Top 10 reasons why you should use real estate Chatbots

Whether for rental management, co-ownership, the marketing or sales of a property, real estate agents need support to answer repetitive questions and thus be able to redirect their work time to high value tasks.  Additionally, centered on human contact and relation.

In the sales process, time is precious.  Usually, when constructing a new building, the agency tries to sell as many apartments as possible, even before the construction begins. In the survey, the agents will always answer the same questions even though the first commercial stage is ultimately used to collect general informations of a person who wishes to know more about the development.  Once they have this data, they contact them and treat prospects individually.

With the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and conversational AI, the use of chatbots is becoming more and more widespread. Chatbots are conversational robots programmed and designed to instantly answer users’ questions. They can have many different roles such as making appointments or suggesting products. By using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning, some very high-performance chatbots, called AI chatbots, can perfect their understanding of users’ inputs and handle way more complex tasks.

Nowadays, chatbots are being used in a wide variety of fields, from ecommerce to Human Resources management. So why couldn’t they be used in the real estate industry as well? Given the multiple benefits they bring, chatbots are rapidly gaining ground in the real estate industry. In this very competitive environment, they are even becoming a must.

In this article we will guide you through the top 10 benefits of Ideta’s chatbots for real estate agencies, buyers, tenants and property owners.

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Why you should use real estate chatbots:

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1. Stand out from your competition:

The covid-19 pandemic has not spared the real estate industry. Prices are rising but so as demand, and, as the year goes by, there are less and less available properties on the housing market, which is thus becoming even more competitive. This is the first reason your real estate agency should start investing in chatbot from today. It will allow you to play your cards right and to stand out from your competition.

2. Personalise your conversations:

The second advantage of chatbots is that they help you personalise your conversations. The style of communication and the way you express yourself are different whether you are discussing with a property owner, landlord, buyer or tenant. The way you communicate also needs to vary for each property owner, for every buyer, and at every stage of the seller’s journey and buyer’s journey. By analysing users’ inputs, chatbots are able to mimic human beings and to adapt their speech to their interlocutor. Chatbots can also have different answers depending on the platform they are deployed on. This is all the more important given that people scrolling on your real estate agency’s Facebook page are probably just randomly looking for information, whereas people who are looking up houses on your website are probably already thinking about investing.

3. Free up your salespeople’ time:

In the real estate industry, the value of your salespeople lies within their ability to rent or sell properties to clients. By implementing a chatbot into your real estate agency, you can significantly free up your salespeople' time by automating most repetitive tasks. This means that, with the help of a chatbot, all the time your salesperson usually spends handling easy and repetitive tasks, like answering clients’ Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) or filling forms, can eventually be redirected toward higher value-added activities, namely: renting or selling properties. It is also worth noting that, if ever your chabot gets stuck, it can escalate tough requests directly to salespeople. That way, you can make sure all clients’ requests are being accurately taken care of.

4. Personalise your clients’ experience in general:

Besides helping you to personalise conversations with your clients, chatbots can also tailor the clients’ experience in general. By asking questions, and then analysing users’ input, they can suggest different properties to buyers and tenants depending on the various criteria clients selected, like the price, the location, the number of rooms, etc. Thanks to Ideta’s software, you can even add pictures in a carousel so that buyers and tenants can get a quick overview of each property. Moreover, Ideta gives you immediate access to all your chatbot’s conversations in the ‘cockpit’. This means there is no need to store hundreds of paper files anymore as all your clients’ information is being saved in the chatbot’s database in real time. Overall, implementing a chatbot into your real estate agency will speed up the browsing process for your clients and will make life easier for your salespeople.

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5. Make appointment scheduling easier:

Real estate chatbots can act as salespeople’s personal secretaries as they can help clients to easily schedule, postpone or cancel appointments with salespeople. Buyers and tenants can also directly schedule visits of properties on the chatbot. To do so, you just need to connect your real estate chatbot to your agency’s schedule. Once you are all set, you can program your chatbot to send you an email or text message every time a client makes, postpones or cancels an appointment with one of your salespeople. To go even further, you can program your chatbot to ask a few questions to buyers every time they make an appointment so that it can generate a short summary of the client’s information you need to know.

