Real estate is an enormous industry worldwide, and it continues to grow rapidly in many parts of the world. Record housing prices are being reported in many countries, reflecting an increase in demand that is making this one of the most lucrative times ever for the industry.
However, despite the surging demand and profits, competition is still stiff and operators need to ensure they do everything in their power to differentiate and offer an attractive service. One way to do this is to leverage technology.
In this article, we look at some of the ways that real estate businesses can utilize technology, specifically AI chatbots, to improve efficiency and offer a better service to customers.
What are chatbots for real estate?
All kinds of chatbots are fundamentally very similar and share the basic purpose of conversing with people, generally through a text-based messaging format. A chatbot for real estate also shares this basic purpose, but will generally be designed to operate specifically in a real estate context. For example, this may mean it is programmed to answer questions about specific properties for aspiring buyers.
For a long time, chatbots were very limited by the fact they operated using a fixed set of responses, meaning people would quickly become frustrated and want to talk to a real person. Now, AI-enabled chatbots offer far more advanced functionality with better semantic understanding and more sophisticated responses.
This new generation of AI chatbots can be very useful for real estate businesses looking to streamline customer service, generate more leads, cut costs, and more.
Possible use cases for chatbots for real estate
Responding to questions
Most customer queries to real estate businesses are quick, simple, and easily handled. However, they still take up valuable time that could be spent more effectively running other areas of the business. To deal with incoming queries, companies often need to hire dedicated support staff, which can be very expensive.
AI chatbots offer an alternative way to respond to customer queries instantly, automatically, and effectively, taking the pressure off your workers and keeping customers happy.
Generating new leads
Moving warm leads through the customer journey and turning them into active customers is absolutely crucial to the success of any real estate business. But it’s a serious challenge for everyone, with multiple businesses often simultaneously competing for the same leads.
AI chatbots can directly increase your chances of converting visitors to your website by immediately and automatically engaging them. By opening a line of communication with them, you’ve already done half of the work toward conversion, without the need for any human intervention.
Scheduling appointments and viewings
Some of the most necessary parts of any real estate business are in-person meetings and home viewings. But arranging these things takes time and organization, which can be laborious and expensive.
Chatbots can be integrated into your scheduling systems to automatically set up appointments with customers, update your schedule, and even send out reminders, without the need for employees to get involved at any point.
Keeping leads engaged
The most basic, but potentially most important function of AI chatbots in real estate is to keep customers consistently engaged throughout the customer journey. This engagement can range from the initial contact with visitors to the website (as mentioned above) to updates about new properties, messages from agents, and more.
This constant, non-intrusive line of communication is the perfect way to keep customers engaged, and it can be entirely automated and personalized to every customer.
Upselling and cross-selling
Once you’ve won the battle of converting a lead, the next step for many companies is to attempt to upsell and cross-sell products and services to them. This could involve showing them properties that may be outside of their original price range, offering insurance packages, and so on.
But while the benefits of this are clear, it can be much more difficult in practice than in theory. AI chatbots can help by automatically presenting offers, other properties, and additional services in a natural, personalized way directly to individual customers. Best of all, as it’s not a salesperson doing the selling, customers are less likely to feel defensive about the propositions and may be more inclined to make purchases.
How can Skil.AI benefit your real estate business?
At Skil.AI, we create tailored real estate chatbots using cutting-edge AI and machine learning technology to streamline your customer service, improve efficiency, and help you generate more leads.
Our chatbots work seamlessly across popular platforms such as SMS, email, WhatsApp, and more, and can communicate in multiple languages as standard.
Get in touch with our estate specialists today to learn how AI chatbots could change the way your business communicates and to see them in action.