How a Two-Hour Chatbot Saved a Real Estate Office Twelve Hours a Week

A small agency we work with was drowning in the same six questions, every day, on their website chat. Opening hours. Listing availability. Application requirements. Inspection times. Pet policies. Bond amounts.

What we built

A small bot wired to their property feed and a static FAQ. No fine-tuning, no vector store, no agent loops. The system prompt is 400 words. If the question doesn't match one of the six categories, it hands off to a human and posts the conversation to Slack.

Why it works

Because we resisted the urge to make it smart. A chatbot that confidently invents pet policies is worse than no chatbot at all. The hand-off is the feature.

The numbers

In the first month: 480 conversations resolved without human touch, 38 handed off to the team, 0 incorrect answers about pricing or availability (we checked all 480). The receptionist got roughly twelve hours a week back, which she now spends actually showing properties.

The lesson

The boring scope wins. Pick the smallest possible job and do it perfectly before adding anything.