Chatbot /

13 Min read

The Most Powerful Guide on Real Estate Chatbots [2024]

June 7, 2020

Hardik Makadia

CEO, WotNot

Table of Contents

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.