The residential real estate industry, globally valued at $300 trillion, is ripe for transformation. Despite technological advances elsewhere, sales, leasing, and customer service processes in residential real estate remain labor-intensive and expensive, burdened by operational inefficiencies and escalating operational costs. The cyclical nature of the industry, characterized by bursts of intensive project launch activity followed by prolonged periods of slower sales, exacerbates these pain points.

Property developers and agencies typically spend 8–12% of their revenue on marketing, sales, and customer service, facing high talent churn and difficulty scaling operations predictably. These challenges result in reduced profitability and compromised customer experiences. With younger, digitally-savvy buyers entering the market, traditional approaches struggle to meet growing expectations for hyper-personalized customer experiences, instant responsiveness and transparency.

Inefficient Real Estate Sales Growth: Is it sustainable to protect margins?

A gist of the current inefficiencies in real estate sales operations across many markets globally:

• Disproportionate cost of sales: Developers allocate substantial budgets (6–10%) on sales and marketing, often without clear, data-driven insights. Over-reliance on ‘push’ sales and incentivizing internal sales teams & external agents with larger commissions.

• Reliance on Anecdotes: Decision-making largely depends on anecdotal insights from sales teams, limiting the ability to strategically optimize sales outcomes.

• Sales team productivity: Sales teams on average spend 50–70% on repetitive, time-consuming tasks speaking with unqualified leads and doing follow-ups, elongating the time spent per deal and hence lowering overall productivity.

• Episodic and Cyclical Demand: Sales and customer service teams find it challenging to scale resources predictably due to the episodic nature of project launches, making operations costly and inefficient.

Moreover, manual processes burden sales teams, restricting their bandwidth and preventing them from focusing on strategic, revenue-generating tasks. Sales & customer service teams spend substantial time handling repetitive queries and administrative tasks, reducing productivity and profitability.

Agentic AI era: Unlocking new possibilities for real estate sales

Agentic AI paltforms that automate the entire top-of-funnel sales processes and other repetitive tasks like scheduling viewings & follow-ups have immense scope in enabling 2X sales for property firms without adding more resources. Unlike generic CRM systems, these platforms automate actual customer-facing tasks, from initial lead qualification and property tours to handling sales transaction processes, follow-ups, and post-sales documentation.

Proplens is one such agentic AI platform that offers digital workforce a.k.a. AI agents in making sales cheaper, faster & more efficient for property firms.

Here’s how it works:

• Lead Qualification & Personalized Engagement: Proplens’ AI agents automatically qualify leads based on buyer intent, location, budget, and timeline, ensuring only qualified buyers progress through the sales funnel.

• Seamless Project Briefing & Tour Scheduling: Automation manages scheduling, customized briefings, and follow-ups, greatly improving responsiveness and personalization.

• 24/7 Availability, multi-lingual chat & voice: Proplens agents provide round-the-clock responsiveness across channels — at 1 AM or on weekends, in natural language (no frustrating ‘chatbot’ experience for consumers). They ensure consistency and accuracy in customer interactions with grounded data that’s ingested specifically for the property firm’s portfolio.

• Capable AI assistant: AI agents equip sales teams with instant, accurate, and data-backed insights, empowering them to address buyer queries confidently. Helps sales teams address concerns & objections with market intel instantly. No more “I’ll come back to you later on this”.

Evaluating Approaches: AI in Real Estate Sales

1. Generic CRM Systems vs AI agents

• Pros of CRM: Needless to say, they offer effective data storage and serve as a ‘system of record’ for tracking the lead journey.

• Cons: CRM platforms primarily record interactions rather than actively driving them, requiring human intervention for all operational tasks. Many sales associates find working with CRMs extremely clunky due to multiple terminologies & tedious workflows to extract or update lead status.

• Pros of AI agents: Actively engages with leads, automating routine tasks, significantly improving productivity and conversion rates. In short, these AI agents do the actual work beyond just serving as a database of records.

• Readiness: Initial adoption requires integration with existing systems; organizations need readiness for digital transformation, patience with the iterative nature of how AI agents work and drive outcomes.

• Proplens’ AI agents integrate well with property firms’ existing CRM systems and require minimal data preparation to work effectively. The AI agents work on top of the CRM & update any additional context gathered from the consumer interactions just like a human sales associate would.

2. Horizontal vs. Vertical AI Platforms

• Pros of Horizontal AI solutions: Broad applicability across industries with general capabilities. These AI solutions dive deep into specific functions like Sales or customer service.

• Limitations: Lack of domain-specific insights and inability to handle detailed real estate-specific scenarios effectively. More importantly, they do not offer integrations that are localized to each real estate market. Example, linking with property transaction data for a particular city or offering market intelligence for a competing set of properties, etc.

• Pros of Vertical AI solutions: Tailored specifically to real estate workflows and terminologies, ensuring higher accuracy, relevancy, and immediate impact on sales operations. There is no precious time lost in teaching the AI to understand the property domain & processes.

• Vertical AI platforms like Proplens deliver instant value and offer deep customization potential compared to general purpose sales AI tools or AI agentic solutions offered by CRM providers. For example, a consumer can ask the platform to ‘find the best suited unit layout with a balcony, open kitchen plan. overlooking the pool under budget X’. This is truly multi-modal domain specific AI at work.

The Road Ahead: Building the Agentic Operating System for Developers

Looking ahead, Proplens is evolving into a comprehensive ‘Agentic Operating System’ for property developers, addressing various workflows across the real estate value chain and cutting across the data siloes of enterprise software stack that includes CRM, ERP, BIM & project management solutions.

• Customer Service & Property Management: Automating post-sales interactions, improving customer satisfaction, and streamlining documentation-intensive processes. KPIs for this AI agent include no. of successful customer resolutions, CSAT/NPS scores & sales referrals generated.

• Procurement automation Workflows: Enhancing efficiency and accuracy in procurement processes through automated BOQ and RFP workflows in the construction phase.

• Project Management Workflows: Delivering integrated project management solutions driven by intelligent AI automation that drives the business goal of lower project spends, lesser repeat work due to better co-ordination between design, procurement & construction teams & effective multi-department planning and scheduling workflows.

This evolution positions Proplens not just as a productivity tool, but as an integral, intelligent operating partner, empowering real estate developers and agencies to realize sustainable sales growth and operational efficiency.

For more insights or collaboration, visit our website www.proplens.ai or view a concept demo of our agentic sales AI solution on YouTube.

‍