Chatbot /
13 Min read
The Most Powerful Guide on Real Estate Chatbots [2024]
June 7, 2020
Hardik Makadia
CEO, WotNot
In the current times, the real estate sector is reeling under the pressure of increasing competition and the volatile state of markets. In all of this, the only way to make sure your real estate business survives and thrives is by ensuring effective communication. And that’s where the real estate chatbot comes in.
Buyers and prospects looking to buy, sell or rent property need immediate answers. And for a real estate agent who is juggling new and old property listings, chasing their own sales goals, and managing past clients — it is difficult to take time out to ascertain the overall seriousness of the lead, answer their queries and nurture them.
Chatbots in real estate can help realtors save resources while catering to the needs of their leads and providing a superior customer experience.
In this article, we will dive deep into real estate chatbots. We will talk about the following:
What Are Real Estate Chatbots?
Top 7 Reasons to Implement Real Estate Chatbots?
How to Leverage Chatbots to Grow Your Real Estate Business
Best Platforms To Build Real Estate Chatbots
How to Build a Real Estate Chatbot Under 5 Minutes
Conclusion
So, without any further ado, let's begin.
What Are Real Estate Chatbots?
Real estate chatbots are chatbots deployed by real estate companies to guide visitors and customers through buying and selling properties.
Through the principles of conversational marketing, real estate chatbots answer visitors' property-related questions and convert prospective leads into potential buyers.
Bots deployed across a plethora of industries such as healthcare, e-commerce, retail or hospitality have made a significant impact in terms of ROI and customer engagement.
Similarly, chatbots are aptly designed to be helpful in the world of real estate as well. Be it a real estate agent or a customer, real estate chatbots prove to be of assistance to both when it comes to saving time, money, and additional resources.
Top 7 Reasons to Implement Real Estate Chatbots?
Real Estate Chatbots have revolutionized the way we buy, sell or rent properties, by turning long static forms into an interactive experience. Listed down are some major reasons why your real estate business needs to deploy chatbots as soon as possible:
1. Real Time Enquiry
Real estate chatbots immediately resolve all queries posed by website visitors. Thus, they can ensure that important leads do not have to wait around for a human agent to answer their questions related to their real estate requirements. These chatbots cater to the needs of your audience instantly.
2. Available 24×7
As real estate agents have time constraints like meeting deadlines, shift timings, etc., it is not possible for them to remain available to the prospect throughout the day. With real estate chatbots being available round the clock, 365 days a year — your customer’s queries can be addressed even outside of operational hours.
3. Search MLS Listings
Real estate chatbots can simplify your customers’ hunt for their ideal house/property. The bot can assess a prospect’s search requirements, scan the MLS for relevant and matching properties and then display listings that are active within the chat interface itself.
4. Language No Bar
Real estate chatbots can communicate with your targeted audience in their language, thus further personalizing the customer’s experience. This also contributes to elevating your brand and increasing customer engagement.
5. Ease of Data Handling with Integrations
Implementing chatbots in your business does not add to the data chaos. In fact, data handling becomes a lot easier with integrations. For example, real estate chatbots can collect information and feed it directly to your CRM or database, without your assistance.
6. Omni-channel Presence
Real estate chatbots can attend to all leads, at any time, and at any channel. Chatbot’s omni-channel messaging support features allow customers to communicate with the business through various channels such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, etc.
7. Easy to Use and User-specific
Every lead is looking for a different apartment or property type. Real estate chatbots help welcome the customers or leads and provide them with what they need by asking a series of questions and offering relevant information through interaction which keeps the customers engaged.
How Real Estate Chatbots Can Grow Your Business
Chatbots in real estate can help realtors save resources while catering to the needs of their leads and providing a superior customer experience. Let us understand how:
1. Qualify Buyer and Seller Needs
Using customers’ interactions with real estate chatbots, you can easily determine what the customer is looking for and nurture the lead ahead. The information collected by real estate chatbots helps you identify which leads are worth being nurtured and which are not, thereby saving a great deal of your time.
2. Schedule Property Viewings
Once the prospect is deeper into the sales funnel, you can schedule home tours, as well as all the other preliminary tasks of a real estate agent. At this point, real estate chatbots can automate the process of scheduling site visits by syncing up with agents’ calendars and confirming visits.
