Chatbots for real estate: what they do for Aussie agencies

A buyer finds one of your listings at 9pm on a Tuesday. They've got three questions: is it still available, when's the next open home, and has it got a lock-up garage. Nobody's in the office. Tomorrow morning, whoever gets back to them first has the best shot at the inspection.

That's what chatbots for real estate are bought for. Agencies don't buy them for the tech. They buy them for the enquiries that land after hours and the admin that buries their property managers.

Matey builds custom chatbots for Australian real estate agencies, trained on each agency's own listings, sold results, and office pages. We've built demo mateys for three dozen Aussie agencies, from country towns to the capital cities, so this is the builder's guide: what a real estate chatbot actually does, the numbers behind it, the Australian rules, and how to test one before you pay.

What is a chatbot for real estate?

A chatbot for real estate is a chat window on an agency's website, or in Facebook Messenger or SMS, that answers buyers, sellers, renters, and landlords from the agency's own listings and policies, at any hour. When someone's ready to inspect, sell, or rent, it passes them to the right person at the agency with the whole conversation attached.

Real estate chatbots come in two kinds:

• Scripted chatbots follow buttons someone wrote in advance: Buying, Selling, or Renting, then a form for a name and number. They're cheap and they collect contacts, but they can't answer a question that isn't on a button.
• AI chatbots read what the person typed and answer from the agency's real data. "Has the Smith Street house got a lock-up garage?" gets its answer from the listing, not a menu.

Our guide to what a chatbot is covers the difference in more depth.

What can chatbots do for real estate agents?

Chatbots for real estate agents do six jobs well: answer listing questions, match buyers to homes, book inspections, handle appraisal enquiries, take landlord and tenant questions, and pass every lead to the right agent. Here's what that looks like for each person who messages an agency:

Watch for the enquiry that doesn't fit a box: someone who needs to sell before they can buy. That's a possible listing and a sale in one chat. A good real estate chatbot passes both halves to the right agents, instead of filing it as one more buyer enquiry.

Do Australian real estate agencies use chatbots yet?

Most Australian real estate agencies don't have a chatbot yet. When we built demo mateys for 35 Australian agencies, 30 of their websites had no chat of any kind. Three had a live chat or Messenger button. Two had an AI chat, and each one only worked on one kind of page: listing pages on one site, and the tenant maintenance page on the other.

Buyers are moving faster than agencies. REA Group launched a realestate.com.au app inside ChatGPT in February 2026, so buyers can search homes for sale by budget, bedrooms, and features in a chat. Once people are used to asking a question and getting an answer, a contact form that promises a reply "within one business day" starts to look slow.

How many real estate enquiries come in after hours?

Around four to five in every ten real estate enquiries come in outside office hours, on the best recent figures, and emails and portal enquiries run higher than phone calls. Australian portals don't publish the number, so the best guide comes from overseas.

In the UK, the proptech firm LightWork AI found 43% of the estate agency enquiries it handled from July to September 2026 arrived outside 9am to 5pm on weekdays, as reported by PropertyWire. For emails and portal enquiries the figure was 49%.

You'll find plenty of chatbot sellers claiming 60% or more. We couldn't trace those numbers back to a study, so they're not here.

Saturday is its own problem. Agents are out running open homes, and that's exactly when buyers who just walked through one want to ask about the next. For phone calls, an AI receptionist does the same job a chatbot does in the chat window.

Why does a fast reply matter for real estate leads?

A fast reply matters because real estate leads go cold quickly, and plenty never get a reply at all. Two studies get quoted for this everywhere, and both hold up when you read the originals:

• Half never hear back. WAV Group, a US real estate consultancy, posed as homebuyers and sent enquiries to hundreds of brokerages in 11 states. 48% of the enquiries never got a response, and the average reply took 917 minutes, about 15 hours (WAV Group, Agent Responsiveness Study 2013).
• Five minutes beats 30. The Lead Response Management study by Dr James Oldroyd of MIT and InsideSales.com looked at more than 15,000 web leads across six companies. Calling at 30 minutes instead of five cut the odds of qualifying the lead 21 times (InsideSales.com and MIT, 2007).

Both are American, and the second isn't about property. But no agent who's lost a listing to the agency that rang back first needs much convincing.

A real estate chatbot doesn't replace the callback. It answers in seconds, books what it can, and hands the agent a lead who's already said what they want. The callback becomes the second conversation, not the first.

Are chatbots worth it for property management?

Chatbots often earn their keep fastest in property management, because tenants and landlords ask the same questions every week and urgent repairs don't wait for business hours. Rent, bond, lease breaks, pets, routine inspections, and "who do I call about the leak?" fill a property manager's inbox.

