AI Assistant for Real Estate

What is an AI Assistant?

An AI assistant, often referred to as a virtual assistant, is an AI-powered program that can recognize human speech, understand intent, do specific tasks, and provide personalized responses in a human-like voice. They are usually cloud-based and require internet-connected devices and applications to work. For example, Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, and Microsoft Cortana are AI assistants.

Virtual assistants can also be AI-powered programs that interact with text messages instead of human speech. Chatbots generally use text-based chat as opposed to voice-activated conversation. Software development companies can produce applications that provide natural, human-like, conversational interfaces.

What is a AI Assistant for Real Estate?

A real estate virtual assistant is an AI-powered tool that helps real estate professionals with various tasks. The range of those may expand from data entry to cold calling, social media management, administrative tasks, project management, CRM management, transaction coordination, lead generation, lead nurturing, video editing, calendar management, setting appointments, generating more business, closing deals, and more.

The AI assistant can help real estate professionals manage their workload more efficiently and effectively by providing them with high-quality work and specialized job skills. It sounds great, isn't it? To date, a virtual assistant or a set of virtual assistants with a focus on a group of such capacities did not exist.

Main use cases of AI Assistants in other industries

Alexa, Siri, Cortana... They have been in our lives for many years. They are great at solving small repetitive tasks and providing answers to some of our questions. Many of them are pretty mundane. They are the best examples of virtual assistants with human-like voices.

A few use cases usually involve virtual assistants for business. Customer service chatbots are those with more visibility. Many companies provide ways to contact their teams only after having a conversation with a chatbot that answers most of the questions and redirects the user to the right answers almost automatically. Only when questions don't have answers in previously solved frequently asked questions and community discussions, the chatbot connects with a sales or customer support expert.

The AI technology behind them is in many cases supported by companies such as IBM, Kore.ai, Cognigy, or Inbenta, to mention some of those included in Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Conversational AI Platforms in 2023.

AI virtual assistants can be deployed across the value chain to help customers and employees in a business. Some of the main use cases of AI virtual assistants in different industries include:

1. Sales support
2. Customer relations support
3. IT support
4. Automation of routine tasks and workflows
5. Patient engagement
6. Employee Support
7. Administrative Support.

The industries making use of AI assistants more prominently are banking, insurance, healthcare, retail, and the travel industry among others.

How can AI Assistants help Real Estate professionals?

For the time being, we don't have great examples of real estate virtual assistants similar to Siri or Alexa with human-like voices. Selling or managing someone's property requires empathy and emotional connection. That's the main reason why it's very likely that this industry will be one of the last industries where professionals will be substituted by AI. Good news for real estate professionals!

Although some scale-up real estate companies claim they make use of comprehensive real estate virtual assistants, the reality is that the AI assistant services provided by them don't differ from the generic customer service chatbots and are highly disconnected from the actual daily real estate tasks. Important problems such as research, data analysis, decision-making, project management, lead generation, lead nurturing, prioritizing leads, automating seller and buyer onboarding, calendar management, and consistent communication through the customers' journey remain time-consuming endeavors, weakly supported by AI-powered chatbots or automated content generators.

A couple of examples of virtual assistants with a specific focus on real estate are Alma and Jobcall, these solutions are already in the market.

Alma is an AI assistant for real estate from Deal Machine, a company in Indiana that provides data analysis, saves time, increases back-office efficiency, and boosts confidence in investment decisions for real estate investors. Alma's main goal is to reduce the need for additional assistance from real estate professionals.

JobCall is a virtual assistant from a company in Austin, Texas, that helps to facilitate communication between property maintenance teams and renters by transcribing maintenance calls and tagging them for prioritization.

How can the breakthroughs in Generative AI bring new capabilities to Real Estate AI Assistants?

A recent report from Mckinsey "The economic potential of generative AI: The next productivity frontier" highlights the potential impact of generative AI in the real estate industry. According to the report the productivity impact of generative AI in the real estate industry can reach $110-180 Billions annually within the next years for a total revenue increase of the industry of 1.0 to 1.7%.

The major gains for the industry will take place in marketing and sales, customer operations, risk, and legal use cases.

Capabilities such as human-like text automated generation, summarization, speech-to-text and text-to-video, text-to-image, and image transformation can be used by virtual assistants that can automate part of the real estate business activity and impact some of their most critical metrics.

If you want to know more about generative AI for Real Estate, read our blog post here.

A Real Estate Virtual Assistant to increase brand awareness and lead generation

Related to the awareness phase, both for prospective property owners with the intent of selling their property and for prospective buyers, real estate virtual assistants can help marketing teams to create, elaborate, and deliver campaigns tailored to the segment, demographics, and interests of their audience. Deep knowledge of their existing customers and prospects based on data will enable the creation of consistent segments and personas.

