Real Estate Answering Service: What to Look For
By Frontly
· Updated
It is 11am on a Saturday. Your agents are running three open homes, and the office line is ringing with a buyer asking about a listing across town and a homeowner who wants to know what their place is worth. Neither leaves a message. The buyer books with the next agency on the portal, and the homeowner calls an agent who answered.
Summary: A good real estate answering service answers every call while your agents are out, books the inspection on the call, puts vendor enquiries in front of an agent the same day and logs everything for Monday. It answers from your listing information only and leaves price conversations and negotiation to your agents.
What should a real estate answering service handle?
Calls to an agency fall into a few groups, and a service has to tell them apart:
- Buyer enquiries. Which listing, what they want to know, their timeframe and finance position, captured before an agent calls back.
- Inspection bookings. Open-home and private-inspection times booked during the call, not left as a request.
- Vendor appraisals. The most valuable call your office gets. It should reach an agent fast.
- Rental and tenant calls. Rental enquiries, applications and repairs, kept separate from sales.
- Evenings and weekends. Buyers ring after work and after Saturday inspections, when the office is closed.
What each missed call costs in commission is worked through in what missed calls cost a real estate agency.
Hear it for yourself
Hear Frontly book a buyer into an open home
Play a recorded demo call, or ring the demo agent yourself from your browser. No signup. No credit card.
What should it never say?
An answering service speaks for your agency, so set its limits before it takes a call:
- Price questions come from your listing information. It gives the advertised price or guide you have set for that listing, and nothing it has not been told.
- Offers and negotiation go to an agent. A buyer ready to make an offer is a call to transfer or a hot lead to send straight away.
- Vendors are passed on, not valued. An appraisal request is booked or put through to an agent; the service never suggests what a home is worth.
Buyer or vendor: what a good handover looks like
Take the two Saturday calls from the top of this guide.
The buyer asks about the listing across town. Frontly answers from your listing details, books her into the 2pm open home and sends the confirmation. The listing agent sees the booking with her notes: pre-approved, wants two bedrooms near the train. Had she said she was ready to make an offer, the call would have gone straight to the agent.
The homeowner wants to know what his place is worth. Frontly rings the agent who covers his suburb and gives a short spoken briefing first: a three-bedroom terrace in Paddington, thinking of selling in spring. The agent is mid-inspection, so the backup number rings the office. Nobody is free, so Frontly books the appraisal into the time you set aside for them and texts the agent the details. The agent rings him back from the car, already briefed, before he calls anyone else.
Seven questions to ask before you choose
- Does it answer on weekends and public holidays? That is when buyers are looking.
- How many calls does it answer at once? A new listing on the portals brings a rush of calls together. Frontly answers every caller at once.
- Can it book inspections during the call? Frontly books the times you set and sends the confirmation to the buyer.
- Does it tell buyers, vendors and tenants apart? Each needs a different next step, and vendor calls need the fastest one.
- Can a caller reach the listing agent? Frontly transfers to the agent's mobile with a short spoken briefing, tries a backup such as the office, and sends the enquiry by SMS or email when the agent is at an open home.
- Does it work with your CRM? Frontly connects to Rex and MRI Eagle; VaultRE, Box+Dice and Reapit need the vendor to approve the connection first.
- Can it make the follow-up calls? Frontly calls open-home attendees and past enquiries when a matching listing comes up, and logs who is still looking.
AI or a human answering service?
A human answering service puts a person on the call; depending on the service and the hours you buy, it takes a message or books the inspection. An AI answering service answers every call at once, books the inspection while the buyer is on the phone, and records each call the same way, in more than 40 languages, so an overseas buyer is booked in without a language barrier.
Many agencies put weekends, evenings and the open-home rush on the AI and keep their agents for the conversations that win listings.
Frontly for real estate agencies
Frontly answers buyer, vendor and tenant calls 24/7, books inspections, sends hot leads to the listing agent and rings your past leads back. Setup time depends on verification, workflow complexity and integrations.
See how it works on our real estate answering service page, where you can hear a recorded buyer call, or try it yourself with a free test call.
