Hands up, salespeople reading this article. How many of you are receiving leads directly from clients who’ve just seen your ad while passing a bus bench or a for sale sign? How many of you can respond to those calls right away, any time of the day or night?
While these are rhetorical questions, Roberto Moreno, co-founder of Gabbi.ai says that increasingly, teams of two to 10 agents who’ve been in the industry for over three years are finding it easier to generate leads. This is due to the proliferation of online marketing and lead generation tools, but the salespeople are finding it harder to nurture those leads in a timely fashion. A common complaint Moreno hears from sales reps is, “I get a lot of leads. I just don’t know what to do with them.”
The window of opportunity to warm up a lead today is down to three minutes. If, within that time, an agent or their assistant is unable to respond to the client, they’ve potentially lost business worth thousands of dollars.
Robert Moreno
Gabbi is the newest real estate tech tool to hit the market. Using natural language processing, this Edmonton-based tech company has developed an app that, “is a communication hub for an agent where an agent or teams can manage all their communication with clients, leads and associates through text, email or voice in one location via their desktops or smart phones,” says Moreno.
A key market differentiator for Gabbi is that it is integrated with MLS data. Let’s say an agent, in the middle of showing a home, receives a text from a lead inquiring about a specific type of residential property. Gabbi listens to this conversation and immediately taps into the MLS to pull out all the potential listings that match the client’s query. It then relays that information to the agent for verification and edits, and within minutes responds to the client, says Moreno.
“We’re not going out to Zillow, we’re not going out to the brokerage sites and hoping that they have the right info, or Craigslist. We’re going right to the MLS,” he says. Because Gabbi listens and learns from organic conversations, round-the clock, she speaks just like her agent, without the client realising they’ve spoken to a bot.
Text messages and emails are the most preferred channels of communication. Research from the National Association of Realtors’ 2017 Real Estate in a Digital Age report suggests that 94 per cent of Realtors “prefer to communicate with their clients through email,” while “90 per cent prefer to communicate through text messaging and 34 per cent through instant messaging.”
The report also says that “58 per cent of millennials and 46 per cent of Generation X found their home on a mobile device compared to 33 per cent of younger boomers.”
Gabbi allows salespeople to capitalize on this trend. Moreno says most sales reps agree that 80 per cent of their time is spent on non-moneymaking tasks – things like driving around, putting up signage, getting the keys and so on. This leaves them with little time to build and nurture relationships. Gabbi enables more time for salespeople to engage in “belly-to-belly meetings, showing homes, negotiating and offering,” says Moreno. “Our goal with Gabbi is to start taking away from those 80 per cent (non-moneymaking) tasks and time, and looking at each one and saying, can we automate it or enhance it?
“Realtors talk a lot,” says Moreno. Having the gift of the gab is a plus in a competitive real estate world. Indeed, by naming their app “Gabbi,” Moreno and his team aim to not only tap into an industry requisite, but also bring real estate conversations up to speed with hyper-evolving customer needs and AI technology.
Sohini Bhattacharya is a contributing writer for REM.
