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Case study · 10 min read · May 22, 2026

How I automated owner prospecting at Blitz Ploiești with N8N.

Complete workflow: Firecrawl + OpenAI + WhatsApp Business + Notion. From 50 monthly contacts manually to 171 automated. With JSON export and screenshots.

The problem

I work as a real estate agent at Blitz Ploiești. The Prahova market has dozens of active agents competing for a relatively limited property pool. The competitive edge comes down to reaction speed — whoever calls a new owner-posted listing first has roughly a 70% chance of getting the exclusive.

Manually, an agent can monitor 1-2 portals and make 30-50 real calls per day. But owners post 24/7 across 4-5 different portals (OLX, Storia, Imobiliare.ro, Anunturi.io). Missing a listing in the first hour usually means losing it.

The workflow architecture

Three N8N flows wired together:

  1. Scraper — Firecrawl polls OLX, Storia, Imobiliare.ro every 15 minutes for new Prahova listings.
  2. Classifier — OpenAI looks at each listing and decides: real owner vs. agent in disguise (in Romania, many agents post "from owner" to get more views).
  3. Scoring + Outreach — for owner listings: extract data, compare to recent transactions in the zone, calculate potential score 0-10, draft a personalized WhatsApp message.

What the data shows after 4 months

  • ~171 outreach attempts/month vs. ~50 manually possible. 3.4x increase.
  • Under 60 minutes from posting to first contact, vs. 8-24h manually.
  • ~30 min/day of my time spent on review + targeted calls, vs. 4-5h manually.
  • ~€8/month total operating cost (Firecrawl + OpenAI + WhatsApp API + VPS).

Honest caveats

Things that don't work perfectly yet:

  • Portals change HTML occasionally. Average 1-2 days of partial downtime per month until I adjust selectors.
  • The classifier sometimes misjudges "owner" vs. "agent" — currently around 87% accuracy. The remaining 13% is mostly false-positive (real owners flagged as agents), which is the safer error direction.
  • Attribution of closed deals directly to the workflow is difficult — real estate is too multi-touch. I can show contact volume and response rates, but not "this workflow closed X transactions worth Y commission" — and I refuse to fake that data.

Want this workflow yourself?

I sell the entire pack as the "Real Estate Complete" bundle — €299 template-only or €1,499 with full setup on your N8N. JSON file + 30-page setup PDF + 20-minute Loom walkthrough.