3. Conduct 360-Degree Virtual Tours
You can pique the interest of your prospects by giving a quick virtual tour through real estate chatbots. Help your visitors visualize the home they want to buy/rent directly through the bot to move them further in the sales funnel and convert them from interested prospects into ready-to-visit customers.
4. Track and Takeover Conversations
Keep a log of the interactions with leads through real estate chatbots. This will make taking over the conversation with converted leads that much easier for you. With access to prior interactions, you have a better understanding of the lead’s preferences even before you talk to them.
5. Automate Your Follow-Up Process
As a realtor, you have a lot on your plate other than following up on people who are yet to be customers. Real estate chatbots can be easily utilized to follow up on your leads via the medium they choose. The chatbot approaches the leads for follow-ups on your behalf, on whichever channel your leads prefer.
Follow-up messages or emails can be automatically sent to the prospect without manual intervention. Or if you prefer to follow up with the lead manually, then that too is possible.
8 Best Platforms to Build Real Estate Chatbots
1. WotNot
WotNot has an easy, no-code bot builder that allows realtors to build real estate chatbots seamlessly, without any coding knowledge.
WotNot allows integration with the majority of property management software, including Entrata, RealPage, YArdi, Yelp, AppFolio, Buildium, and BoomTown. It also allows you to create turnkey chatbots by customizing the pre-existing templates available on the platform.
WotNot allows you to create Formless Lead Capture, which means that your bot can capture important information via an engaging conversation with customers instead of form-filling.
In addition, WotNot offers a done-for-you service wherein a team of experienced conversation design experts understand a business’s needs and carefully create a conversation flow that matches the needs of your business and keep optimizing the flow by reviewing the results.
Key Features
Easy drag-and-drop function – no coding skills required to build bots
Bot to human handover of conversation made super easy
Insightful analytics dashboard that clearly shows the trajectory of a business’s KPIs
Saves chatbot conversations in the backend and emails transcripts
Supports multiple channels like WhatsApp, Messenger, Messenger, and SMS
Provides native integrations with Zoho, Slack, Salesforce, Shopify, WordPress, and IBM
Pros
Has a simplified and intuitive, chatbot builder
An excellent customer support for your queries
Easy to set up and use
Cons
The integrations are limited in the startup package
Pricing
WotNot has a free plan that offers basic features. Talking about its paid plans, it starts at $49/month.
Also Read: Kathryn Harbour Generated High Volume Leads With WotNot
2. Qualified
Qualified is the expert-recommended software that is easy to use and focuses on generating pipeline for high revenue. It is exclusively designed for Sales Cloud customers to connect their websites with Salesforce data in no time. This vastly helps to identify buyers’ interests and accordingly design personalized sales pitches.
Key Features
Identifies the most valuable visitors
Starts sales conversations as per customers’ interests
Helps in managing sales and marketing campaigns
Generates pipelines quickly
Saves real-time conversations
Pros
Aptly pinpoints to the highest value visitors, and their locations on-site
Insightful data that helps customers understand their visitors’ requirement patterns
Stellar support and onboarding team
Qualified provides a collaborative workspace where multiple developers can code in real-time at the same time
Live chat, chatbots, voice interactions, and screen sharing allow VIPs to connect in real-time
Cons
Qualified's admin panel may seem confusing at first
Previous conversation tracker
Dynamic messaging
Sometimes confuses between actual customers and internal employees
Pricing
Qualified offers different categories of paid services like:
Growth: $3000/month
Premier: $6000/month
Enterprise: Request a quote
3. Drift
Drift is focused on conversational sales and marketing through automation, text, and video chat, which makes it perfect for building real estate chatbots.
Drift positions itself as an AI-powered demand-generation tool that real estate businesses can use to personalize experiences, and eventually increase revenue and customers.
