How A Bot Reduced Our Workload By 80%
As both Drew and now Nathan have written, there is a lot of nascent interest in bots for real estate. Most technologists tend to focus on the consumer-facing use cases: helping buyers figure out which homes to look at, answering basic questions about listings, etc.
At Virgent, we took a little bit of a different tack. Since we exclusively focus on home sellers, we handle a lot of showing requests from buyers’ agents – in some cases it can be dozens of requests a day.
It only took us two weeks after launch to determine that coordinating showings via phone and text message was not super scalable. We knew we needed an automated system to handle the throughput, but we also knew we had to be very careful in developing it to ensure that buyers’ agents would use it instead of making a phone call or sending an email and that it was dead simple for our clients to use as well.
In order to do this well, it meant really understanding our user, who in this case was the buyer’s agent. This person is extremely busy, and almost always scheduling showings while on the go. They don’t have the time or interest in downloading a new app, but they do want the latest information on the subject listing instantly (“Does it have any offers?”)
We landed on the following guiding principles (consultants call these the Business Requirements):
- The bot must accept natural language
- The bot must be entirely mobile, without requiring agents or our home sellers to download anything new
- The bot must be quick to use – no more than 3 “screens”
- The bot must be flexible enough to handle different occupancy scenarios (e.g. Owner Occupied, Tenant, or Vacant) and adjust the showing confirmation process accordingly.
With that in mind, we built a fully automated, text-messaging based bot that now handles about 80% of all the showing requests we receive. Here’s how it works:
How Our Bot Works
Accepting natural language is the key to agent adoption
Properties we list are auto-assigned a text-message capable phone number which is noted in the private remarks of the listing. Buyer’s agents can text any sort of showing request to the number. For example:
“I’d like to show this home tomorrow at 3pm”
“Saturday, May 16 @ 12:30pm”
“Is the home available for showing at Friday at 2?”
Our servers parse the agent’s request, turn it into a standardized time format, and send back the current offer status of the house (e.g. the house does or doesn’t have active offers on it).
Homeowners confirm showings via text message instantly
In the case of an owner- or tenant-occupied property, our bot immediately sends a text message to the resident asking them if they can be out of the house at the requested showing time. A “yes” response triggers confirmation texts and emails to both parties, as well as other information the buyer’s agent needs to know, such as alarm codes.
A “no” is passed back to the agent for rescheduling along with better times for the resident.
If the property is vacant, the showing request is automatically approved and the homeowner is notified via email that a showing has been scheduled.
About 15 minutes after the showing ends, our system automatically texts the showing agent and asks for feedback on the property. Any response is instantly shared with our home sellers and our team via email.
The results? Our average showing is confirmed about 5 minutes after it’s requested, entirely via text message, without any intervention by our team.
User Response
We were actually surprised by the reaction we got once we released the system. This bot is one of the most noted features in our reviews on Zillow:
They have an amazing feature that will text you when an agent wants to show your home and you can respond with a time that works best.
The text-to-show feature was excellent because it allowed us to share showing information about our 3 dogs and alarm codes codes directly with selling agents
It’s always great to get that feedback, but personally I was even happier that our bot passed what I’ll call “the poor man’s Turing Test.”
For those of you who aren’t familiar, the Turing Test is a test of a computer’s ability to simulate a human’s behavior so the user can’t tell if they’re talking to a human or a computer.
After launching the bot, we had a number of agents contact us afterwards following up on their discussion with the bot, which they had assumed with a member of our team on the other end.
More importantly, our counterparts on the buying side have told us the bot saves them a ton of time in scheduling showings, gives them the info they need instantly, and makes the showing process much less hectic.
The Technical Nitty Gritty
For those of you who are curious, we built the system using Twilio, which is a service that can programatically handle incoming and outgoing text messages and phone calls. The platform is fully integrated in our proprietary software, built on Ruby on Rails, so all showing data is stored in our systems and available to our clients online 24/7.
Shoot me a note if you ever want to talk about Twilio or RoR.
Bryn Kaufman
Posted at 11:00h, 26 AprilVery nice Ben. We also use what we call our Showing Tracking System. It is basically the same as what you are doing as it is 100% automated, but we use a form and emails, along with a text message option for our client if they want it.
Not sure if you verify the phone number the text is coming from or going to, but that is a big selling point of our system. If for some reason the information gets out to a non-agent, they still can’t book a showing, because our system only emails a confirmation to email addresses registered in the MLS. This protects sellers from ever having a buyer book a showing. We promote the idea that most agents give the entry code to anyone who calls and asks for it, which is not very secure.
We also do up to 3 follow up emails for showing feedback in case the first once does not get a response. At any time the seller can see a history of their showings and the comments. Additionally, if there is a price drop the system let’s us notify everyone who showed it with one email.
Thanks for being open about Twilio and other technology you use. We also use Twilio for texting. It let’s us text any agent from our website. It is especially useful for our VAs in the Philippines who can easily check on the status of listings or let agents know we submitted an offer. We found agents to me much more responsive with text messages vs. emails or phone calls.
What I like with our Twilio setup is when an agent text messages another agent, our VAs get copies of what was sent and the replies to keep them in the loop. Text messaging is normally one-to-one, but with Twilio our VAs are copied too.
Darren
Posted at 17:59h, 27 AprilVery interesting Article Ben, I’m a property manager and i use various software’s to make my life easier. One of the biggest issues i faced in the beginning was organizing my information correctly and how to manage my properties at a distance. I read this article: https://www.rentecdirect.com/blog/2016/04/long-distance-landlord/ that talked about how to handle being a long distance landlord and it helped me realize automation and technology definitely make a difference! Thanks for the article!
Andrew Macia
Posted at 08:24h, 28 AprilGood job on the article Ben. I’m a fairly new landlord, I actually have a couple apartments overseas. Thanks for the recommendation on that article Darren.