Advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) have made this a reality. Real estate brokers can now employ chatbots and automated responders to ensure that both existing and prospective clients receive all the information they want and need at the exact moment it is convenient for them. clients

What Is a Chatbot?

A chatbot is a computer program that interacts with potential clients through online and text conversations. Simply put, they are a form of AI that can improve your customer engagement strategies by providing quick responses to inquiries at any time of the day.

Relationship building plays a large role in successful customer interactions. Chatbots engage prospective clients and free up your time in the early stages of the relationship. Bots can carry on an unlimited numbers of conversations with programmed responses. In some cases, they learn and expand their knowledge as they are used — which improves the quality of the responses without much extra work from you.

Chatbots are an easy-to-use method of communicating with clients, especially after normal work hours. They bring more benefits than an automated responder, which only responds to inquiries with a prewritten message. Your bot can respond intelligently to messages, giving you the appearance of being available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

How Can I Use a Chatbot to Generate and Nurture Real Estate Leads?

With a chatbot installed on your website, you have the ability to sell more properties. When potential clients visit your site, a chatbot can ask specifically what they are looking for and recommend properties that fit their needs. Bots can even assist in proactive outreach, to existing clients, by sending out automatic alerts with new listings that match a customer’s search criteria.

Prospective clients often reach out with questions about listings that can easily be answered through text or other messaging services. Bots have the ability to cross reference millions of properties to quickly answer questions related to floor plans, amenities and property taxes. Once the qualifying questions have been answered, you can step in and work directly with the clients you know are ready to buy.

Chatbots can also communicate with your clients in whatever channel/medium suits them best, and in many cases, that’s still text messaging and SMS. SMS and text messages have a 98% open rate, compared to the 22% open rate for emails. Automating SMS messages means that your prospective clients are getting a personalized note from you on their favorite device — their phone. And, in the real estate industry, clients respond.

Barry Jenkins, with Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate, created seven messages that, when sent to the right clients at the right time, generated 20% and 65% open rates.

The most effective messages are those that are brief (think 160 characters or less), to-the-point and include a call to action. What steps do you want the customer to take when they open your message? Make it easy for them to reach you — put the information they want within one click. By law, you also need to let them know how they can stop receiving your messages, so include an opt-out option. The best part of using automated messages through SMS is that you’ll have access to the analytics. See who is responding, what messages move people to action and make regular adjustments to maximize the tool.

Chatbots can grow your leads and help funnel potential buyers through the process. You are able to focus on profitable leads and tasks that require a human touch while your bot answers repetitive questions that don’t require human input.

What Tools are Available?

Chatbots help in numerous customer service industries. Chances are high that you have interacted with a chatbot on a retail or software provider’s website without even realizing.

Several options on the market serve real estate agents specifically. Like having a personal assistant, these services can start conversations, schedule appointments and respond to emails. Having these day-to-day tasks covered by a chatbot allows you to better prioritize your time and your clients.

Using bots and AI may seem like overwhelming technology. Companies like Botsify are making it easy to set up Facebook Messenger responders without using coding. Below are some examples of other technology currently available:

• Automabots is a real estate chatbot that can capture and nurture leads. Interested buyers can interact via their favorite channels (e.g. Facebook Messenger, Web Chat or Text) to find their dream home.
• helloAlex can engage leads 24 hours a day by answering inbound phone calls and placing outbound calls. An added benefit of helloAlex is that you only pay for the minutes you use. This can save costs versus paying a person to be available for the entire day.
• Structurely uses an inside sales agent called Holmes. Aisa Holmes will respond to interested leads within two minutes of initial online contact. The conversation will continue as far as scheduling an appointment. You are then able to take over with an interested client.
• OJO answers questions a buyer may have about a property, while keeping them anonymous until they want to be contacted. OJO learns about the consumer everytime it is engaged and the information obtained gets passed along to the agent.
• Roof.ai is a messaging platform that gathers data points and builds personas for each of your website visitors, which enables them to tailor the message accordingly with the help of a smart virtual assistant that is available 24/7, 365.

Pricing for these tools can seem daunting at several hundred dollars/month. However, you need to consider how much business you are potentially losing by not being able to respond to all inquiries in a timely manner and also how much of your time you are wasting answering repetitive questions, which in turn, keeps you from effectively nurturing the leads you already have.

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If you are still building your success-oriented habits, you may find that you need some digital help. Here are the top apps that will help you achieve your short-term and long-term goals as a real estate professional.

Scannable

Platform: iOS
Price: Free
Description: Expense tracking, copy paperwork, and keeping track of business cards does not have to be a pain or complicated. Scannable is the latest offering from the developer behind the wildly popular Evernote, and it functions exactly the way it sounds: scan a receipt, document, or business card, and it automatically crops to the edges, adjusts the image to fit, and stores it under the correct category thanks to its advanced optical character recognition software. Stop digging through endless stashes of receipts, business cards, or boxes of documents and file folders. Now all you need to do is click, scan, and store in three easy steps.