6. Facilitating follow-up after appointments:

After having visited one or several properties, buyers often have more questions as they want to be sure of what they are doing before investing a large amount of money. In this context, chatbots are also pretty useful. You can indeed program them to send automatic follow-up emails, text messages or even voice messages to clients. They can also be programmed to automatically generate estimates and quotes. Therefore, as we explained earlier, real estate chatbots can really take weight off your salespeople’ shoulders by automating most repetitive tasks. Tougher requests, which can’t be handled by the chatbot, can be escalated to the sales team or other third parties involved in the renting or selling.

7. Keep records of conversations and data:

Ideta’s chatbots can save all conversations with clients so that you can have access to it at any time via the ‘cockpit’. This functionality can be especially useful when a salesperson needs to take over the conversation because the chatbot is unable to accurately answer the client’s query on its own. Salespeople can have immediate and continuous access to all conversations: they can see the different properties the client is interested in, and much more.

In addition, the Ideta ‘dashboard’ allows you to keep an eye on your chatbot’s Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). This will enable you to keep improving your chatbot, even once it is deployed, and to determine the best channel for lead generation depending on the number of conversations your chatbot has on each channel.

8. Make surveys more engaging:

The traditional way for clients to search for a property or to put their property up for sale is to complete an exhaustive, and sometimes quite tedious, form. Chatbots can make this process more fun and engaging for buyers, tenants, sellers and landlords. This user-friendly conversational form will help you build trust with and between each stakeholder. 

9. Reach more clients, sell more:

It is said that 38,7% of home buyers are millennials. Another survey conducted by MobileMarketer found that millennials usually prefer speaking with a chatbot rather than with a human sales assistant. Indeed, millennials want fast and precise answers, and the fact that chatbots are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week is definitely a key asset. Millennials also feel more comfortable asking questions they consider to be slightly naive to chatbots. Last but not least, people like to be able to contact you from any channel. Deploying your chatbot on multiple channels will help you reach more clients.

10. Improve lead generation:

As previously said, chatbots can be deployed on multiple channels: Facebook, Messenger, text messages, Slack, and many more. This will allow you to improve lead generation. Indeed, by connecting your chatbot to your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, independently of the channel being used, your chatbot will always remember your clients’ data. In other words, if one of your Facebook client suddenly decides to switch to text messages for example, your chatbot will still be able to recognize that they are the same client, and thus to carry on with the exact same tailored conversation. By deploying your chatbot on multiple channels and remembering people across all channels, you will be able to build trust with people and therefore to generate more leads.

Ready to build your first real estate chatbot and stand out from your competition? With Ideta’s software you can create a chatbot in just a few days and without coding. For more information, send us an email at contact@ideta.io, our team will be pleased to help you!

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How Thierry Immobilier used real estate chatbots to stand out

Thierry Immobilier, is the number one of the condominium and rental management of residential property in the Nantes Metropolitan and Guérande Peninsula

Thierry Immobilier sought to improve their productivity while increasing customer satisfaction with responsive and constantly available service.

Their real estate chatbot make it possible to answer customers’ question instantly and simply as:

• I want to install fiber in my home, how do I proceed?
• How is the settlement of my rental vacancy?
• My rent is higher this month, why?
• When will my rent be taken?

After a few months of use, the chatbot data analysis will be very important.  Do people use the bot?  How often?  A chatbot is a powerful analytical tool that allows you to understand the most frequently asked questions and identify ways to improve internal communication.

To avoid significant additional development costs, the solution must allow your bot to be deployed on all communication channels needed by your target.  You have to be where users interact every day!

The chatbot also has a great return on investment. They are useful for saving time, money and additional resources.

Real Estate chatbots help to answer the problems faced by agencies by being:

• Real time:  When a user lands on the website, they can immediately get answers to their questions.
• Available 24/7:  Customer requests can be processed even after business hours.
• Specific:  The customer journey is personalized by taking into account, at every moment, the user’s answers.
• Efficient:  A chatbot answers the majority of customer questions and the real estate agent can focus on higher value-added tasks.

They also revolutionizing the way we buy, sell and rent properties by:

• Transforming static web pages into interactive experiences
• Personalizing the customer experience
• Being present on a website, but also on social networks
• Responding instantly to requests from users 24/7‍

In the case of Thierry Immobilier, the chatbot can currently answer more than 150 questions!  ‍If Thierry Immobilier wanted to answer these 150 questions by e-mail, it would take about 45 hours per week (assuming 5 minutes by e-mail).  This represents a full-time employee each month!

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- By Eléonore Laloux