Estate agents are being encouraged to make the most of WhatsApp Business because it will, according to SMS Speedway, an omnichannel communications company, become fundamental to doing business in the property sector within the next two years.

The company has analysed statistics from Hootsuite, revealing that 2bn people globally use WhatsApp every month, meaning almost a third of the world’s population are using the popular app to send messages, images, video and to make calls.

Bradley Kieser, CEO of SMS Speedway, said: “What we’ve seen over the past few years is WhatsApp establishing its dominance in the messaging space and becoming people’s preferred platform.”

SMS Speedway, based in Cumbria, is releasing its newest offering, integrating their omnichannel communications services with WhatsApp Business and giving estate agents an opportunity to deliver their messages via the platform.

Kieser commented: “We’ve worked closely with the team at Facebook to ensure our WhatsApp Business integration is simple and straightforward to activate, meaning we can have our clients up and running with WhatsApp in a matter of minutes.”

Through their long standing relationships with market-leading CRM providers, SMS Speedway have also been able to pipe in WhatsApp Business messaging functionality into existing software meaning estate agents can continue using the platforms they are familiar with.

As part of the new product, all of SMS Speedway’s existing features are available on the platform including appointment reminders, auto-responders and their Advance Customer Engagement tools.

Additionally, the service is capable of sending a variety of media from images to stickers, PDFs to surveys and stickers to call to action buttons, plus if WhatsApp goes down, messages are routed via other channels to ensure the customer always gets the message.

Moving to the service also eliminates the need for agents to use their personal phones for communicating with clients via WhatsApp.

Kieser added: “This is a gamechanger for the property sector and we believe it will revolutionise communications with customers and within the agency – something we’ve been doing since 1994 when we launched the world’s first commercial text messaging service.

“Not only that, but because of our relationship with the CRMs, we’ve been able to create an integration that pushes all WhatsApp communications back into their system so customer service is never compromised and clients don’t lose track of their communications at any point.”