Managing the real estate marketing of properties is one of the big topics where the new wave of generative AI mimics the real estate agents' capabilities non-existing to date. One of the innovations is producing tailored real-time messages and even images adapted to the audience, without the need for graphic design. Leading incumbent online advertising platforms will soon adapt and provide virtual assistants with those enhanced capacities. We envision those advances taking place in the coming weeks or months.

Owners selling their property have different reasons to do it. Each of them with a different goal, needs, and emotional cost and impact. It's not the same for a mature couple looking to get rid of a property that got too big without their children at home, as it is for a young professional looking to sell his apartment to upgrade to a property that shows his new successful status. Adapting the message, the media, and even the person or avatar telling the story to each interest and use case, may grant real estate professionals a head start over their competitors and enable them to capture leads with a higher probability of conversion. Their brand will be identified and remembered by prospects as the best choice to solve their specific problem.

Most agents, given their expertise, will identify the personal circumstances of the lead early on during their first conversation. What changes with these new tools is that campaign virtual assistants will enable us to anticipate that moment even before a personal conversation takes place, starting from the very first advertising message delivered to the prospect. The impact will be decisive in increasing the conversion rate down the road from new leads to qualified leads and automating admin tasks related to the distribution of leads among the responsible teams. Also, AI assistants will help small real estate agencies better filter the leads captured according to their own capabilities and target audience.

A Real Estate Virtual Assistant to coordinate the transaction

Another important moment for real estate virtual assistants to shine will be the first contact of the owner looking for an agent to sell or manage his property and of the user looking to buy or rent a new property.

Currently, many websites do a good job with the description of their services and process. They showcase their expertise. This onboarding process instills trust in future customers.

A real estate AI assistant addressing this stage will answer all the questions from the prospect owner or interested buyer related to the process and paperwork involving the transaction. Soon this virtual assistant will act as a transaction coordinator that takes over the complete communication exchange with the contacts and new leads from the first second that the prospect lands on the website. It will nurture the lead, prioritize qualified leads and drive them through the transaction process, setting appointments and interconnecting the actors involved in each step of the process till the deal is closed.

This transaction coordinator will remove time and effort for real estate professionals, and the productivity gain will materialize through allocating this time to other value-adding tasks and providing high-quality work services that will help the business to succeed.

The efficiency and effectiveness of the process will result in an increase in conversions, from contact or website visitors to a closed deal, with the consequence of more deals closed by the agent. The transaction coordination real estate virtual assistant will be integrated into the companies' CRM to provide a unified user profile throughout all the customers' journey touchpoints.

The transaction coordinator will play an important role in the assistance to the seller with gathering documentation and the data entry of his property and personal information in the onboarding form. When entering his property characteristics and his intent to sell the property now, immediately, or in the future the assistant may provide tips about the current market developments, level of interest of buyers and tenants for properties in the area, square meter prices, and steps to follow, among others. The onboarding becomes that way a conversation much different from the current cold, boring forms. It will be also the first touchpoint to gather direct feedback from the sellers.

The dynamic conversational Real Estate Property Listing. A Real Estate Virtual Assistant to increase conversion and generate loyalty

Companies such as Redfin provide some of the most detailed real estate listings in the US market. They deliver high-quality content that enables their clients, owners, buyers, and tenants, to solve a problem that they are determined to fix.

As a real estate enterprise, your listing serves as a crucial tool to attract the attention of your clients. However, not all real estate professionals possess the resources available to Redfin. The significant advantages enjoyed by industry giants and large hybrid real estate players, thanks to their team size and expertise, may now be challenged by the emergence of generative AI and the innovative capabilities brought forth by real estate virtual assistants.

Such tasks as providing the needed property details, market, and location information to buyers and tenants are about to suffer a great upgrade.

Early this year we had a conversation with one of our top advisors: Michael Vax, from commerceisdigital.com. Michael is one of the top e-commerce experts and has been the CPO and Head of Product in companies such as SAP, Spryker, and Elastic Path. We both agreed that one of the big changes that Artificial Intelligence will bring to e-commerce is the transformation of the product detail page, a real estate listing in this case, into a dynamic conversational listing led by a human-like assistant that uses the data of the viewing user to create ad hoc messages linked to the information that the user sees in the listing.

We created our prototype in early April "The Dynamic Conversational Product Listing".

wAIpify announced this breakthrough as part of its roadmap in 2023. This real estate listing uses the data from the buyer gathered throughout all the buyer's touchpoints to provide a real-time conversation to any buyer landing on a real estate listing, to optimize buyer selection and deal conversion. This development has the potential to become the leading real estate marketing virtual assistant in the coming years. To sign up for the current available AI tools, start a free trial here.

This real estate virtual assistant would exponentially increase the efficiency of internal teams, deal closings, conversions, and also the loyalty of the potential buyers and tenants. The AI virtual assistant will appear both in the real estate listings and in those onboarding forms for buyers and tenants. For example, when onboarding a buyer, a conversational virtual assistant can provide these clients with tips about their buyer intent. It can tell the buyer right away if he can afford a property in the area and even suggest alternative areas with the same living conditions at more affordable prices. The increase in the quality of the buyer and tenant-qualified leads will be impressive.

