Real Estate Chatbots: Success Stories & DIY Guide

Having a chatbot for your business is like having a customer support staff who doesn't sleep, go on leave, or take an afternoon nap. While real estate chatbots have helped many scale their businesses, some realtors still think they are a threat. Whichever side you are on, you are in the right place.

This blog post will take you through the ins and outs of chatbots in real estate, demystifying the myths, sharing examples, giving use cases, and helping you build one from scratch. Lastly, we will answer your pesky questions to help you make an informed decision. Let's take the ride.

Part 1. What is a Real Estate Chatbot?

A real estate chatbot is a virtual assistant that can handle inquiries from prospects about buying, selling, or renting properties. The chatbot is the first point of contact between your business and potential clients. Because it is available 24/7, it can capture the attention of prospects even when your support team is off duty.

Most chatbots use artificial intelligence, natural language processing, or pre-scripted content to create conversations, answer questions, and guide prospects through the sales funnel. It can be boring answering the same question a hundred times to different clients, and that is where automation comes in.

You can use a real estate chatbot to:

• Answer frequently asked questions (FAQs)
• Share listings with prospects
• Scheduled calls or meetings with potential customers
• Share personalized offers to clients
• Ensure legal and insurance compliance
• Collect contact information

To help you know how you can benefit from this technology, let's explore its benefits.

Part 2. Why Use Chatbot in Real Estate?

If the numbers shown by Statista are anything to go by, no business should ignore the impact of chatbots. The statistics show that 44% of consumers appreciate the assistance of chatbots in finding product information before making a purchase. Here are more reasons why you should use real estate chat bots:

Increase Conversion Rates

According to Ledoo, chatbots increase website conversion by 10-100%. In the age of instant and convenience, you need to provide round-the-clock assistance to potential customers. While this might not be feasible with human staff, a real estate bot can help you fix this problem and increase conversion. The impression you create at the attention stage of your sales funnel determines whether you will close the deal.

Reduce Workload on Customer Support

Before the purchase, over 97% of property buyers have to search online at some point. Handling such numbers can be overwhelming for your customer support team because of the numerous questions you will likely receive. Using chatbots to answer commonly asked questions can save your business more than 1.75 hours daily.

Personalized Recommendations

Analyzing and interpreting data can be challenging, especially when prospects need answers as they scroll through your listing. AI chatbots assess potential customers' past searches, time spent on listings, and saved properties, giving recommendations within seconds. The tools also allow prospects to make location, size, and price adjustments for tailored listings.

High ROI

With over 72% of real estate decision makers planning to implement or already using AI technology, it is understandable with the high return on investment. Most real estate deals are worth hundreds of thousands in dollars; each increased conversion means more returns. Botpress reports that the return on investment for real estate chatbots could be as high as 1000%.

Part 3. Top 3 Examples of Chatbots for Real Estate

Some of the big names in the real estate industry have used chatbots and recorded immense results. Let's look at 3 of them.

1. Century 21

One of the industry giants implemented chatbot technology in 2021 to help in lead generation and nurturing.

RiTA is an AI assistant that uses deep AI integration to qualify leads through a hyper-personalized and automated two-way SMS conversation. So, the sales and marketing teams can assign prospects to the relevant recipient without breaking or delaying the customer journey. This positions C21 at a better place to win more listings and sell more properties.

2. Compass

Investing over $1 billion in AI can seem extravagant, but not when one of the best in the industry is doing it. Compass announced its investment in artificial intelligence to automate the lead generation process. At a time when the real estate market shrank to its all-time low in 30 years, Compass was leaving nothing to chance to increase market share.

The real estate giant's president of growth and communication said, "Our job is to help agents grow their businesses, make more money, save time, and create great experiences for their client". And there is no better to do it than investing in automation chatbots.

3 Home Boutique

You might think this technology is only for the industry leaders, but even start-ups are taking up the challenge. One such company is Home Boutique.

This Spanish real estate company uses a chatbot to guide clients through their listings. You can use the chat to find properties in specific places, sizes, types, and designs.

The chatbot also provides a 360-degree house tour to give you a glimpse of your preferred property. This feature comes in handy if you are time-constricted or far from the location of the properties.

Part 4. 5 Best Custom Real Estate Chatbot Platforms

After defining real estate chatbots and exploring why you should consider using them, it's time to highlight some of the best real estate chatbots and their features. Let's get the ball rolling.

1. ChatInsight

This tool helps you automate the question-and-answer process to minimize response time and handle more queries. ChatInsight is a product of San Studio, a SaaS developer with experience across different industries. The real estate chatbot builder has a simple interface that makes it easy to build your virtual assistant without coding expertise.

The AI-powered chatbot allows you to create a comprehensive database to answer price, location, size, and other property-related queries, ensuring potential clients receive instant and accurate information anytime.

The ability to upload and synthesize information from different sources (documents and links) makes ChatInsights stand out. You can create a knowledge base by uploading content from various departments or sharing website URLs.

Apart from that, this chatbot builder comes in handy when training recruits by sharing documents and other files. The centralization of information makes retrieval of company policies and other essential files easy, even for new employees in your team.

Pricing

ChatInsights offers a free trial that you can choose to test the suitability of the tool to your business. If you want to upgrade, you can go for the Standard, Basic, or Enterprise packages at $199, $299, or $499 annually.

