Street Group: Inside the £200m Estate Agent Platform

UK estate agents have long managed their businesses across disconnected systems. Separate tools for CRM, prospecting, marketing and websites mean duplicated data entry, lost leads and workflows that break at the handoff between one platform and the next. Street Group set out to fix that in 2015 and has spent the past decade building towards a single answer.

The company started with one product and one problem. Siblings Tom and Heather Staff launched Spectre, a direct mail prospecting tool for estate agents, from Manchester. The premise was narrow: help agents identify which homeowners were most likely to sell, then put a letter through their door at the right moment.

At the centre of Spectre sits a proprietary Propensity to Sell model that scores UK properties by their likelihood of coming to market. The system analyses activity signals and local market conditions to rank addresses by readiness to list. Agents select a postcode sector, and the platform identifies which doors to target. The company says agents using the AI-optimised targeting see a 2.4x return on investment for direct mail campaigns.

Spectre found its market quickly. Customer numbers grew 50% year on year, and the product expanded from direct mail into email, social media and property reports. It won multiple industry awards and built a customer base that stretched from single-branch independents to regional chains. By the time it rebranded from Agent Software to Street Group in 2020, the company had already outgrown its original pitch.

The next move was CRM. Street.co.uk launched as an integrated system for contact management, pipeline tracking, sales progression and property listings. Rather than competing with standalone CRM vendors on features, the play was integration. An agent using both Spectre and Street.co.uk got prospecting data flowing directly into their sales pipeline with no manual import, no CSV files, no third-party connector.

That integration changed the economics of switching. An agency already using Spectre for prospecting could add the CRM and immediately see its lead data populate the pipeline. An agency already on the CRM could layer Spectre on top and start generating leads that fed straight into existing workflows. Each product made the other stickier.

Spectre Websites followed in 2025, giving agents a self-service site builder at £159 per month with no setup fees. Listings sync automatically from the CRM. Valuation leads feed back into Spectre. Property pages update in real time as prices change or listings go under offer. Each new product locked into the same data layer, and each one made the others more useful.

That pattern is the core of the company’s strategy. Every product shares a single data infrastructure, so what an agent does in one tool informs what happens in the others. A prospecting campaign in Spectre generates a lead. The lead lands in Street.co.uk. The CRM tracks the sale. The data feeds back to sharpen the next campaign. The loop closes without the agent touching a spreadsheet.

Street Group now serves more than 4,000 estate and letting agency branches across the UK, from independent high street offices to national operators including Knight Frank. The team has grown to more than 200 people in Manchester. All of it bootstrapped. Tom and Heather Staff took no external funding for nine years.

That changed in December 2024 when Praetura Ventures, now part of PXN Group, invested £3.3m. It was the company’s first outside capital.

Less than two years later, Hg came in. The London-based private equity firm, known for its portfolio of European software businesses, made a strategic minority investment through its Mercury Fund in July 2026, valuing Street Group at more than £200m. Hg invested £7m directly, with institutional clients also participating. The deal generated a 4.4x return for PXN, a strong result for a nineteen-month hold. Tom and Heather Staff remain majority controlling shareholders and continue to lead the business as co-CEOs.

The timing was not accidental. In April 2026, the company launched Cortex, an AI agent platform that sits on top of the existing CRM and marketing stack. Cortex allows agencies to build and deploy AI agents that handle enquiry responses, viewing bookings, client communications and content generation within their existing workflows. Agents configure these AI agents using natural language instructions and assign specific tools and permissions to each task.

The company says more than 300 agencies were preparing to go live with Cortex by May 2026, with pricing starting at £149 per month. Tom Staff has described Cortex as a way to remove the administrative work that fills an agent’s day, freeing teams to focus on negotiation, relationship management and winning instructions.

Cortex builds on six AI tools the company had already shipped. An AI Photo Editor handles virtual staging and object removal. An AI Call Handler fields out-of-hours enquiries. An AI Onboarding tool generates property listings from floorplans and photographs. Cortex is the layer designed to chain these together into end-to-end workflows that run without manual intervention. An agency could, for example, configure an AI agent to respond to every new enquiry, qualify the lead, check property availability, book a viewing and update the CRM record, all before a human picks up the phone the next morning.

The trajectory from a single direct mail tool to a £200m integrated platform took eleven years. Street Group’s position now is that estate agents should not need five vendor relationships to run their businesses. One platform, one data layer, one login. The product roadmap points in the same direction it always has: replace the next disconnected tool with something that plugs into everything else. For the thousands of branches already on the system, that pitch has landed.