Key Features
The Drift chat widget ensures immediate communication with the customers, thus enhancing interactions
You can create rules to route the leads and conversations for better assigning
At-a-glance reporting that allows you to track the key metrics for bot performance
Integrates with major chat and messenger platforms so that you can view all chats from a single place
Pros
Over the years, Drift has strived for agility, so it's easy to get onboarded and implement
Automated chat tools on your website and other applications
It has strong lead-generation capabilities that drive your sales and revenue
With numerous automation tools, you can ensure to customize your bot and personalize your chats
Cons
Compared to other competitors, Drift is considerably expensive
Drift’s bot builder also lacks when it comes to advanced features that you can find in other providers
Pricing
Drift offers free plans along with plans like Premium for $2500/month
It also has an Advanced plan and an Enterprise plan, which you can request a quote for as per your requirement
Also Read: Is It Worth Buying Drift in 2024?
4. Landbot
In the real estate game, Landbot is among those chatbot platforms that help you to create simple yet advanced automation that serves wide-ranging use cases across marketing, sales and customer support.
Landbot supports advanced data workflows, NLP, Dialogflow & real-time integrations with all leading apps. It comes with a whole library of interesting, ready-to-customize chatbot designs that can integrate with your property management system within minutes.
It also allows human agents or support reps to jump in the conversion and take complete control whenever a chatbot is unable to give a reply to a complex query.
Key Features
Offers numerous integrations to scale the bot better
Enables the creation of several chatbots for different platforms like WhatsApp
Provides drag-and-drop interface
Enables testing and analyzing chatbots without any codes
Enables native integration with other online tools and apps
Enables personalization
Pros
Simple visual constructor for your bots
Many bot patterns
Zapier and Webhooks
Full customization CSS for your bots
Cons
Lacks the ability to upload custom icons for answer buttons
Lacks the ability to pop up on the side
Pricing
Landbot offers various plans available: free, paid, and customizable.
Starter: €30/month
Pro: €80/month
Business: Customized plan
5. HubSpot
HubSpot is a platform that provides businesses with a complete suite of tools for managing and growing their customer relationships. The platform is designed to be user-friendly and intuitive, making it easy for real estate businesses of all sizes to manage their visitor and customer data and interactions.
HubSpot is actually a comprehensive solution ecosystem for businesses, encompassing all aspects, including marketing, sales, services, operations, and CMS. It streamlines manual tasks and results in improved sales productivity efficiency.
Key Features
Connect with the website visitors in real-time with live chat on your bot to close deals faster
A single inbox that allows your sales, marketing and support team to collaborate efficiently and manage the customers better
Helps manage the pipeline efficiently by integrating with your CRM software
Use the pre-built templates to start creating the workflow for the chatbot
Customize the voice and tone to meet your business needs
Instant reply bot that allows you to send a quick reply immediately after the user starts the conversation
Pros
Sort data through Filters
Manage to Log Meetings, Calls, and Tasks
Managing the priority level of Business lead
Generate Reports
Cons
Removes outdated leads after a specified date
Expand the filtering section with additional tabs
Make minor modifications to the Mobile App, such as ensuring data entered from a phone is properly synced with the system
Pricing
HubSpot categorized its pricing into three:
Starter: Starts at $45/month or $540/yr
Professional: Starts at $800/ month or $9600/yr
Enterprise: Starts at $3200/month or $38400/yr
6. Tidio
Tidio is a live chat and chatbot platform that helps enterprises with no-code conversational marketing solutions. It’s a perfect solution for lead generation and answering FAQs. It also comes with a variety of templates that include chatbot conversation scripts for real estate businesses. It helps you proactively generate leads on websites, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, etc.
Key Features
Hassle-free and quick installation
Visual builder interface
Third-party integrations
NLP integrations
Live chat (Web/Mobile)
Custom branding
Customer database
Pros
Tido is easy to implement across all platforms
Tidio offers a simple, clean, and robust interface on their backend as well as on your website and other platforms
It offers 16 different triggers for its bots. Triggers are bot nodes that prompt the bot when to start
You also have access to chatbot templates that you can customize according to your needs
Cons
Since Tidio has too many features, it can become daunting for brands and marketers who are completely unfamiliar with real estate bots
The prices may seem too high for small businesses
Pricing
Tidio offers both free and paid plans. Its free plan can handle two operations and manage 100 conversations. With the paid plan of $26/month, you can increase automated conversations up to 40,000 chats.
