Chatbots are tools can help you capture more leads, and leverage your time more effectively. But are they just a passing fad, or are they effective tools you should implement? And if so, which ones?
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Chatbots have gained popularity to the point where they are four times more popular than they were ten years ago. Keeping up with the latest developments in technological breakthroughs is important for any industry and real estate is no exception.
With the internet growing more and more omnipresent each day, and technology improving both on the hardware and software side, it’s not a surprise that it’s more important than ever to be at least technologically proficient.
One of the hottest technologies being implemented by more and more businesses, including real estate agencies, is chatbots.
Chatbots are a great way to manage your business when you are OOO, connect with clients, and hold on to promising leads.
Chatbots proactively reach out to your visitors on your website, instead of passively waiting for queries and actively gain essential data for leads. These tools are meant to free up human agents so that they can focus on more complex tasks that require emotional intelligence.
In the following article, we’ll help understand how to use chatbots in the real estate sector and show you how to you narrow down the best real estate chatbot for your real estate business.
If you’re not sure if chatbots are a good idea for your real estate business, consider these statistics from chatbots.org:
- Live chatbots increase conversions on your professional website by 45%.
- Website engagement gets a 3x boost when a chatbot is present.
- Consumers are over 60% more likely to return to a website that has a web chatbot.
What are Chatbots?
Scripted bots are considered one of the simplest types of bots. They are made with pre-programmed conversation options, using rather simple computer logic. It helps to think of them as conversation options on an answering machine, or as choices in a “choose your own adventure” books.
But don’t let that simplicity fool you. Even that basic logic can be very effective and allows your chatbot to answer simple questions that your visitors could have such as whether they need to talk to a live agent, what kind of home they’re looking for, schedule a meeting, etc.
These are by far the most popular kinds of chatbots out there, and the ones with the most communication services integrations.
Others are far more advanced and use sophisticated artificial intelligence that can understand real language, and at times make it hard to tell whether you’re speaking to a real person or not.
Chatbots also serve as a bridge between a client and an agent by switching between a bot or a human on-demand.
They are typically found on one of the corners of a webpage, and cheerfully let you know that if you have any questions, it can help you find it or get you in touch with a real person.
Though we usually think of Chatbots as a program embedded on a website, they aren’t just limited to them. There are chatbots available for Facebook, Slack, Discord, Twitter and pretty much any communication program you can think of (including SMS).
Chatbots have been gaining traction in recent years as a way to automate routine tasks. For example, some bots can type of the same message to hundreds of leads at teh same time, or send automatic replies when you are not available.
Bots rely on natural language processing ethnology or pre-defined conversation scripts.
Why Should You Care About Chatbots In Real Estate
Real estate is an industry that depends heavily on communication. You must constantly prove your worth as an agent to new and old clients. If you had all the time in the world, you’d be able to get in touch with every single potential client and handle each conversation yourself. But that’s not possible.
You’re swamped with so many daily tasks that it’s easy to neglect prospecting and following up on your websites’ visitors. Way too often new leads fall through the cracks because it’s hard to keep up with all queries from prospective customers.
This is where chatbots come into play. They can help direct your website’s visitors to the right place, schedule in-person consultations, and even gather information on the home they’re looking for and automatically find it for them.
To start, real estate chatbots can:
- Collect contact information and lead prospective buyers to the right real estate agents
- Schedule appointments and tours
- Help customers with their home search and home values by providing them with listings that match their interests
- Provide prospective clients with information about the property listings such as square footage and property details
- Answer common questions regarding buying or selling properties
- Search MLS listings
The benefits of chatbots:
1. They Offer Live 24-Hour Support
One of the biggest advantages of using chatbots is that you can always have someone answering simple questions your clients and prospects may have.
That’s because unlike a real-life representative, chatbots are available to visitors and clients 24/7. They can greet, answer a customer’s queries immediately, and direct them to the right place.
This allows queries by customers to be addressed even outside of working hours. And as a bonus, you would also save you up on customer support costs as well.
