Estate agents get pitched software constantly. Portals, CRMs, valuation tools, chatbots. When it comes to choosing a chatbot for a real estate website, the demos all look impressive, and they all claim to generate leads. The question is which one actually helps your agency.
This guide covers what a website assistant should do for an agency, the questions worth asking any vendor, and the promises to treat with care.
What it should do
A useful assistant for an estate agency covers a few core jobs:
- Answers questions from your listings. Availability, property facts, viewing process.
- Qualifies enquiries. Buyers, tenants, sellers and landlords each need different questions.
- Captures leads. With contact details and the conversation attached.
- Works out of hours. Evenings and weekends, when many buyers browse.
- Hands over to people. For negotiation, complaints and anything complex.
Everything else is secondary. The importance of out-of-hours cover is covered in buyer enquiries that arrive on Sunday night.
Questions to ask any vendor
Where do the answers come from? An assistant should answer from your own website content, not generic property information. Ask how it learns your listings and how it handles properties that change status.
What happens when it does not know? The right answer is that it says so and captures the enquiry. Be wary of anything that always has an answer.
How are leads delivered? Check that each lead arrives with the conversation, contact details and qualifying answers, not just a name and email.
Can it separate buyers from sellers? Seller and landlord enquiries are worth more and need different handling. We covered why in valuation requests are your best seller leads.
How is it priced? Per-lead and per-conversation pricing can climb quickly during busy months. Flat monthly pricing is easier to budget.
How long does setup take? A good assistant should be running on your site in an afternoon.
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Promises to treat with care
Instant valuations. An automated figure that is wrong can lose you an instruction. Ask how it is calculated and whether you can turn it off.
Automatic diary booking. Check exactly how it works with your diary, and what happens with double bookings. Many agencies prefer to capture requested times and confirm manually.
Phone and messaging coverage. Confirm which channels are actually included. SpideyChat for real estate, for example, works on your website only. It captures viewing and valuation requests for your team to confirm rather than booking them itself.
Big lead numbers. Ask what counts as a lead. A captured email from a casual browser is not the same as a qualified buyer.
Testing before you commit
The most reliable test is your own data. Take twenty real enquiries from the last month, covering buyers, tenants and sellers, and ask each question to the assistant. Score the answers: right, vague or wrong. Check how it handled the ones it could not answer.
This is the same method software teams use to test documentation assistants, described in how to train a website assistant on product docs. It works just as well for listings.
Setup questions worth asking
Beyond features, ask how the assistant fits your working day. Who receives the leads, and in what form? Can different enquiry types go to different people, such as sellers to valuers and tenants to the lettings team? How do you update it when a property goes under offer? Does it pick up changes to your listings automatically, or does someone need to retrain it?
Also ask what you can see afterwards. Being able to read every conversation matters, because the questions buyers ask tell you what your listings are missing and where your service could improve. An assistant that captures leads but hides the conversations leaves your team guessing about what was said.
Signs a vendor is overpromising
Watch for demos that only use perfect questions, claims of large percentage increases in leads with no explanation of how they were measured, and contracts that lock you in for a year before you have seen results. A confident vendor will let you test with your own enquiries and cancel if it does not work.
Comparing cost with what it replaces
Once you know what an assistant can do, compare its cost with the value of the enquiries you currently lose or answer slowly. SpideyChat's plans are flat monthly prices, so the calculation is simple.
Seeing one in action
Before choosing anything, spend ten minutes with a working example. You can try the live demo assistants, including ones built for property, and put your own buyer and tenant questions to them.