Case Study
Thirteen days to list. Down to five!
How Nested rolled out a consistent onboard process across their network.
About Nested
Nested launched in 2021 with a clear target: fix what wasn’t working in the UK’s self-employed estate agency model – giving agents a protected local patch, a dedicated marketing budget, and real operational backup, rather than leaving them to handle admin, compliance and lead generation entirely on their own.
That model has grown into a national network of self-employed Partners, run through a central HQ team and built on the Street.co.uk CRM, spanning locations from Margate to the Scottish Highlands. Nested’s pitch to agents is explicitly about not going it alone: a commission split starting at 75/25 (rising to 100% once an agent’s cap is reached) rewards growth, while HQ handles onboarding, marketing, compliance and training centrally so agents can focus on their own patch and clients.
James Hummerstone-Pope, Head of Operations, sits inside that HQ function. His focus is making sure the support behind agents – and the client experience it produces – stays consistent across a network built on individually-run businesses, rather than one single trading entity.
The challenge
Before Kotini, Nested’s agents were each running onboarding through a mix of contract-signing and compliance tools, and clients were getting noticeably different experiences depending on which agent they landed with.
We had someone in Margate being onboarded, receiving a very different experience to someone in Battersea. For us, that brand consistency was really key. What wasn’t working was what we needed to fix.
James Hummerstone-Pope, Head of Operations, Nested
Making sure every client – whether in Battersea or up in the Highlands of Scotland – received the same journey, the same checks, and the same signing process became the priority.
Growing pains at scale
As Nested’s self-employed network grew, the inconsistency in client experience grew right alongside it. Agents running onboarding through their own combination of contract-signing and compliance tools worked well enough at a small scale, but became a bigger problem with every new agent added to the network, until brand consistency was too large a gap to leave unaddressed.
I only considered Kotini. We went out there and started looking for another solution because it was the only one that I believe delivered everything we needed – not just AML checks, but that complete onboarding experience whereby a client felt like it was Nested.
James Hummerstone-Pope, Head of Operations, Nested
Nested’s agents each have the freedom to choose their own partners – a mortgage broker or conveyancer, for example.
From a compliance perspective, it was really important that we knew that their business was protected and the Nested business would be protected. So Kotini, for us, was something that we mandated so that we knew it was being done properly.
James Hummerstone-Pope, Head of Operations, Nested
Thirteen days down to five
Prior to using Kotini, at that point, for instruction to publishing an advert was 13 days. Since choosing Kotini, it’s now five. So it’s clearly sped up that process, which is fantastic.
James Hummerstone-Pope, Head of Operations, Nested
The rollout has landed across all three groups involved. Head office can be confident compliance is being run properly and the brand is protected; agents get properties on the market faster with a consistent onboarding journey to offer their own clients; and buyers and sellers get a single-link process that guides them straight through.
The nice bow nobody expected
I thought Kotini was just AML and contracts. So the fact that it wraps everything up in sort of like a nice bow was like a sweetener to the deal.
James Hummerstone-Pope, Head of Operations, Nested
The material information, legal information and marketing information all being collected through the same onboarding flow, rather than needing a separate tool, turned out to be a meaningful part of the value beyond what he’d gone looking for.
A change nobody had to sell
Rolling out a mandated system across a self-employed network was as much a change-management job as a technical one – getting agents onto the new way of working, and showing them it would leave their business better protected, even though it looked different to what they’d used before.
Once people saw that, whilst it was different to the way they were before, it’s been adopted really well… there’s loads of benefits to Kotini.
James Hummerstone-Pope, Head of Operations, Nested
For a change that started as a head-office mandate, that kind of buy-in is the strongest endorsement there is.
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