Once I've delt with real estate agency. The have only 2 agents that works with clients using something like MS Excel as data storage. Each of this agents spent about 10 minutes to satisfy a customer. After business automation (they bought a solution for real estate data management) one agent can satisfy about 3 customers in 10 minutes. But it was only single example. Now I think about investment into my business automation. Have anybody another optimization examples. Would be great to learn more about it.
Short answer ; yes it is. Longer answer; it is, if you use integrated, simple to use, cheap-to-maintain software. I don't know about real-estate, but for instance, for my businesses I connected a bunch of software together to handle everything. It is cheap, open source packages with some PHP glue. Easy to maintain, easy to run and easy to use for my clients and employees. The total system allowed me to 'trade in' overhead for billable hours, which, bottomline, means profit.
Automation is really the only way to build your business effectively. To prove it, I actually work in the "Automation Services Team" for a fairly major telecomm company in the US. If you can free up your own time, or somebody else's by automating parts of your job, then that leaves you open to work in other areas that will help your business grow. Think about it this way: Would you rather- a) Earn $100,000 per year working 80+ hours each week or b) Earn $100,000 per year, taking time off when you want, learning about new avenues for your business, and just having a good time because the entire process is completely automated? I mean, you can even automate the part of your business where you log into all your affiliate accounts to check your commissions. Have a program that does that for you and sends you a text message while you're on the golf course. Which do you prefer? As you can see, I'm all about automation.