can you see a call while it is happening?

Yes. A call now appears in the Calls list while it is happening, with a Live indicator, and the transcript arrives turn by turn as the caller and the assistant speak.

For an agent between appointments, a glance at the Calls list shows that a seller is on the line and what they are asking about, before the summary exists. When the call ends, the recording, summary, records and any tasks follow as they did before.

How is rental enquiry email organised now?

Each enquiry is now one conversation: the enquirer's emails and your replies in a single thread, with one reply box. A property manager opens the enquiry and sees the whole exchange in order, rather than piecing it together.

The details that come with it:

• Replies include the quoted earlier email, the way a reply from any mail program does, so the enquirer sees their own question beneath the answer.
• Drafts waiting for review sit at the top of To Do, so they are the first thing a property manager sees.
• A sent reply appears in the thread straight away.
• Discarding a draft removes it for good.

In Gmail, once a thread has been replied to and its tasks are done, AgentFront marks it read and moves it out of the inbox. It does not delete anything. The inbox stops filling up with enquiries that are already finished, which leaves the ones that still need work easier to find.

Why the timing of that first reply matters is the subject of our guide on how fast to reply to a rental enquiry.

What changed in how AgentFront uses your listings?

Answers on calls and in email now match the listing more closely, in four ways.

Rental enquiries are matched only to rental listings. An email about a home for lease is answered from that rental listing, never from a home that is for sale.

Calls now reflect when a home is under offer. A buyer ringing about it hears where it stands.

On calls, the assistant now has the agency's current homes for sale ready from the start of the call, so a buyer asking about any of them is answered from the right listing.

Unsent drafts that no one has edited are rewritten when a listing's open home times change. If the Saturday open home moves after a reply was drafted on Friday, the untouched draft is updated with the new time, so the reply that goes out carries the current one.

How do you set up call forwarding now?

With one code. Forwarding setup now uses a single dial code, in a setup we call Smart Voicemail, in place of the several codes it took before. That one code sends busy, unanswered and unreachable calls to the agent's AgentFront number, so a call the agent can't take reaches the assistant rather than the carrier's voicemail.

Forwarding still lives on the agent's own phone. The agent dials the code once to turn it on and can switch it off again from the same phone. The Phone Assistant page shows what happens to a forwarded call from the first ring.

What else changed?

A handful of smaller changes went out in the same releases:

• Grace and Paul, the two voices, each have a sample in the voice picker, so an agency can hear both before choosing.
• Admins can now remove team members.
• The draft queue has a Give feedback button, so anyone reviewing a draft can tell us when it isn't right.

The person approving a draft is usually the one who knows the listing best, and the button lets them say what was wrong with a reply at the moment they see it.