7. Intercom
Intercom is one of the first companies to launch chatbots in the market since 2011. It is one of the best-performing chatbot platforms with an extensive list of numerous software integrations that are ideal for seamlessly creating outbound social media marketing campaigns for real estate businesses.
Key Features
Provides support for desktop and mobile apps
Makes the chatbot easy to use
Provides integration set of more than 250 helpful apps
Provides engaging customer support with its business messenger
Provides machine learning models to answer queries smartly
Analyzes business and customer data for providing a personalized experience
Pros
An intuitive and professional interface
Free trial available for the product
A unified platform for better collaboration
Integrates with your website and other systems
Cons
Customer support is slow and unresponsive
Expensive for small and medium-sized businesses
Pricing
Starter: $74 per month (for small businesses)
Support: Connect with sales
Engage: Connect with sales
Convert: Connect with sales
8. Ada
Ada is one of the most highly rated chatbot platforms for building real estate chatbots. This chatbot platform automates the majority of brand interaction with intelligent solutions to consumers’ queries. It also comes with an inbuilt chatbot support functionality. The best part about it is that this platform is easy to implement and easy to scale.
Key Features
No coding skills are required to customize
Provides real-time analytics of customer data
Top-notch integration capabilities
Pros
Fairly easy UI when it comes to creating answers, training answers, report finding, etc.
Easy and fast bot-building process
The backend is straightforward for bot managers and doesn't require any prior coding experience
Cons
Lack of customization of reports
Issues with understanding how best to measure success and track the impact of training the bot
Limited in providing some of the customizations, especially for companies with more than one product line
Pricing
Ada provides three packages for enterprises, which are:
Core: Request a quote
Advanced: Request a quote
Pro: Request a quote
These subscription packages cover different features and provide different benefits.
How to Build a Real Estate Chatbot Under 5 Minutes!
Contrary to popular belief, building a real estate chatbot is not a herculean task, especially if you are building it with WotNot. With WotNot’s no-code bot builder and ready-made templates, you can build a real estate bot within 5 minutes.
Yes, all you have to do is, follow the below instructions.
1. Create a Free Account on WotNot
To create your free account on WotNot, you can sign up by entering the details below:
Name
Contact number
Business Email
Company Name
Password
You can also sign up directly through your Google account.
After signing up successfully, you will see various chatbot templates based on different use cases.
2. Choose a Template
Here, since we are building a real estate chatbot, we will choose real estate in the industry tab. You’ll see multiple ready-made templates for different use cases pertaining to real estate. You can choose any template and start building your bot.
You can also preview how the conversation flow would look for each template which will help you to make decisions quicker.
For now, we’ll choose a property showcasing template to build a real estate chatbot.
3. Add or Edit Text and Images
Once you click on the template, you will see the chat flow with multiple action blocks each serving a particular function. You can add relevant info and media to the conversation.
For example, you can add images to the carousel and change its description.
Similarly, you can make minor tweaks in this flow as per your business requirements.
For example, you can have more options for adding more cards in the carousel action block.
Similarly, you can ask for extra information by adding an additional collect input action block in the chat flow.
And obviously, you define the tone of the entire conversation by changing the messages inside action blocks.
4. Test
The chatbot is now ready. You can chat with it below to see how it works.
Conclusion
Generating and closing leads, managing property viewings, closing sales, are just a few of the hassles in the real estate sector that aren’t just time-consuming but also expensive. And believe it or not, the internet has only made things further complicated.
Real estate chatbots help you to automate a large part of this whole process by:
Having personalized conversations with your leads, at scale
Assigning the right properties to the right people on the basis of buyer and seller needs
Scheduling property viewings
Conducting virtual tours
Thus, chatbots prove to be a win-win for both the parties — you and your customers.
Leading property aggregators have used real estate chatbots built on WotNot, and attained impressive results in terms of generating pre-qualified leads, saving time, and providing excellent customer support.
Want to create a similar customer experience? Or just simply wish to bring in more leads for your properties?
If either, then contact us or schedule a demo with our experts.
ABOUT AUTHOR
Hardik Makadia
CEO, WotNot
His leadership, pioneering vision, and relentless drive to innovate and disrupt has made WotNot a major player in the industry.