Quotes in hours, not days, for a Central London design and build firm

The brief

Homeconcepts has been designing, building and renovating homes across Central London and Surrey since 2004, with offices in Kensington and Virginia Water. More than 80% of its work comes from referrals, which is a good problem to have until the enquiries outpace the people who price them. Every quote meant a surveyor visit, a stack of photos and notes, a spreadsheet, and several evenings of a director’s time. Quotes were taking a week, and good leads were going cold.

The brief was simple: keep the quality of the estimating, lose the delay.

What we did

• Opportunity Audit, two weeks. We shadowed two surveyors and the office team, mapped the quote-to-contract process end to end, and ranked the opportunities. Estimating came top by a distance, followed by client updates and supplier invoice matching.
• 10-Day AI Sprint. We built a working estimating assistant on 60 historical quotes. It reads survey notes and photos, drafts a priced schedule of works against Homeconcepts’ own rate book, and flags anything it is unsure about for a human to check. We scored it against the firm’s real quotes before anyone used it in anger.
• Production build. The assistant now lives inside the tools the team already uses. Surveyors dictate notes on site, a priced draft is waiting when they get back, and a director approves every quote before it goes out. Nothing is sent without a human signature.
• Client updates and invoice matching. A second workflow drafts weekly progress updates for clients from the project log and photos, and a third matches supplier invoices to purchase orders and chases the gaps.
• Adoption. Half-day workshops for the office team and surveyors, a champion in each office, and a monthly review of where the assistant was wrong so the rate book improves.

The result

Quotes now go out in under a day. The firm issues around a third more quotes a month with the same team, and directors have their evenings back. Client update emails that used to be written on a Friday afternoon now go out every week without fail, which the team credits with fewer “any news?” calls. Every automated step has an audit trail, and the estimating assistant still gets overruled on the unusual jobs, which is exactly how it should be.

“We were nervous about AI touching the numbers. The thing that won us over was watching it get scored against our own quotes before we trusted it with a single client.” Director, Homeconcepts