Taxis for estate agency property viewings

How does CabsOn handle a full day of property viewings? We treat a day of viewings as one continuous booking with multiple waypoints, not as a series of separate trips. When you book through the CabsOn business portal, you enter the pickup point — usually the agent's branch, a client's hotel, or their home — and then list each viewing address in the order you plan to visit them. The driver is assigned once and stays with you all day. Between each viewing the meter switches from journey rate to a metered wait rate that varies by city and vehicle class, shown to you before you book. This is materially cheaper than dispatching a fresh vehicle for each property, because you avoid the minimum fare and pickup surcharge every time. The agent controls the day from the app in their pocket. If a viewing runs long, the driver waits and the meter reflects it. If a viewer decides they want to see one more property nearby, the agent adds a stop live and the route recalculates. If someone cancels and drops out of the tour, the stop is removed. Everything that actually happens on the day appears on the eventual invoice, so there is a clean audit trail between what the client saw and what you paid for. ## Can we book the same driver for the whole day? Yes, and for property viewings this is our default. Continuity matters. Your client is meeting the driver at 9am and may still be in the same car at 4pm, so we assign a single driver for the duration. If the viewing day is unusually long — say a full 10-hour London-to-Cotswolds tour — we may arrange a driver changeover with prior notice, but for standard 4-to-6 hour viewing days you get one driver, one car, one continuous experience. We can also flag specific driver preferences on the booking: fluent English (default), Mandarin, Cantonese, Arabic, French, or Russian for overseas buyers where we can arrange it with advance notice. We do not guarantee language matching on short-notice bookings, but for planned viewing days with named international clients, we do our best to match on request, though we can't guarantee it for every booking. ## How much notice do we need to give? For central London, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Bristol and Edinburgh, we can usually respond to a multi-viewing booking within 2 hours. However, honestly, next-day is better and gives us more choice of driver. For prime instructions where the client is only in the country for a specific window, book 48 to 72 hours ahead so we can assign an executive-class vehicle and an experienced driver rather than whichever car is nearest. For rural viewings — country houses, farms, development land, listed properties in villages — we recommend at least 4 hours notice. Driver density is lower outside city centres and we need time to position the vehicle. If your agency regularly does rural viewings across a specific county, tell us and we can pre-position drivers for known viewing days rather than treating each booking as ad hoc. ## What does it actually cost compared to Uber, Bolt or Addison Lee? Honestly: for a single short viewing, an Uber will be cheaper. Where the maths changes is when you have three or more viewings in a day. A four-viewing day using separate Ubers adds up several minimum fares, possible surge pricing, and the awkward wait time in between when the agent has to hail a fresh car with a client standing on the pavement. Booking the same day with CabsOn as one journey with consolidated wait time is typically cheaper, and you get one VAT invoice rather than several separate receipts your bookkeeper has to reconcile — get a quote for your usual viewing pattern to see the actual difference. Addison Lee is a genuinely strong alternative for prime London property work — they have an established chauffeured product and long-standing client base — and for a single high-value client where money is not a factor, they are worth considering. Where we typically win is on price for the same wait-and-return model, on nationwide coverage outside London, and on the business-portal reporting that lets your finance team allocate rides back to specific listings. ## Can I set spending limits per agent or branch? Yes. Every agent booking under the agency's business account can be given an individual spend cap — daily, weekly, or monthly — and each branch can have its own budget envelope. Bookings that would exceed the cap either trigger an approval request to a nominated manager or are blocked outright, depending on how you set the policy. This matters for agencies where associates and negotiators have booking rights but you need to keep transport costs proportionate to the value of the instruction. Departments in our system map naturally to branches. A London-based agency with offices in Chelsea, Notting Hill and Marylebone can have three departments each with their own cap, their own approver, and their own line on the monthly invoice. Reporting can then be sliced by department to see which branch is generating what transport spend, and whether that spend is being recovered from vendors or absorbed by the business. ## How does monthly VAT invoicing work? On the first working day of each month, we issue one consolidated PDF invoice covering every ride your agency's users booked in the previous calendar month. VAT is calculated at the UK standard rate of 20 percent and itemised per ride, not just totalled at the bottom. Each line on the invoice includes the ride date, the booking reference, the agent's name, the pickup and drop-off (or route summary for multi-stop days), the base fare, the wait time in minutes, and the VAT amount. The invoice is emailed to your nominated accounting inbox and is also downloadable from the business portal in PDF and CSV. For agencies who prefer to reconcile against specific listings, each ride can be tagged with a client reference or listing code at the point of booking. Your accounts team can then filter by that reference to isolate the rides being recharged to a vendor on a marketing budget, or the rides being expensed against a specific instruction. The CSV export makes this straightforward to pull into Xero, Sage, QuickBooks, or your practice management system. ## What data does the reporting include? The business portal reporting shows spend by agent, by branch, by client reference, by day of week, by vehicle class, and by wait time versus journey time. You can see, for example, that your Kensington branch is spending significantly more on wait time than journey time — which usually indicates viewings are overrunning and could be scheduled more tightly. Or that a particular agent's average booking value is double the branch mean, which might mean they are handling higher-value instructions or might mean they are booking unnecessarily large vehicles. We do not currently provide a live occupancy dashboard or predictive analytics, and we are honest about the fact that the reporting is descriptive rather than prescriptive. It tells you what happened, in enough detail to inform decisions, but it does not automate the decisions themselves. Larger agencies typically pull the monthly CSV into their own BI stack for deeper analysis. ## Is CabsOn GDPR-compliant for storing client data on viewings? Yes. We are a UK-registered business, ICO-registered as a data controller for our own users and as a processor when we handle personal data on behalf of your agency. Any client name, phone number, or address entered against a booking is stored in the UK, encrypted at rest, and retained only as long as needed for operational and HMRC purposes. Some agencies prefer not to store client names against bookings at all — using labels like "Viewing 1" or the internal listing code — and our system supports that. Our standard Data Processing Agreement is available on request and forms part of the business account onboarding for agencies that require one. Under UK GDPR, your clients have the usual rights of access and erasure, and we can respond to subject access requests routed through your agency within the statutory 30-day window. ## What vehicle classes are available? Saloon for typical viewings. Executive (Mercedes E-Class or BMW 5-Series) for prime London instructions or overseas HNW clients where the vehicle matters as part of the experience. Our V-Class MPV for a viewing party larger than four — extended family looking at a house together, or an agent bringing along a valuer and a photographer. Wheelchair-accessible vehicles are available on request. The vehicle class is selected at booking and priced per journey, with the fare quoted before you confirm. Most agencies default to Saloon for typical viewings and only step up to Executive for named prime instructions where the client-facing impression matters.