Vert S

Platform: iOS
Price: $2.99
Description: Converting units of measurement and other numbers in your head or with a calculator is time consuming. It can also lead to needless errors since your memory and math skills are more prone to error than a smartphone or computer. For all your currency and unit of measure conversions (length, weight, height, volume, etc), use Vert to make sure you’re giving the most accurate information every time.

Roomscan Pro

Platform: iOS
Price: Free with In-App Purchases
Definition: Like Scannable, this app does exactly what it sounds like it does: determines dimensions of a room via your smartphone camera and uses that data to create floor plans. The developer claims it is accurate within six inches, and you can even adjust scans based on your own physical direct measurements for increased accuracy. It’s well worth considering if you frequently include or refer floor plans with listings or when listing or meeting with a client in a virtual setting.

Videolicious

Platform: iOS, Android
Price: Free
Description: The power of video for marketing and branding is indisputable. Quickly generate high quality videos on your mobile device with music, banners, photos, cinematic filters and narration using Videolicious, and then upload directly to social media or YouTube. Videolicious is ideal for walkthroughs on properties, profile videos, and many other marketing and media releases.

Mortgage Calculator

Platform: iOS & Android
Price: Free
Description: Always keep a mortgage calculator handy for meetings and on the spot estimates of payments. This app, directly titled Mortgage Calculator, is a great digital tool to quickly calculate estimated payments and can help inspire a hesitant buyer.

HelloSign

Platform: iOS and Android
Price: Free for 3 documents/month or $13/month for unlimited
Description: One of the best apps for sending and receiving signed documents online, this cloud-based app allows you to prepare PDF files, forms and other documents and then share them with clients and other stakeholders so that they can be digitally signed and stored in the cloud. It also integrates seamlessly with DropBox, Google Drive, and other popular online storage solutions.

Lastpass

Platform: iOS and Android
Price: Free with In-App Purchases
Description: Password security is of critical importance in real estate, and secure passwords to protect private customer data is absolutely essential. Lastpass allows you to set one secure password to login to the app, and then helps you generate and track multiple secure passwords across web browsers and apps on your computer or mobile device. Instead of writing all your passwords down or keeping them in an unsecured file log, Lastpass locks everything down for you, and on compatible iOS and Android devices it can be secured using fingerprint ID or facial recognition.

Todoist

Platform: iOS and Android
Price: Free or $28.99/year for Premium
Description: Not your average task management app, Todoist uses email to generate tasks and reminders for up to 80 items in the free version or up to 200 items for the premium. What’s unique about Todoist is that it references the actual  email when your task reminder pops up, saving you the trouble of searching for the message that you set a reminder for in the first place.

Buffer

Platform: iOS and Android
Price: Free or $10/month for premium
Description: Do you prefer to manage your own social media accounts? Buffer lets you schedule posts and tweets for your feeds in advance, keeping your content fresh without requiring your full time attention. This enables you to manage and plan your social content for days, weeks, and even months at a time so you can simply focus on engaging with comments and replies as they come in.

The above apps are just a few of the hundreds of other real estate agent and broker apps currently available today, and many you will find indispensable to your continued success.

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Seasoned Professional

Founded 21 years ago and exclusively in the real estate industry for 17 years, WolfNet is your data aggregation solution. We are currently in 640 MLSs and have full approval in 600 of them. Having that approval allows us to not need system installations. It is, generally speaking, the same process, however it’s more efficient to not need those installs. Depending on the approval, we also maintain the geocoding and offer the photos via URL, which is more efficient and provides better security.

All Data Sets Covered

We can cover every data set.  We do this for a multitude of customers, whether it’s IDX or VOW, Broker Only or third-party fee.  Plus, we update the data as fast as possible, so you always have the most up-to-date data.

Keep it Local

While we are standardizing the data, we make sure to keep it local. We don’t standardize the data down to a skeletal base where it is just designed for a portal.  We make sure that when we bring the data in we are standardizing it and maintaining those local nuances because ultimately, it is a local business.

While it is very important to know what your customers want, and we make sure we maintain that level of data, we also provide the data in a more normalized format. If you are a portal, for example, this normalized format allows you to manage and operate the data that way as well.

Maintain Control

We will never try to take control over the data feeds; unless you want us to.  We want the MLS to maintain control. We are only facilitators and we are trying to make the process work as efficiently as we can for everyone involved. Not every data aggregator can say that!

Check out the webinar below to hear Joel speak in more detail about why WolfNet is the data aggregation solution. If you would like to learn more about WolfNet’s data aggregation and distribution services, visit our website, or call 1-866-WOLFNET.

The post Why is WolfNet the Data Aggregation Solution? appeared first on WolfNet.

MLS Nuances:

Each MLS may have their own individual headaches with data. There are five nuances that WolfNet can almost guarantee will find when working with MLSs. These five nuances are: Data, photos, fees, contracts, and compliance.

• MLS Data: The MLS data is very localized. For example, if you live in Minnesota, you would want to find properties by lake names, which is probably not a common search in New Mexico. Also, different parts of the country might have home addresses that is one way, but it is different than how the US Postal Service recognizes it, which are tough to geocode.
  
