Who answers the block: the property management answering service options.

Ask a few managing agents who covers their residents once the office shuts, and you get four different answers. One pays a bureau to hold the emergency line. Another passes a duty mobile round the office on a rota. A third buys a virtual receptionist briefed on the whole portfolio. A fourth runs a chat window on the website that never involves a phone call. All four are sold as a property management answering service.

What decides the purchase is where the enquiries arrive, not whether a person or software answers them. Some of these options wait for a telephone to ring; only the website assistant reads a typed question. So an agent losing work in writing gets nothing at all from a staffed bureau or a virtual receptionist.

The out-of-hours job is narrow. Somebody answers, establishes which block and which flat, writes down what is happening, and applies the rules the agent set in advance: does this go to the duty contact tonight, or onto the morning list? That is the entire product. What a burst riser or a stuck lift actually needs is settled by whoever the escalation list names — and most agents spend too little on that list.

• The block and the unit. A report reading "water coming through the ceiling" is worth very little until it carries an address, a flat and which floor the water started on.
• What is happening right now. Running water, heating dead, power out, somebody shut in a lift, a communal door that will not open — taken down plainly, in the resident's own words.
• Who is in the property. An elderly leaseholder with heating out in a cold snap is a different report from an empty buy-to-let, and only the person taking it finds that out.
• How anybody gets in. An access window and a mobile number. A contractor standing at a locked communal door on a Sunday is the classic wasted call-out charge.
• Where it travels next. The duty contact, the block's own published route, or the morning list — decided in advance, because nobody works that out at speed.

None of that is complicated, and all of it gets skipped under pressure. That is why the brief you write matters more than which option you buy. A bureau working from a thin script produces thin messages. Give the same bureau a proper escalation list, and the same money buys a report a duty manager can act on straight away.

The escalation list decides who gets woken up. Whatever an agent buys, its job is to fill that list in properly.

What the website side costs is easy to work out on its own. A website chatbot reads the pages the agent has already published — the tenant guide, the reporting route, the block policies, whatever the site says about service charges . It answers from those pages and from nothing else, in whichever language the resident typed. Property management comes as a ready-made setup, with this sector's limits already set before anyone starts.

The other job is taking the report. Somebody describing a problem is asked what a manager needs before anybody instructs a contractor: the block, the flat, and what is happening at that moment. The assistant also asks whether the water, the heat or the power has gone, whether anyone in the property needs particular care, and when somebody can get in. The report goes out as an email alert to whoever the agent named for reports of that kind. The resident can carry on with the team over WhatsApp. Photos reach the team only after a WhatsApp handoff, if the resident sends them there — the chat window itself accepts no attachments at all.

Emergencies need more care than anything else here, and they are the part a demo always makes look easy. A pipe bursting on the top floor. Heating dead in a cold snap with a baby in the flat. Somebody shut in a lift. Gas you can smell in a communal hallway. Those are incidents, not enquiries. What each of them needs is a person holding a phone list and the authority to use it.

So the written assistant does the smallest useful thing, deliberately. It hands back the block's own published emergency wording, word for word, and puts the report in front of the contact the agent named. How serious the report is stays a judgement for that person. So does the decision to send somebody out, and so does the instruction to the contractor that follows it. What the fault turns out to be, and how long it takes to put right, wait for somebody standing in front of it.

That wording is worth publishing whether or not an agent ever buys cover. Whichever option you buy should hand it straight back rather than write its own version. Distrust the confident demo: software grading a report by severity, raising a job and sending an engineer out. Ask any supplier two questions. What happens when a resident describes something the block has never published? And who is responsible when the grading is wrong on a winter night?

Emergencies are the loudest part of the job and the smallest part of it. The other queue runs all week, arrives typed, and is nearly always a question the agent's own site already answers. Somebody in the office finds the page and reads it back, one resident at a time.

• "What am I actually paying for?" Answered as the published service-charge page words it — what the budget covers, when demands go out, how the year-end reconciliation runs. A balance on one named account sits behind a login, so a question about that is captured and passed on instead.
• "How do I report a repair?" The route the agent publishes, handed back in the resident's own language, whenever they happen to be reading.
• "Is this mine to fix, or yours?" Demised or communal decides who pays, and it turns on the lease. The assistant describes the process the site publishes for settling that, then passes the specific case to a property manager.
• "When do the major works start?" Consultation stages, timings and contractor selection are given back only as far as the agent has published them. A resident-management-company director wanting more than that reaches the manager running the project.
• "Can I get another fob, and where do visitors park?" Fobs, bin days, visitor parking, bike stores, the lift-refurbishment notice — the questions nobody in the office wants to answer twice, every one already written down somewhere.
• "When is the gas safety check due?" The renewal process comes back from the published page. The date on one flat's record sits behind a login, so that question is captured and passed on rather than guessed at.

Every one of those answered on the website is a call nobody had to make — and those are the calls a per-call service bills the agent for. What is left on the telephone afterwards is the report that genuinely needs somebody awake for it.

The two sides are priced in completely different ways, so putting them on one spreadsheet is where the comparison goes wrong. People are billed per call or per minute, usually above a monthly minimum, so a bad winter costs more than a quiet spring. Ask any bureau for its per-call rate and its monthly minimum together, then ask what an out-of-hours call adds on top. Software is one flat monthly plan, priced by how many answers it gives, so a burst-pipe week and a quiet week cost the same.

Adoomi's own prices are short enough to list in full. One credit covers one AI answer. Free gives 50 credits a month for £0, Local 200 for £8, Growth 500 for £20 and Scale 4,000 for £75. The pricing page has the full list. Setting one up takes about ten minutes — connect the website, read the wording it proposes to give a resident, then add one line to the page.

Whichever side you buy, get one thing in writing: where a resident's words end up. Adoomi keeps conversations on EU infrastructure and exports or erases them when a GDPR request comes in. Logs record identifiers instead of message text, and the chat window sets no tracking cookies. That describes the software and nothing else — compliance rests on the agent's own registrations, policies and records. Ask a bureau the same question before signing anything, and keep the answer.

The answer comes from where the enquiries already arrive, so start with your own numbers. Print last month's out-of-hours log beside last month's website enquiries, and read the two columns.

1. The out-of-hours log is the longer column. Incidents arrive by voice, from residents who are frightened or furious, and a person on the line is what answers them. Adoomi leaves that line alone and takes the written column.
2. The website column is the longer one. Buy the written assistant. Service-charge and process questions arrive typed, from leaseholders reading at the weekend, and answering them costs a flat monthly fee.
3. Both columns are long. Run the two together. They catch different people, and plenty of agents finish with a bureau holding the emergency line and a written assistant working the website.
4. Neither column has much in it. The gap is usually the reporting route itself — the thing residents ring about because they could not find it. Publish that page and the assistant answers from it, on the Free plan at £0.

Whichever way it goes, the buying question stays the same: what does each option cost for every report that reaches a duty manager in a usable state? A cheap service that sends messages saying "tenant rang about water" has cost far more than its invoice by the time anyone gets to the flat.