Lead generation · 6 min read
The Property Enquiry That Is Really a Valuation Request
Under the walkthrough of the 3BHK, somebody comments: "what's the rate in this area?"
Read quickly, that is a buyer asking what the flat costs. Read properly, it is very often somebody who lives four buildings away, has been thinking about selling since Diwali, and has just asked you — carefully, without committing to anything — what their own place is worth.
That message is the most valuable thing an agent gets on Instagram. A buyer enquiry is one transaction. A seller enquiry is inventory, and inventory is the constraint on the whole business.
It is also the message an automation must never answer with a number.
A rate is not a fact about your business
Opening hours are a fact. A rate is not.
What a specific flat is worth depends on the floor, the facing, the age of the building, whether the lift has been replaced, the society's dues, the parking allocation, whether there is an encumbrance, what actually transacted in that tower in the last six months as opposed to what was asked, and how quickly the owner needs to move. None of that is visible to a system reading a nine-word comment.
A generated reply will produce a plausible per-square-foot figure anyway. Plausibility is the entire skill; being right is not part of it. And the number does not have to be far wrong to cause damage. It has to be specific enough that somebody anchors on it, and every one of them will.
An automated valuation is an opinion with your firm's name on it, given to a stranger about an asset nobody has seen.
Three numbers that never go out automatically
A valuation of somebody's own property. For the reasons above. The correct reply says what determines the number, not what the number is.
A per-square-foot rate for an area. This looks harmless and is not. Said in public under a listing post, it becomes a comp. Everyone in that building reads it, quotes it back at you, and compares it to what they paid. You have published a market opinion on behalf of your firm in a comment thread.
The asking price of a live listing, in the public reply. The listing side of this has its own post, and the short version is that the public half of a comment automation is read by every other commenter, the seller, and the neighbours. It should be short, warm and content-free. The detail belongs in the DM.
The reply that works instead
The instinct is a hedged paragraph. Hedged paragraphs get skimmed and read as evasive. What performs is short, specific about the mechanism, and ends somewhere a person takes over.
- Name the question honestly. "Rates in that pocket move a lot by floor and facing, so I'm not going to guess at yours in a DM." This does not lose you the lead. It is the sentence that makes you sound like an agent rather than a portal.
- Say what actually decides it. Three factors, plainly. Floor and facing, what genuinely transacted recently rather than what was listed, and the condition of the building. Thirty seconds of real expertise in a template.
- Offer the concrete next step you actually do. A twenty-minute visit, a comparison of recent registrations in that society, whatever your process really is. Named, not vague.
- Ask one question, not five. "Aap khud ki property ke liye pooch rahe hain, ya kuch dekh rahe hain?" That single question sorts sellers from buyers, and it gets answered because it is one line.
- Stop. No requests for the flat number, the society name, the owner's name or documents. Those come on the call.
That last point matters more than it looks. People will volunteer their address, their loan balance and their reason for selling in an Instagram DM because they are trying to be helpful. A template that says "don't send documents here, we'll take those properly on the call" is thirty words that keep a lot of information out of a place it should not be.
Sellers and buyers want opposite first replies
Once the one question sorts them, the two paths barely resemble each other.
Buyer
Seller
Which is why the two should not share an automation. A buyer template sent to a seller reads as a company that did not listen, and that is the one lead you cannot afford to lose to a bad first impression, because there are far fewer of them.
Hold the unusual ones rather than sending them
For a brokerage the traffic is low and each row is heavy, which inverts the usual advice. Speed is not the variable worth optimising. Not being wrong is.
Takeover works in the same direction. The moment you reply by hand the automation is out of that thread for good, which is what you want in a business where you will personally be in every conversation that ends in a signature. The automation's job is to hold the door open until you get there.
Cost, and the honest limits
Templated replies are free and unlimited. A credit is spent only when the AI writes a new reply, one credit per reply. The buyer side of an agent's inbox is one repeated question answered by one fixed template, so it costs nothing however far a reel travels. Credits go on the genuinely unusual messages. Free tier is 100 credits, no card; packs start at ₹499.
It cannot value anything, cannot check availability, cannot message anyone who has not written to you first, and does not do WhatsApp. There is no CRM sync — leads export as CSV, and if nobody is named as the person who works that file, it does not get worked.
Official Graph API only. Seven days to answer a comment, counted from each comment; twenty-four hours inside a DM thread, restarted only when they write again. A seller who goes quiet is not lost — they can reopen the thread whenever they like — but you cannot chase them on your schedule, which is the whole argument for putting the real value in the first reply.
What a captured enquiry actually contains is the next thing to read, and ranking which of them to call first matters more here than in almost any other business.