2. They Can Help You Qualify Leads
Even if you cater to a very specific real estate niche, every client is different and has different needs.
Some look for condos, while others look for detached homes. Others can buy a home in cash, while others need financing. Some need to buy a home ASAP, while others have a more lenient timeframe.
All of that information is crucial to collect. Chatbots can help gather some of that important property search information by asking qualifying questions, saving it to your CRM, and using it to provide clients properties they may be looking for right away.
Some Chatbots can also automatically send out property alerts to those clients as soon as a listing that meets their specific criteria gets listed on MLS.
3. Assist In Managing Client Relationships
Real estate agents will typically have at least a thousand contacts collected for their CRM, but staying in touch with them on a regular basis with all of these contacts is incredibly difficult.
Chatbots can help you manage your client relationships by automating certain common but essential tasks, such as tracking and recalling client activity, sending out email notifications for open houses or even recalling important dates such as birthdates, anniversaries, and holidays.
Those responses can be sent by email, social media, SMS or messengers of all types
These messages can also be tailored to collect additional information or call your recipients to take a certain action, such as scheduling a live consultation with you.
4. Help Schedule Property Tours
Some chatbots are able to keep an eye on your website’s visitors and deduce whether a person might be interested in a certain property. For example, if someone keeps coming back to the same property over several sessions, the chatbot could chime in, invite the visitor to a property tour, and schedule it for you.
5. Chatbots Can Help Log Conversation
Chatbots are also capable of saving a log of the interactions they’ve had with a prospective customer. This can be incredibly useful for the human agent who takes over from the bot and communicates with the customer.
By having access to the interaction they had with the chatbot, you’ll be able to understand what the client is searching for and having everything prepared for them before even talking to them.
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6. Answer Client Questions
When a prospect is looking for a home, they naturally have a ton of questions. Everything from location to property buying process, HOA rules, and more can be answered by a well-programmed chatbot. Chatbots also allow you to provide clients with quick, rich responses. Studies show that 69% of client queries are answered successfully by chatbots.
Think of your real estate chatbot as the first line of defence to answer clients immediately or connect them to one of your staff or yourself.
7. Convert Real estate Website Visitors into Leads
Why do clients find their way to your website? 90% of the time, it is because they are looking to buy or sell a property. However, there’s no way for your real estate website to predict and answer every single unique question your potential clients may have.
This is where chatbots come in. When your site visitors land on your website, a chatbot can appear and immediately offer a way to capture your web visitors and convert them to lead while answering their detailed questions instantly.
Program your chatbot to end the conversations or fill in dead time in conversations with a message such as ” Did I answer all of your questions today”. Whether your user answers yes or no, your chatbot can encourage them to sign up for your email list to continue to receive helpful real estate information. Alternatively, you could prompt them to book a meeting with you or hop on to a live call with a support staff.
8. Connect Users to a Virtual Property Tour
In this day and age, clients expect high quality visuals and may have become used to top level virtual tour technology. Real estate agents can use real estate chatbots to show property viewings through a virtual tour. They’ll appreciate the time you’ve saved them and the freedom to only go out of their way to see homes that are worth your time and theirs.
Full-page real estate chatbots are best suited for this type of layout, allowing clients to interact and look closely at every corner of the property. When clients take the step to schedule an in-person property visit, you’ll know that they are already in love with the property.
The chatbot can simultaneously ask for a user’s data and instantly create a list of similar properties to share with them and add them to your email newsletter or another email drip campaign.
9. Collect Reviews
The right chatbot for real estate can also request reviews. Client reviews are the most powerful form of social proof for building trust and gaining tracking for your hyperlocal reputation.
It’s easy for clients to quickly leave a review with a chatbots who is prompting them and guiding them through specific questions about the client experience. Chatbots can also send SMS messages to request reviews that are easy to complete quickly in the moment.
11. Decrease Your Real Estate Website Bounce Rate
Website visitors who arrive on your webpages will stay there for quite a while if they find the resources and information relevant. As your bounce rate decreases, the credibility and ranking of your site on major search engines such as Google, increases.
