Streamlined Call Handling for the Property Sector

Property Management Answering Service and Online Appointment Booking

CallChimps provides market-leading call handling services for property management, estate agents, letting agents or any other type of business within the property sector.

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CallChimps has provided call handling and appointment scheduling for the property sector since we started. In fact, our directors have built and sold property management and real estate businesses before they created CallChimps. This is an industry we know inside out.

We know that a missed call, or challenges with scheduling an appointment, can result in loss of business. Every call is important. Every meeting is important. Don’t lose out to competitors because your lines are engaged, or your calendar isn’t up to date.

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180 min call time included - £0.37 per min thereafter

Starts at

£89Free for 1 month

Then, starts at £89/month

Free Up Your Time for Business Growth

CallChimps frees up property agents and others within the real estate industry to focus on higher value work, whilst we pick up the endless calls from customers, tradespeople, homeowners and prospects. CallChimps can filter these callers and provide you with a summary of key points, so you don’t miss a single thing.

Whether you work in property management or as an estate agent, it can be hard to free up time from daily admin and conversations to focus on business growth.

This is one area a telephone answering service, such as CallChimps, can really help.

Our approach to call handling can be thought of as a little like a virtual receptionist - there to deal with day-to-day requests, take messages and schedule appointments when you are free.

A typical property management call may not need a real person to answer common questions, or make note of a specific request.

Parallel call handling enables you to handle more enquiries from potential customers, with lead capture designed to step through important questions and ensure you have exactly what you need to prioritise and follow up with each call. Don't miss a sales opportunity from potential tenants or buyers because your lines are busy!

CallChimps ensures you give a highly professional appearance on that first call, answered within 3 rings and giving a cheerful greeting with your business name, as well as handling subsequent maintenance calls with a similarly professional tone and efficient manner.

Listen To CallChimps in Action

As an estate agent, every call you receive is potentially worth thousands of pounds. Money spent on marketing is wasted money if prospects can’t reach you.

Listen to a sample of CallChimps in action to hear how it could transform your business.

Appointment Scheduling for Property Management Companies and Estate Agents

CallChimps provides much more than just a call answering service from virtual receptionists both in and outside of business hours. Our appointment scheduling service for estate agents and property managers means that you no longer have to juggle calendars and phone, we can book service requests and business meetings in when your calendar shows you are free.

In larger organisations, with multiple agents, each property manager shares their calendar, or CallChimps integrates with your CRM system, to book appointments into each calendar as needed. These appointments can be allocated based on a round-robin approach, or by specific rules relating to location, skills, property type or any other criteria that can be identified on a call.

Appointment booking for real estate and property management

For busy individuals working in property, it's incredibly useful if a call handling service can stretch beyond just an answering the phone. Customers will also welcome this flexibility - rather than just answering questions and message taking, setting appointments as well as sharing calendar invites and timely reminders provides significant extra valuable.

In cases where a specific amount of time needs to be left between appointments, CallChimps can be configured to never book appointments back-to-back, always allowing sufficient travel and/or preparation time.

After Hours Answering Service

As every property manager knows, there is an implicit expectation for property management call answering to extend beyond typical property management office hours.

The property management process requires busy property managers to be available to answer customer service calls and other requests throughout the day, and outside these hours it is often expected that professional property management agencies will arrange call handling to receive incoming calls and take detailed messages, which can be acted on the following day.

CallChimps provides the ideal service for any property management business to answer calls outside of business hours, going beyond simple message taking to answer questions about the business and even book in meetings. Ideally, a property management answering service needs to answer phone calls 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. CallChimps does this, and can scale to handle a virtually unlimited number of parallel calls, summarising each and delivering this summary and task list by email, text or WhatsApp after each call.

Real Estate Answering Service

Answering service needs in the real estate industry are somewhat different to those for property management. Real estate answering services are more likely to need to answer calls from prospective buyers and sellers. This is fundamentally different to a management answering service - no need to deal tenant inquiries or other day-to-day needs, or drill down into the specifics of a particular maintenance request.

With the emphasis on new business, real estate agents tend to prefer experienced call handlers, rather than generic call center services. Therefor virtual receptionists providing a real estate answering service need to go beyond simply answering calls to being able to answer queries and ask questions relating to the application process, enabling real estate professionals to follow up with all the pertinent information to hand.

CallChimps goes way beyond standard real estate answering services, with the ability to answer a wide range of questions about the business, in a professional and conversational manner (without the terrible pauses associated with synthetic call handlers of yesteryear), as well as asking questions of the caller to ensure specific details are captured before the call is summarised and this summary, task list, call transcript and link to call recording are sent to the real estate agent for follow up.