2. Sleekflow

As the name suggests, SleekFlow helps real estate companies streamline communication. Delayed communication could lead to missed opportunities, damage your reputation, or discourage potential clients from closing the deal. Using the chatbot builder, you can create a virtual support agent to answer questions, recommend properties, merge touchpoints, and fast-track the customer journey.

The platform also helps in workflow automation through lead distribution, auto-responses, and traffic splitting. These functionalities make the engagement with prospects more personalized, which increases conversions. You can also integrate the real estate chatbot with other marketing for a centralized approach.

The omnichannel functionality helps you manage contact across different platforms. Consequently, it is easier to identify different touchpoints from a single client and quality leads accordingly.

Another standout feature is the customer data management system, which is ideal for segmentation and tailoring your campaigns to different audiences. You can also use this function to centralize your business database and send broadcast messaging to a specific demographic.

Some real estate companies using the tool include mudah.my, ibilik, Swire Properties, Sunsuria, Tanami Properties, and EcoWorld.

Pricing

SleekFlow has a free plan that allows you to manage up to 100 contacts. The other plans are Pro and Premium, which cost $79 and $299 monthly, respectively. You can also get a tailored package (Enterprise), depending on your business needs.

3. Wotnot

Customer service, marketing, and sales departments control most aspects of a real estate business. If you can automate part of these tasks, it could mean saving considerable time for your team. Wotnot is the go-to real estate chatbot for automating these functions without compromising the quality of services.

The objective of the platform is to help you screen potential leads and assign them depending on their phase in the purchase journey. Through Wotnot, you can answer 60% of customer queries through self-service. Besides, the tool helps in property recommendations by matching available listings with prospects' preferences.

Some companies using the platform include Ricoh, Donna Italia, Amneal, Blue Chip, Superbo, and Electra.

Wotnot stands out because of its lead qualification functionality, which assesses the potential of each potential client based on their engagement and responses. This ensures no gaps in the sales funnel, and only high-quality leads are passed on to the sales team.

The no-code bot builder has customizable real estate chatbot templates, which come in handy if you don't have the technical skills. You can also assign the responsibility of building your bot to the Whatnot team.

Property tour and appointment booking makes it easy to manage your schedule. The tool ensures you are not double-booked, and clients choose the most convenient time for them.

Wotnot is compatible with most real estate tools through Zapier.

Pricing

Wotnot offers 4 packages, as shown below:

• Free
• Starter: $99/month
• Premium: $299/month
• Ultimate: $899/month

You can also get a customized package that aligns with your business needs.

4. Botpress

Botpress has set the pace in the chatbot industry, serving global giants like Tesla, Shell, American Eagle, EA Sports, and American Express. The chatbot builder has an easy-to-use interface leveraging the power of artificial intelligence and large language models (LLMs) to automate customer support.

Botpress allows you to import data from documents, PDFs, and websites with a click. This enables you to create a comprehensive database to handle all client queries in a jiffy. You can also integrate the chatbot with Slack, Linear, and Database to centralize your information.

If you are good at coding, you can give the chatbot a box with the easy-to-use Botpress API and SDK.

The chat automation makes Botpress a standout chatbot builder because of its ability to process complex queries. The tool provides tailored solutions through large language models, giving your customer support team a hand in handling customer requests.

Botpress can also manage visit booking and contact scheduling for real estate businesses. The feature helps synchronize your calendar and lets prospects choose their preferred dates and times.

The wide range of integrations and templates makes Botpress an all-in-one platform for building a real estate chatbot.

Pricing

The cost of Botpress is $495 per month for the Team package. You can also opt for a customized plan that matches your business needs. Apart from that, Botpress has a generous free package that includes 5 bots.

5. Tars

This tool leverages the power of natural language processing (NLP) to ease the burden on your customer support team while giving quality responses. Tars chatbot can handle complex queries like financing options, property tour schedules, commission structures, and prices.

With the chatbot's intuitive customer engagement, you can rest assured that your prospects will find the solution to most of their queries.  

TREGP, MRG NYC, Shriram Properties, Housing Hand, and Broker Loop are some companies using Tars.

The primary feature is the multilingual and no-code chatbot, which includes analytic capabilities. This allows you to make informed decisions.

You can use the hundreds of real estate chatbot templates and the drag-and-drop option to build your bot from scratch. The platform also allows conversation transfer to live agents if the query is complex.

Pricing

Tars offers tailored prices depending on the needs of a business.

Part 5. How to Build a Real Estate Chatbot without Any Coding

After exploring the best real estate chatbots, the next step is to use one of them (ChatInsight) to build a chatbot from scratch. Don't fret; no coding skills are required!

Conclusion

Artificial intelligence has revolutionized the real estate industry by introducing tools that handle complex tasks. We have highlighted some of the tools that can help you stay ahead of the game in the industry. You can also create your chatbot from scratch without any coding skills.

FAQs about Real Estate Chatbot

Will AI replace real estate agents?

Isabella

AI will replace real estate agents, but lazy and rigid ones. Artificial intelligence is more of an assistant than a substitute for the human workforce. However, one must learn how to leverage the technology to remain relevant.

What is a virtual agent in real estate?

Isabella

A virtual agent is a tool that uses artificial intelligence to handle prospects' queries. The responses could be pre-scripted or AI-generated.