Adding a website assistant to an estate agency site is simpler than most agents expect. The technical part takes minutes. The useful part, making sure it gives good answers and hands over properly, takes an afternoon. This guide walks through the setup.
Step 1: check your listings
The assistant answers from your website, so start there. Make sure each listing includes the facts buyers ask about:
- Availability status, kept current.
- Tenure, council tax band, service charges.
- Parking, garden, heating.
- Nearby schools and transport.
The common mistakes to avoid are listed in estate agent mistakes with website enquiries.
Step 2: write your key pages
Beyond listings, the assistant needs information about your agency:
- Fees and what they include.
- How valuations work.
- Viewing process.
- Office hours and contact details.
- Buying and selling process guides.
- Tenant requirements, if you do lettings.
Step 3: train the assistant
Point SpideyChat at your website and it reads your pages, up to 150 of them. You can add documents or question and answer pairs for anything not on the site. The training guide covers each method.
Step 4: set your qualifying questions
Decide what to ask buyers, tenants and sellers after answering their question. For buyers: finance, chain, timescale. For tenants: move date, household, pets. For sellers: property details and plans.
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Step 5: set handover rules
Decide which conversations go straight to a person: offers, complaints, sensitive situations and anything the assistant cannot answer. Decide who receives each type. How handover works in general is covered in how to set up human handoff for your chatbot.
Step 6: install it
Installation is one script tag before the closing body tag of your site. The installation guide covers the details, and the integrations page has platform-specific instructions for WordPress, Wix, Squarespace and others.
Step 7: test with real enquiries
Take twenty recent enquiries covering buyers, tenants and sellers. Ask each question word for word. Check the answers, the qualifying questions and the handover. Fix any gaps in your pages and test again. The same testing approach is used by software teams, as described in how to train a website assistant on product docs.
Step 8: review after the first week
Read the first week's conversations. Look at questions it could not answer and add the missing information to your listings or pages. SpideyChat for real estate logs these as knowledge gaps.
Choosing before setting up
If you have not chosen a tool yet, choosing a website assistant for an estate agency covers what to look for and what to ask vendors.
Setting the tone
Decide how the assistant should sound. A high-street agency with a friendly local brand might use a relaxed, warm tone. A prestige agency might prefer something more formal. Set the name, welcome message and suggestion buttons to match. Suggestion buttons work best as the things visitors actually want: "Book a valuation," "Arrange a viewing," "Register for new properties," rather than "Our services." Watch which buttons get clicked in the first month and swap out the ones nobody uses.
After a month
Most agencies find the assistant's answers improve noticeably in the first month, not because the software changed but because the listings did. The gaps list pushes the team to add the details buyers kept asking about.