Real Estate Chatbots — Do You Really Need Them?

It’s 2019 and the chatbot hype hasn’t died down. In fact, more and more industries are looking to implement chatbots in their businesses to ensure customer engagement and loyalty in the current digital age when the customer is flooded with options (read competitors).
The real estate industry is no stranger to the challenges of generating leads and closing them.
Properties are not something you can pack into your bags and showcase to people.
Hence lead generation in the real estate industry becomes a lot more complex and grueling.
In today’s time of digitization and online presence of businesses, most of the customers are converted from leads online. In such a scenario, letting all that online traffic go is something one cannot afford to do. Intelligent chatbots in real estate help you tap into that traffic in order to collect and convert leads into customers.

Let’s assume a buyer on your website is on the lookout for a new place to move into or seller is looking to sell his/her home. In both cases, the buyer and the seller need immediate answers. However, for a real estate agent that is juggling new and old property listings, evaluating products, chasing their own sales and marketing goals, and managing past clients — it is quite difficult for them to take time out and assess the requirements of an online lead.
Taking time out to ascertain the overall seriousness of the lead from scratch is pretty time-consuming. But, it is a no-brainer that if you wish to be successful when it comes to real estate, you need to capture as many leads as possible to make sure that you have a specific number of clients on a monthly basis.

The bot will handle conversations with clients that are at the top of the funnel — generally people you don’t know and who might be unsure of actually buying/selling the property. The bot can be programmed on tasks like collecting basic information in the form of asking relevant questions and generating relevant answers resulting in an e-mail capture. Additionally, the chatbot can even transfer the conversation to a human agent, if need be.
To get started, one needs to figure out what medium makes the most sense for their business — Facebook, Web Chat, automated email or SMS bots.
If you happen to have a robust Facebook presence with a good following and engagement, it makes sense to deploy a Facebook bot.
If you generate a good amount of traffic on your website, then a chatbot that pops up and assists your visitors in their journey is your best bet.
1. Real Time Enquiry
When a user lands on your website, they can immediately get their queries answered by the chatbots. They do not have to wait for assistance from a human agent in order to seek answers about the property they are interested in.
2. Available 24×7
As real estate agents have time constraints like meeting deadlines, shift timings, it is not possible for them to remain available to the user throughout the day. With chatbots in real estate being available round the clock, 365 days a year — your customer’s queries can be addressed even outside of operational hours.
3. Qualify Buyer and Seller Needs
Using natural language generation, your custom chatbot determines the prospect’s exact needs and relays the required information without you having to step in, or without your customers having to download an additional app.
4. Schedule Property Viewings
Once the prospect is deeper into the sales funnel, the bot can schedule a home tour and in a way, take care of introducing the client and the real estate agent. At this point, the agents or sales team can take over the reigns.
5. Search MLS Listings
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.
6. 360-degree virtual tours
Are prospects too busy or too eager to see the property in person? The real estate chatbot has your back. Your prospects can take a quick virtual tour through the bot itself without them wasting time waiting to get an inside look.
7. Logging Conversations
With chatbots, you can keep a log of the interactions that your leads had with your bot. This comes in very handy when the human agent takes over from the bot and interacts with the lead. With access to prior interactions, you have a better understanding of the lead’s preferences even before you talk to them.
8. 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. Chatbots can be very easily utilized to follow up on your leads via the medium they choose. Whether they want to be contacted via email or text message for more information or would directly prefer talking to the realtor, is all asked to the user.
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.
9. Language no bar
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.
10. Ease of Data Handling with Integrations
Fret not! Implementing chatbot in your business does not add to the data chaos. In fact, data handling becomes a lot easier with chatbots. Chatbots collect information and feed it directly to your CRM or database, without your assistance.
At WotNot, we have worked with leading property aggregators in the Real Estate industry and developed bespoke chatbot solutions that have resulted in pre-qualified leads for their sales team, while at the same time addressing FAQs and customer support.
With WotNot, you can have your chatbot ready in under an hour! So, what are you waiting for? We have the chatbot templates ready for you to experience for free! Visit us at https://wotnot.io/ and experience the chatbot apt for your business for free!

Article Source: https://medium.com/swlh/real-estate-chatbots-do-you-really-need-them-4f9fe892af00