How I built a fully automated showing feedback tracker in 3 days, during spare minutes on the clock, without being asked to do it.
When I joined the team, one of my responsibilities was collecting showing feedbacks. On the surface it sounds straightforward: a property gets shown, the showing agent sends feedback, I document it. Clean, simple, done.
Except nothing about it was clean or simple.
This was a high-performing real estate group. Showings didn't trickle in at one or two a day. They came in at ten, fifteen, sometimes twenty in a single shift. Twenty agents to follow up with. Twenty different threads to track. Twenty chances to get something wrong.
"The SOP I inherited had a process for handling showings. It involved keeping notes manually. Sticky-note era stuff. Information scrambled. Follow-up texts went to the wrong agent. Feedback got attributed to the wrong listing. It was embarrassing and it was only going to get worse as the team grew."
The previous assistants before me managed it through sheer memory and manual effort. There was no archive. No way to check who had already responded. No way to pull up feedback from a showing that happened three days ago without digging through a mess of notes. It was a system built on hope, and hope is not a process.
Nobody asked me to fix it. The SOP said to keep doing what the previous person did. But I sat with that process for a few days, felt the weight of it building, and decided I wasn't going to spend the next several months doing it that way.
I didn't ask for permission or pitch it to anyone. I just started building during the quieter moments of my shift, chipping away at it piece by piece over three days. The goal was simple: every showing notification that came in should flow automatically into a tracker, pre-populated with the right agent details, ready for me to follow up without spending a single minute hunting for information.
When it was done, I turned it on and let it run. That was the moment the relief hit. Not when I finished building it. When I watched the first showing come in, parse itself, find the agent's number from the archive, and sit there in the tracker ready to go without me touching a thing.
{
"showing_status": "new" | "cancelled",
"agent_name": "",
"listing": "",
"phone": "",
"email": "",
"showing_date": "",
"showing_time": "",
"source_system": ""
}
Before the system existed, collecting showing feedbacks on a high-volume day consumed 2 to 3 hours of a shift. Manually sorting emails, hunting for agent numbers, copying details into notes, texting the wrong people. After the tracker went live, that same process takes 30 minutes or less.
The first morning after I turned it on, showings started coming in the way they always did. But instead of scrambling through notes, I opened the tracker and everything was already there. Agent names. Listing addresses. Phone numbers pulled from the archive. Follow-up messages pre-written. Status columns clean and ready to mark.
I remember just sitting there for a second looking at it. Three days of quiet work during spare moments on the clock, and the most painful part of my daily routine had become the easiest.
Nobody had asked me to do it. The SOP said to keep using the old way. But I knew the old way wasn't going to hold, and I wasn't willing to be the person who let things fall through the cracks just because that's how it had always been done.