It’s possible for agents to reach new clients through voice assistants like Amazon’s Echo — if it’s done the right way.
Father-son duo and Voiceter Pro co-founders Miguel Berger and Ami Berger gave a demonstration Tuesday on the best ways for agents and brokerages to take advantage of the technology at Inman Connect San Francisco’s Hacker Connect.
“What works for web and what works for mobile when you have these screens, all this space where you can give the user information, is not necessarily going to work for voice,” Ami Berger said.
The pair’s company, Voiceter Pro, allows brokerages to capitalize on Amazon Echo, Google Home and Microsoft Cortana users’ real estate searches to capture those leads. If a user asks Alexa — the name of the voice assistant that operates through an Amazon Echo device – questions about buying a home, Voiceter Pro can connect users with a company’s listings and inform the user which brokerage powered their search.
But for those leads to be effective, brokerages have to offer the right responses through voice assistants.
Real estate advertising through a voice assistant should include a clear opening statement and a closing statement that reminds the listener of the company’s name — not just a “goodbye” to a user turning off the app. The opening and closing are the only parts of an ad that a user will always hear, since they can always turn off the search at any time, so those components should be effective and contain essential information.
The real estate search function also has to ask the right questions. Alexa, for example, shouldn’t ask a user “do you want a bathroom?” and instead needs to ask “how many bathrooms do you want?”
Companies also have to temper their expectations of Alexa. The voice assistant often mishears things that users say, so it’s hard for a potential seller, for example, to share the address of their home.
“Alexa’s not as good as you think she might be,” Ami Berger said. “She’s not going to hear everything 100 percent. You have to work within that.”
Miguel Berger is a longtime real estate professional, and his son Ami Berger is a software engineer. This form of advertising is in the early stages, and the two are trying to make sure the real estate industry is on board.
“It’s a cool technology, and it’s here to stay,” Miguel Berger said. “We can embrace it as an industry or we can let somebody else do it for us.”