After that, it will ask the buyer to use his data to save him time and effort on the search to provide new matches every time the system identifies an opportunity. An example that we like with this latest approach is that of Casavo, one of Italy's leading real estate marketplaces.

Real Estate AI Assistant to reduce seller churn and increase profit per deal

One of the big failures that seller clients from a real estate business report when churning are the lack of interest, proper promotion of the property, and especially the absence of visibility of what is going on with their properties. It's not that the agents have no interest to sell their house. The problem it's a time management one. Many agents do not have enough time to handle a large number of transactions at the same time and also to communicate continuously and empathically with the owners. The story ends up with a highly unsatisfied owner that ends the contract at the first opportunity. The impact on the business reputation is high and translates into the loss of future clients.

In the case of buyers and tenants, the problem is the lack of response due to the large number of messages from interested prospects. Real estate agents are often offering their properties in several classified platforms. The management of a large number of inquiries is cumbersome and ends up with many high-quality prospects not receiving any type of answer.

For tenants, the reality is not too different. Just repairing a small flaw takes an infinite exchange of emails and several phone calls. The property manager contacts then the third-party provider and tries to set an appointment that matches both the professional calendar and the tenant calendar. The whole process is tremendously inefficient.

An AI assistant fed with the company processes linked to communication automation in each step of the process will solve this problem shortly. The solution, in this case, will focus on providing personalized messages from a chatbot to augment realtors' communication capacities. One single real estate agent or customer onboarding professional using this virtual assistant will multiply the number of customers it can handle at the same time by 10x and increase the quality of communication.

Real Estate AI Assistant to increase customer retention and frequency on the buyer prospect side

The importance of client loyalty is often underestimated in the real estate industry, with its significance varying greatly depending on the market. In countries like Germany, where buying and selling transactions are infrequent and non-speculative due to higher taxes on short-term reselling, loyalty is particularly crucial. Conversely, in markets like Spain, it is more common for individuals or families to switch properties multiple times throughout their lives, even engaging in purchases with speculative motives.

With the high inflation and interest rates, the market of buyers has become scarcer and therefore the focus is on the need to generate and manage the loyalty of buyers with the capacity to buy has increased. Also, lead nurturing for those potential buyers who are still not ready to buy has gained relevance.

A virtual assistant with automation of administrative tasks, communications timelines, communications generation, and lead reassessment as part of the lead nurturing process, looks plausible now with a combination of generative and non generative AI. Established CRM management companies may tackle this use case. It's a solution that is not exempt from complexity.

wAIpify is very clear that its focus is to help real estate agents to increase their number of real estate transactions per employee and overall business. That means that all the generative AI provided to real estate professionals is hyper-customized and focused on enhancing agents' specialized skills. We have already started our research on the technological complexity of this topic. Currently, wAIpify offers tools in the areas of lisitng descriptions, location descriptions, AI-avatar conducted property presentations and videos and more. You can try these tools for free here.

A Real Estate Virtual Assistant for strategy and research

Although some real estate businesses and professionals utilize market projection tools, the truth is that many of these tools are too static for the rapidly changing times we live in and have proven to be inadequate. They often require organizations to extract actionable insights from multiple data sources and present them in written narratives, which are then discussed extensively in board meetings. This entire process is not only expensive but also time-consuming, taking several months to complete, by which time the information is already outdated. What was considered important to address six months ago is now yesterday's news for our business.

Therefore, there is a need for a suite of virtual assistant services that can address market research and strategy more efficiently. Sales and marketing professionals, as well as top management in the real estate industry, will be able to gather market trends and customer information effectively from unstructured data sources such as social media posts, news articles, research studies, product information, and customer feedback. Using this data, a virtual assistant can provide automated, actionable insights at short intervals, continuously updating a written narrative.

This custom narrative replaces the hundreds of manually performed research tasks currently in place, generating data on market trends, environmental development scenarios, and the current size of the addressable market, all within the context of the company itself. These insights go beyond simple economic predictions and delve into real estate business and product metrics. The virtual assistant can combine public data sources with internal analytics, not only forecasting the impact on key economic metrics like EBITDA, revenue, gross profit, and customer lifetime value, but also providing insights on crucial leading indicators such as the number of sales, profitability per sale, prices, and the number of qualified leads, among others. These data must be generated almost in real time, enabling fast decision-making. The time required to generate reports will be significantly reduced, along with the need for a large number of people, administrative support, external expertise, and paperwork traditionally involved in creating such reports.

Now, the question arises: Is this even possible? Partially, this can already be accomplished with some emerging generative AI technologies. However, one of the challenges faced by such an assistant will be integrating data from various sources. Not all the necessary data for a comprehensive market analysis is publicly available. To generate accurate predictions, AI needs access to highly specialized data sources that are often only accessible through paid services.

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