Australian proptech is already selling this. reHeroes sells its chatbot, Alex, to agencies to take tenants' busy work off property managers and cut unnecessary call-outs. In a 2023 Crikey story republished by SmartCompany, one agency using it, Distinct Property Management, said the benefit was not needing a staff member working out of hours.

A property management chatbot should do three things well:

• Answer from the agency's own rules. Pets, rent days, how to break a lease, and what a routine inspection involves.
• Sort urgent from routine. A burst pipe at 11pm gets the emergency repairs number straight away. A dripping tap gets logged with photos for the morning.
• Catch the landlords. An investor asking about management fees is a property for the rent roll. That enquiry should reach the agency that night, not next week.

Can a real estate chatbot book inspections and appraisals?

Yes. A real estate chatbot can book inspections and appraisals, either straight into the system the agency already uses or by taking the person's details and preferred time and sending them to the right agent.

• Rental inspections and applications usually run through a platform like Inspect Real Estate or 2Apply. The chatbot should send renters to the right page for that property, not to a phone number.
• Open homes come straight from the listing. A private inspection gets the buyer's name, number, and a time sent to the listing agent.
• Appraisals start with "what's my place worth?" The chatbot can show what similar homes nearby sold for, then book the agent for a proper appraisal. It shouldn't put its own number on someone's home.

All of it only works if the listings are fresh. Homes sell, open times move, and price guides change through a campaign. Agency websites run on a handful of systems: across our 35 builds, the most common were Reapit (Agentpoint), Eagle, and Rex, with Box+Dice, Agentbox, PropertyMe, Phoenix, and ARO behind the rest. A real estate chatbot has to read listings from whichever one feeds your site, at least once a day, or it'll happily book an inspection on a house that sold last week.

Sold prices are the other catch. Plenty of agency websites hide them, and on some of the sites we built for, most sold homes showed no price at all. A real estate chatbot can only quote what the agency publishes.

What are the Australian rules for real estate chatbots?

A real estate chatbot speaks for the agency, so the rules that apply to agents apply to it: underquoting laws on price, the Privacy Act on personal information, and the Spam Act on follow-up messages.

Price guides and underquoting

In Victoria, it's illegal for an agent to advertise or tell a buyer a price below the seller's asking or reserve price, a written offer the seller has already rejected, or the agent's own estimated selling price (Consumer Affairs Victoria). Victoria's newer rules add a reserve price disclosed seven days before an auction or fixed-date sale, sold prices published once a sale goes unconditional, and a Property Price Statement in place of the Statement of Information.

In NSW, an agent can't advertise or state a price below their reasonable estimate of the selling price, and "offers over" or "$900,000+" prices are banned. Agents face fines of up to $22,000 (NSW Fair Trading). Other states have their own rules.

For a real estate chatbot the rule is simple: it quotes the price guide the agency has published for that listing, word for word, and nothing else. No guessing, no rounding, and never "they'd probably take less".

Privacy

Chats with buyers, renters, and landlords are full of personal information: names, phone numbers, addresses, and sometimes income or rental history. Agencies covered by the Privacy Act 1988 have to handle it under the Australian Privacy Principles. Add the chatbot to your privacy policy, know where the chats are stored, and keep ID and payslips in the rental application platform, not the chat.

Follow-up texts and emails

Marketing texts and emails need the person's consent and a working unsubscribe under the Spam Act 2003. A real estate chatbot that asks "Want new listings in your suburb sent to you?" and records the yes is doing it properly.

How much does a chatbot for real estate cost in Australia?

A chatbot for real estate in Australia costs from $59 a month plus GST for a Facebook Messenger bot. Matey's custom AI chatbots are $149 a month, and custom builds from other Australian chatbot agencies are usually quoted per job.

How do you test a real estate chatbot before you buy?

Run the Matey open-home test. Type these seven messages into any real estate chatbot, ideally at 9pm, the way a buyer, seller, or tenant would:

1. A new listing. Ask about a home that went up today. Does it know about it?
2. A sold home. Ask to inspect one that sold last week. Does it say it's sold, or book you in?
3. The price. Ask what an auction home will go for. Does it stick to the published guide?
4. "What's my place worth?" Does it show real recent sales, or make a number up?
5. Sell, then buy. Say you need to sell before you can buy. Do both agents hear about it?
6. A burst pipe at 11pm. Does it give the emergency repairs number straight away?
7. "Can I talk to someone?" Does an agent get your details and the whole chat?

A real estate chatbot that fails number 2 or 3 will cost you more than it saves.

Want to see what a custom chatbot can do? Try a matey on the homepage, or read how custom chatbot development works at Matey.