What's new in Cortex: Lettings, Ask Cortex and new agent recipes.

For the last few weeks we've been building alongside our first Cortex users, shipping improvements every day. This week we're opening it up.

Over the next few days, every estate agent on the waitlist gets access. Watch for your activation email: it lets you claim your account, unlock your free credits and build your first agent.

We've shipped more than 20 new features in Cortex in the last month alone. Here's what's new.

Lettings

Agents that can work property management end to end. Cortex runs across your whole agency. It always has. But lettings is where the repetitive work lives, so it took the biggest share of this month's work.

Ask anyone who runs a lettings book where their week goes and you'll get the same answer. It goes on chasing. An application sits half complete, a renewal creeps up, a tenant reports a leak, two quotes come back, and somewhere in the middle of it a gas safety certificate expires without anyone noticing. None of it is difficult work. It's constant, and it doesn't fit neatly into anyone's diary.

Maintenance. The largest single addition. Agents can create and search maintenance jobs, view contractor quotes, find contractors, and react as a job progresses. So a tenant report becomes a raised job, a contractor search and a chased quote without a person touching it, and the landlord update goes out on the same trigger. Most maintenance traffic is somebody asking whether anyone has heard back yet. That question can now answer itself.

Applications and offers. Agents can search applications and offers, and react the moment either changes. An agent picks up a new application as it lands, checks what's missing and starts the chase itself, rather than waiting for somebody to open the list.

Tenancies. Agents can search tenancies and react when one changes, which turns renewals, status changes and end dates into triggers rather than diary entries.

Inspections. Agents can search inspections and react when one is booked or completed. The one worth building first: the moment an inspection is marked complete, an agent writes up the outcome, raises any jobs it flagged and tells the landlord.

Compliance. Agents can check certificates, flag any that are missing, and check buyer or applicant AML status.

Ask Cortex

Set up an agent in minutes. There used to be two helpers inside Cortex: a docs helper for product questions, and a separate assistant for building agents. They're now one, Ask Cortex, available everywhere.

It builds and edits agents inside the conversation, saving as it goes. Describe what you want and it's live in your account in minutes, with results straight away.

SMS

Agents can text, and read the replies. Email gets ignored. Text gets answered. Agents can now send and receive SMS with your Street.co.uk contacts. The chase moves to the channel people actually reply to, and the reply comes back to the agent rather than an inbox. An agent can text a tenant to confirm an inspection slot, then act on the answer.

Recipes

Six new recipes, ready to run. Knowing you could automate something is a long way from knowing what to automate first. Six ready-made recipes are now live, built for jobs agencies already do: write a blog post, for Spectre or as a PDF; brief your team on the market; summarise the day's branch activity; research a valuation; review a sales applicant; and produce a monthly economic briefing.

Each comes in Slack, Teams and email versions, so it reports back where your team already talks. No building required, and the first one runs in minutes.

Writing styles

Cortex writes like an agency, not like software. Cortex's default voice has been refined, so out of the box it writes even closer to the way an agency writes. A chase reads like a chase, and a landlord update reads like something a property manager would actually send. Nothing to configure.

Onboarding

Get started even faster. Ask Cortex and the recipes make building an agent easier. Onboarding covers everything before that: getting you from signing up to something running. There's a new welcome tour, and a getting started checklist in the sidebar so there's always a next step to hand.

Also in this release

Seven more changes landed this fortnight.

Diary reading. Sharper appointment slot suggestions from a negotiator's diary, so the slot a client gets offered actually works.

Photo and measure triggers. The listing prep that follows an appointment can start itself.

Files into Slack. Reports and certificates land in the channel, not as a link somebody has to find.

Key holders. Agents can see who holds a property's keys, which settles one of the most repeated questions in any branch.

Enquiry assignment. Every inbound enquiry gets an owner the moment it arrives.

Linked applicants. Couples and sharers are handled as the single party they are.

Full questionnaire answers. Agents read complete answers rather than partial ones, so they don't act confidently on half the story.

What happens next

These updates land every two weeks: what we're building, how to get more out of what's already there, and the results coming out of agencies running it.