  Along with localized data, deleting data can also be a challenge.  Some of the MLSs provide information on how to delete data, others do not.  We go through a process of comparing massive amounts of data in order to keep everything synced. Some of our clients complain about “Houdini Data,” which are listings that just disappear. They possibly came off market, or the status is not an option in the IDX so the listing just disappears. We have received 441 unique statuses.  You would expect active, contingent, pending, sold, and foreclosures. So we as a data aggregator, need to sort through all this data and make sure it is universal.

• Photos: When WolfNet receives photos from a MLS, the order of the photos may or may not be provided. If they are not the correct order, we need to figure out what that order is.

• Fees: Each MLS may or may not have a fee to access this data.  Fees range from IDX or VOW fees, to broker or third-party fees. Sometimes it’s a flat monthly fee and sometimes it’s an annual fee. There are many variations fees can come in so it can be tricky for new vendors to understand how to manage fees.

• Contracts: Whether IDX, VOW, fees, or something else, there are a ton of variations between each MLS and their contracts. As a data aggregator, we need to be sure that we are abiding to all the rules of these contracts.

• Compliance: While the majority of compliance rules and regulations are standard, the unique, non-standard compliances are tricky. A new vendor trying to get this data will need to learn the way through them by combing through contracts and extracting rule and regulation data from that. WolfNet has gone through the process of productizing compliances to make it a lot easier to be able to provide the data to help new vendors and vendors who don’t have the bandwidth to execute data aggregation a lot more efficiently.

How Does the Service Work with WolfNet?:

With our experience, we have mastered the process of receiving data and allowing others to use it.

Our data access can be accessed directly or through an API.   We also offer photos. Some of the MLSs, like MLSListings, offer photos through URLs. In our case, we offer every single photo through a URL and they all run through a CDN- no download needed. All our photos are secured and delivered through HTTPS.

WolfNet offers compliance reviews to help our customers get through compliance rules and regulations. We also offer contract processing services. On average, we process 1,500 contracts.  This means we are familiar with these contracts and they are completed properly. We’re very efficient.

Another benefit WolfNet provides is address standardization.  When we receive these addresses we verify and standardize the information and compare them with the US Postal Service. Comparing the address to USPS address allows us to find the verified address and helps delete duplicate information.

With our process mastered we provide vendors and brokers everything they need for data aggregation in one place.

MLS Benefits:

There are many benefits for MLSs when you work with WolfNet.

• Fees: While the MLS fees remain the same, there are lower expenses.  We help lower the expenses because MLSs are using less bandwidth.  When on-boarding new vendors or clients there is typically a fair amount of questions regarding data, compliance matters, etc., which takes a lot of resources. We take that burden over and help solve those matters, so you and your team don’t have to.

• Contracts: While the MLS contracts are the same, we digitize them. This makes them more accurate so when we submit them, they are correct. If we are doing the contract processing, we also assure that the member is in good standing prior to submitting the contracts.

• Compliance: When we are verifying all the contract information we provide an additional layer of compliance enforcement.  An extra set of eyes if you will. We definitely assist with compliance rules and regulations because if we submit it wrong, we need spend time correcting that contract, which isn’t efficient.

• MLS Remains Centered: When a MLS works with WolfNet, the MLS remains at the center.  We are not a trojan horse trying to benefit from working with the MLS.  We are facilitators and we are trying to make the process work as efficiently as we can for everyone involved.

Check out the webinar below to hear Joel speak in more detail about how data aggregation works and benefits MLSs. If you would like to learn more about WolfNet’s data aggregation and distribution services, click here, or call 1-866-WOLFNET. 

The post How Does Data Aggregation Work and Benefit MLS? appeared first on WolfNet.

How IDX Works

IDX, or Internet Data Exchange, encompasses various policies, rules, regulations and software that help display property listings to the public. Homes that are currently on the market are placed on a Multiple Listing Service but only members of that MLS can access this list of properties. So what happens when an agent wants to display housing information from an MLS they aren’t apart of? How do home buyers and sellers access housing information? IDX was created to remedy this exact problem – it pulls data directly from the MLS allowing agents to display property information on their personal sites. Now all you need is a trusted IDX provider (hint, hint) to equip your website with the best IDX property search and you’re all set!

Adding Value with VOW Data

VOW, or Virtual Office Website, is very similar to IDX but with a few subtle changes and additions for home buyers. VOW data offers even more in-depth information about a property such as how many days on market, original list price, and any price change history. Additionally, in order for customers to access VOW data they have to register with an email and password before seeing property information. This provides a great way for agents to build their potential lead list with VOW! One important thing to note – VOW data is not always available in every MLS market or region. Any good IDX/VOW provider will notify their agent and brokerage customers once VOW data has become available in their market.

IDX & VOW are both vital tools in helping agents and brokers bring home buyers and sellers into the market. While there’s plenty of information and history behind both, this high level explanation can hopefully shed some light on the process it takes to bring your real estate property search to life!

The post Know Your Lingo: What’s IDX/VOW? appeared first on WolfNet.