Suggest a client is looking for a new home to live in or a potential seller wants to sell their apartment. Both parties demand quick responses in any scenario. However, it is difficult for a real estate agent, broker, or developer who handles new and old listings, as well as their sales and marketing tasks, to take the time to meet the needs of the occasional visitor on their website.
Given that most buyers and sellers start their home search online, it’s a good idea to use a bespoke chatbot for real estate to help them grow their sales funnel. In today’s world of digitization and the online presence of firms, most customers are converting from online leads. In such a situation, letting all that web traffic go is impossible. Real estate messenger bots help you use this traffic to generate leads and turn them into customers.
Main reasons to use a chatbot in the real estate industry
In real estate, lead generation is becoming increasingly complex due to the nature of the industry. Real estate is not something you can pack in your bags and go door to door showing people.
Many of the little things go into the lead generation process alone, and it also takes time to figure out what brokers or real estate agents have to offer and what the client is looking for. Below are the reasons why real estate bots tend to guarantee success:
- Real-time requests: bots quickly answer their questions when people visit your site. They do not have to wait for someone to help them obtain information about the property they are interested in.
- Availability 24×7: Real estate agents cannot be available to the user during the day due to time constraints such as meeting deadlines and an accurate shift schedule. Since the real estate messenger bots are available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, your clients’ questions can be answered, even outside business hours.
- User information: each person is looking for a specific type of apartment or property. Real estate chatbots are critical to giving clients exactly what they want by asking them a series of questions and providing relevant information in a fun way. It’s in stark contrast to traditional data collection methods through long and tedious forms.
- The automated tracking process: apartment bots make it easy to track leads through the media of their choice. The person is asked if he would like to be contacted via email or text to get more information or if he would like to speak to the realtor in person.
- 360-degree virtual tours: real estate messenger bots provide potential clients with a brief virtual tour of the bot itself if they are too busy to visit a property in person. It allows them to get a good idea of what the property will look like before booking a site visit.
- History of interaction: apartment bots help you by keeping track of all previous chats. You can access the logs stored in the system whenever you need to see what a customer has said. If you want to know if a specific type of property in a particular category is of interest (by region, budget, etc.), you can easily do this using all the data in your logs.
Once the prospect has moved further down the sales funnel, the bot organizes a tour of the house and, in a sense, introduces the buyer to the real estate agent. Now agents or the sales team may take control of the situation.
Your real estate chatbot variants
Real estate are one of those areas that is growing, thanks to chatbots. You should consider developing messenger bots for your real estate business if you want to reduce customer support costs, get more qualified leads and, as a result, increase your income. There are four types of chatbots for real estate today. Let’s discuss further the functionality of each virtual assistant.
Website bots
One of the best ways to increase sales is to embed a chatbot on your website. Platforms such as Botsociety and TARS offer ready-made bots similar to building a Lego house. You piece together your conversation flows using pre-built elements, embed the chatbot code into your website, and it starts working.
Website chatbots help you greet website visitors, answer simple questions, make appointments, and share links that match the user’s query.
If most of your business is on your website, then having a chatbot built into your home and contact page is perfect. A proactive chatbot for real estate can reach out to customers outside business hours and direct them to the pages they are looking for.
Messaging bots
If your business thrives on social media or uses messaging (like WhatsApp or SMS) as your primary communication channel, we recommend considering adding a chatbot.
If you actively develop a business page on Facebook, you probably know how quickly ads are viewed and shared. If a customer is interested in the home you post, having a Messenger bot embedded in your business page will make it easier to get in touch with you.
Chatbots in messaging also help keep your customers up to date with changes and updates. If there are new homes on the market that meet the client’s criteria, the bot may ping the client on their preferred messaging app.
Sometimes customers send you messages outside of business hours. You can set up your chatbot to reply to all incoming messages so that it can try to respond to them or forward them to the appropriate agent.
Live chatbots
If you already offer live chat, then integrating a chatbot for real estate will help you connect with customers in their journey to buying a home.
Unlike chatbots on websites that work semi-autonomously and can only perform a narrow range of tasks, a real-time bot works alongside your agents. In addition to answering questions and directing customers to your website and real estate offers, a chatbot can route serious or complex requests directly to your agents.
You provide convenience not only to your customers but also to your team. Instead of giving the client a boring form to fill out, a bot conversationally asks the visitor follow-up questions.
Custom logic bot
Such a chatbot option will bring you closer to home buyers. The specialists have created a chatbot solution called Logic Bot that combines a website and messaging with human support as a backup. Logic Bot is connected to our online chat solution so that you can keep all customer conversations and chatbot controls in one place.
Users are also provided with a chatbot API to which they can connect an external complex chatbot. Logic Bot and the chatbot you connect to the API allow you to send text messages and chat with customers on their favorite messaging channels such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.
Best practices of real estate chatbots
A real estate chatbot helps a real estate firm with various tasks, including lead generation, marketing, scheduling, and acting as the company’s AI to attract and engage new customers. To get the most out of your apartment chatbot, here are some tips to consider:
- Integrate the bot into business social media platforms. Statistics show that social media activity generates 45% more sales opportunities.
- Add real estate images and videos to your chatbot database to increase your chances of views and customer interactions. In a survey, 55% of homebuyers said that the most important online search feature is finding floor plans for properties.
- Let the chatbot suggest information about upcoming open days.
- Integrate the chat feature into your online ads. Once a user clicks on an ad, instead of only finding the text about the property, they will chat with your chatbot, which will provide them with information, collecting their contact information for further communication.
The beauty of automation is that you may follow site visitors if they leave your page without leaving any contact information. Chatbots may continue the conversation where they left off.
The best way to keep in touch and track your bot’s performance is to pair it with your live chat solution. Specialists help you to get started with Logic Bot or connect a pre-built chatbot to your chatbot API.