Chatbots increase client engagement and keep a user on your page for significantly longer than usual. You could even deploy a chatbot to welcome new guests and then recommend other pages on your website that may be relevant to them.
12. Prompt Users to Follow You on Social Media
In the information age, your online presence has the power to make or break the reputation of your real estate business. Like many others, the real estate industry is heavily affected by the messaging on social media and individual presence of real estate agents who are killing it.
Use a chatbot on your webpages to guide visitors to your other digital platforms after they’ve spent a while on your webpages. You can include social icons and easy to click “follow” buttons within the chat.
13. Multilingual Chatbot Support
The real estate industry is becoming more globalized by the day. Your clients may not speak English as their first language and will appreciate the multilingual capabilities and dialect recognition that chatbots allow. Chatbots that allow communication in multiple languages make your services more widely available and accessible to a more diverse audience and wide range of market opportunities.
14. Cost Effectiveness
Your real estate chatbot is like a low-cost virtual assistant working for you 24/7. A single chatbot on your website can handle multiple conversations at once, reducing the need for a large customer service staff working around the clock. Intricate tasks that would otherwise require paid human hours can now be managed by a simple real estate chatbot template.
15. Data Collection and Record-Keeping
Every client interaction or with a chatbot can be used as a data point. AI powered tools are built to collect and analyze client engagement in order to better serve your audience over time. Your chatGPT can provide valuable insights into market trends, your client’s desires, behaviour of leads at different stages in the sales funnel, and more. With this data in hand, you can also better shape your marketing strategies and enhance client service.
16. Assist With Tenant Screening
Tenant screening is a task that is known to be time-consuming yet necessary when looking for rental tenants. Chatbots help to streamline this process by collecting crucial tenant information such as employment history and references and cross checking it against public and credit records. With the screening process completed quickly, agents can quickly sort through the best qualified leads for your client.
17. Integrate Neatly with Your CRM
All real estate professionals know that CRMs are the motherboard of your entire lead funnel, digital marketing, and contact organization. With your chatbot connected with your CRM, you can automatically import client information collected by the chatbot into your CRM. Your chatbot will become another great resource to learn more about client preferences and hold on to leads.
Which Chatbot Should I Get?
Because there are literally thousands of chatbots to choose from, it can be overwhelming to pick one that’s right for you. Though they are often marketed as artificial intelligence solutions, not all of them use true AI.
The truth is that you don’t always need to get an expensive chatbot with a sophisticated AI powering it.
Many simple tasks can be performed quite well with free, open-source chatbots. Let’s take a look at some chatbots available out there.
Scripted bots
Scripted bots are considered one of the simplest types of bots. They are made with pre-programmed conversation options, using rather simple computer logic. It helps to think of them as conversation options on an answering machine, or as choices in a “choose your own adventure” books.
But don’t let that simplicity fool you. Even that basic logic can be very effective and allows your chatbot to answer simple questions that your visitors could have such as whether they need to talk to a live agent, what kind of home they’re looking for, schedule a meeting, etc.
These are by far the most popular kinds of chatbots out there, and the ones with the most communication services integrations.
Scripted Chatbots To Check Out
True AI chatbots
These kinds of chatbots are the real deal when it comes to using artificial intelligence. Thanks to machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), and other artificial language techniques, these chatbots are capable of holding almost human-like conversations. This come across as warmer and personable than anything a scripted chatbot can do.
AI chatbots can also do much more complex tasks, and use conversation context to make better, and more valuable suggestions to visitors, such as providing customers with relevant listings based on what was discussed in the conversation.
Just like with scripted bots, AI bots can also direct the visitor to a real human whenever necessary.
True AI Chatbots To Check Out
Conclusion…
Chatbots are powerful tools available for real estate agents ready to take their real estate businesses to the next level. In the right hands, these amazing AI chatbot for real estate are capable of saving up massive amounts of time and ensuring you capture as many leads as possible from your website.
You can easily stay in touch with potential buyers without having to put in a ton of extra time. Save your time and money while still gaining the opportunity to reach a large number of potential buyers.
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