The company
AZ Real Estate is a boutique property agency founded by Alisa Zotimova in 2012, operating in prime central London. The team is lean and deliberately so — the focus is on personalized service, deep market knowledge, and handling every aspect of a transaction from start to finish. The name reflects the philosophy: A to Z, nothing handed off, nothing missed.
Thirteen years in one of the world's most competitive property markets means Alisa has seen what works and what doesn't. For a long time, what didn't work was her tech stack.
The problem: tools that worked until they didn't
Before 2021, AZ Real Estate ran on Trello and spreadsheets. It was a common enough setup, and it held together while the business was smaller. As the team and the pipeline grew, it got messy fast.
The specific problem with real estate pipelines is timing. A standard CRM or Kanban board is designed around deals that progress. Real estate deals often don't — not because they're lost, but because the client isn't ready yet. Forcing those leads into a binary choice, either active or closed lost, meant the team was constantly misrepresenting where deals stood. Active stages filled up with stale leads. Closed lost stages swallowed opportunities that were never actually dead.
Money and time were disappearing into a system that couldn't reflect how the business actually worked. Alisa brought in a consultant to find a CRM that could.
Why Bigin got the green light
The non-negotiables were straightforward: easy to use and affordable. The consultant recommended Bigin. What confirmed the decision was a ready-made real estate template that gave the team a starting point, combined with enough flexibility to customize it around AZ Real Estate's specific workflow.
The ease-of-use point matters more than it might seem for a small agency. A CRM that requires dedicated training or technical support to maintain creates a different kind of overhead. When new team members join AZ Real Estate, getting trained on Bigin is the first thing they do. That's only possible because the system is genuinely straightforward to pick up.
How the pipeline was built
The main sales pipeline covers the stages you'd expect: pitching, site visits, contract signature, memo signature, completed deals, and closed lost. Clean, linear, easy to read.
The addition that changed how the team managed cold leads was two pause stages: "live hold" for clients who are close but not quite ready, and "long hold" for those whose timeline is further out. When a lead goes cold, instead of closing it as lost or leaving it cluttering an active stage, it moves into the appropriate pause stage with all the deal history intact. The full context — every conversation, every note, every document — stays attached and accessible when the timing eventually changes.
This sounds like a small tweak. The impact on lead preservation is significant. Leads that would previously have disappeared into closed lost, or been forgotten in a stale active stage, now sit in a clearly labelled holding area. The team knows they exist. They know why they're on hold. And when the client is ready to move, the relationship picks up where it left off rather than starting from scratch.
The rest of the system
The pause stages get the most attention because they're the most distinctive part of the setup, but the rest of the infrastructure is worth understanding too.
AZ Real Estate integrated their existing Mailchimp contact list into Bigin when they made the switch. Contacts are organized into the correct Mailchimp audiences based on type — client, partner, or real estate agent — and segmented further by language. Different email campaigns go to different audiences, with Bigin and Mailchimp working in sync rather than as separate systems.
A second pipeline manages partner relationships. AZ Real Estate's agents refer business to partners and solicitors, who pitch their services to clients and loop back — a revenue stream that needed its own tracking logic separate from the main sales pipeline.
Automations handle the consistency piece. When a new lead enters the pipeline, the responsible team member is automatically assigned a sequence of tasks. Nothing gets missed because nobody remembered to assign it. Gmail integration means inbound and outbound emails are logged against the right deal without manual effort.
Dashboards give leadership a view of pipeline health and revenue tracking without requiring anyone to pull a report.
The result
Alisa's stated goal was to work smarter rather than harder. By that measure, Bigin delivered. Productivity improved across the team, and the system has become embedded enough that onboarding new hires starts with Bigin training.
The pause stage logic in particular reflects something consistent across small businesses that get CRM right. As the pillar article on small business CRM metrics shows, the businesses that see the biggest gains aren't necessarily the ones with the most sophisticated setups — they're the ones that build a system that matches how they actually work, rather than forcing their workflow into a generic template.
For AZ Real Estate, cold leads used to have nowhere to go. Now they have exactly the right place.
"It's a great CRM — not too much and not too little. I like the ease of use, how straightforward it is and not overly complicated," said Alisa Zotimova.
The team is already looking ahead. Bigin's WhatsApp integration is next on the list, and Alisa is launching a new brand, AZ Alliance, that will let independent brokers operate under her umbrella. The entire operation will run on Bigin.
Cold leads aren't lost leads — they're leads without the right place to live. Bigin gives small businesses the pipeline flexibility to keep every opportunity alive until the timing is right.
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