220 branches. £150k/yr in SaaS retired. Average rating moved from 3.8 to 4.4.

Greystone Estates is a UK estate agency network with 220 branches. The firm's brand is the sum of branch-level reputation — Rightmove ratings, Google reviews, agent-level feedback, and the chatter on PropertyHub forums and MSE threads that drive purchase intent before search ever happens.

Managing this at 220-branch scale needed three capabilities: review velocity campaigns (encouraging fresh genuine reviews after positive interactions), brand-mention tracking across the open web (estate-agent reputation forms on PropertyHub, MSE, Rightmove community, Twitter, and 30+ property-focused communities), and AI compliance filtering on outgoing branch responses (ASA, RICS, Trading Standards exposure on careless replies).

The market answer was enterprise reputation platforms: Yext, Birdeye, Podium-tier. At 220-branch scale, pricing came in at £100-200k/yr depending on feature mix. Plus per-seat licences. Plus 12-month minimum. Plus a vendor lock-in on the firm's historical reputation data.

The firm had also been trialling smaller hosted tooling on Railway + Supabase. As branch volume grew, hosted costs climbed and the trajectory was running toward another £30-50k/yr just for database + hosting on a half-built system.

The review velocity engine runs across all 220 branches. Customer-completed transactions (sale completion, let agreed, viewing completed) trigger personalised review requests on appropriate timing. The system schedules messages with human-paced sending (no platform spam flags), tracks reply rates per branch, and surfaces low-velocity branches to the regional team for intervention. Reviews land on the customer's preferred platform — Google, Trustpilot, AllAgents per branch — via existing integrations.

Brand-mention tracking covers 30+ property-related communities daily: PropertyHub forums, Rightmove community boards, MSE House Buying / Selling / Renting threads, r/HousingUK, r/UKPersonalFinance property threads, Twitter property hashtags, and 20+ regional-property Facebook groups. Every new mention is scored for sentiment, claim type (complaint / question / praise), and competitive context.

An AI compliance filter screens every outgoing branch response before it sends. Watches for ASA-flagging claims (unsubstantiated 'fastest' / 'best in area'), RICS Code of Conduct violations, Trading Standards risk language, and Property Ombudsman scheme exposure. Problematic drafts route to a regional manager for review; clean drafts auto-send.

All self-hosted on Hetzner + local Postgres behind Cloudflare Access. Drizzle ORM, systemd-managed workers, restic backups to off-server cold storage. Total infrastructure cost in the low thousands per year. Annualised SaaS-equivalent saving: £150k.

Average branch rating moved from 3.8 to 4.4 across the network in 11 months. Material at portfolio scale — a half-star average rating shift across 220 branches measurably moves Rightmove ranking, Google Pack visibility, and the conversion rate of every property listing.

£150k/yr in enterprise reputation SaaS retired. The infrastructure cost of the self-hosted alternative is in the low thousands per year. The savings dwarf the build cost within the first quarter.

Beyond the direct savings: the firm owns the data, the algorithms, and the extensibility. New review platforms (Trustist, Feefo) get added by writing an adapter, not waiting for a vendor's roadmap. The compliance filter has been extended to email outreach and listing copy as new RICS guidance has been published — same engine, broader application.

The Railway + Supabase trajectory the firm was on would have hit £30-50k/yr by year three. That curve was cut off before it materialised.

Two principles. First: at 220-branch scale, even modest per-branch SaaS pricing balloons — the larger you are, the more building beats buying for repetitive infrastructure. Second: reputation data is brand-defining. The risk of vendor lock-in (your historical reviews, your response templates, your moderation rules sitting in a SaaS database) is not theoretical.

We don't recommend this for every firm. A 5-branch agency should buy the SaaS. A 50-branch firm should think about it. At 200+ branches the maths is unambiguous: build.