Furthermore, call transcripts and associated documents are all searchable via a secure dashboard, so you never lose track of the conversation - as well as having the ability to filter, analyse and report from all of the call data, to produce unprecedented insights from the real estate answering service.

Real estate call handling and automation

How Property Managers Can Improve Customer Service

As every property manager knows, customer satisfaction and a friendly service is good for business. For this reason, many property managers employ a virtual receptionist, or call center services (for larger businesses) to handle incoming calls and avoid any missed calls.

Tenant calls may be emergency maintenance requests and other emergency calls, which need handling urgently to improve tenant satisfaction. When possible, call handling should be able to transfer calls to the right person at the right time, providing live support and enhancing customer service.

For this reason, the property management answering service of choice is normally a live answering service, from as big an answering team as possible, ensuring maximum coverage and timely action for all inbound phone traffic.

However, these are costly solutions. Live answering services and large call handling teams come at a steep price. There is another way to ensure great service - using the latest AI technology to replicate and extend these call handling abilities.

CallChimps can answer 100% of your inbound calls within 3 rings, answer questions about your business, capture detailed messages and summarise these (even producing a task list) which is all then sent via email, text or WhatsApp to a contact within your business. For more complex businesses, specific callers can be transferred and appointments booked with specific agents, according to various business rules, ensuring maximum customer satisfaction day after day.

How to Evaluate Property Management Answering Services

So, there's no question as to whether property managers and property management companies would benefit from an answering service to avoid missing calls. But the challenge is how to determine which property management answering service is best for your business.

Many providers will emphasise the value of a dedicated receptionist or PA who is familiar with the business, but the reality is now that AI can pull information from knowledge bases, websites and other content to answer queries in a knowledgeable and professional manner. In fact, technology-based solutions, such as CallChimps, can provide customized live support with far greater accuracy and depth than an outsourced receptionist who has been trained on your business. CallChimps never has a bad day, never calls in sick and never needs retraining (outsourced receptionists aren't guaranteed to stay in the same role forever).

A more pertinent question is whether the business has the scalability to cope with the volume of demand from day-to-day calls, such as tenants in apartment complexes and other accommodation, as well as tradespeople and other service providers. Typically, calls tend to come in peaks and troughs, so ask the question about how many parallel calls can be handled with the level of professionalism and personalisation you expect.

Evaluating call centres for real estate-1

Depending on your business needs, you may also want to report on calls - such as sentiment analysis, length, time of day, week or year and any number of other variables. Look for an answering service which provides digitised call transcripts and call data, so you can extract insight from this for competitive advantage and business growth.

Online reviews are increasingly important to businesses today. Look for call handling that can automatically follow up with your happiest customers (based on call sentiment analysis) and request that they leave an online review.

In additional to answering the phone, you may also have requirements for your call handlers to schedule in meetings. Look into how each provider works with shared calendars and even CRM systems to ensure they are able to reliably book meetings in a way that doesn't risk overlap or clashing in these systems, and takes travel time, holiday and other factors into account too.

The Difference Between Real People and AI as an Answering Service

When evaluating the options for a property management or estate agent answering service, you will undoubtedly need to weigh up the differences between services delivered by people and those delivered by technology.

In the past, it's likely that most of us have encountered the horrors of IVR systems which reel off a prerecorded message and ask you to "press 1 for..." or similar. Or, more painful still, systems which ask you to say "yes" or "no" or provide other details and then fail to understand your accent or just plain English! Thankfully, these are considered outdated technology now, with leaps forward in AI speech recognition and synthesis (e.g. ChatGPT's most recent voice recognition and speech synthesis capabilities).

Answering questions no longer needs a UK-based live person on the call, but can be done just as well (and sometimes better) by the latest AI technology. Property managers and estate agents can fine-tune answering service responses to questions by providing links to the business website, FAQs and other documentation. This helps the AI deeply understand the property businesses and provide answers to each caller's questions immediately.

Furthermore, AI-driven call agents can conduct rigorous lead capture (returning to any unanswered questions in different ways), as well as answering the phone at any time of the day or night, 7 days a week, 365 days per year.

One common criticism of AI vs. human call handling stems from the fact that people are ‘chattier’ and engaging, but when you are paying for something by the minute, sometimes you want a friendly but direct approach to cut down on call times. And for every positive and chatty human receptionist, it's worth considering the flip side - not everyone can have a good day every day. It just takes a quick Google to find stories of dissatisfied employees in these roles and the negative impact that can have on call quality.

AI never has a bad day, is never off sick and scales to handle thousands of callers in parallel with the same quality of phone manner.

How to Get Started with CallChimps Property Management Answering Services

Setting up CallChimps to provide your business with a property management answering service really is as simple as following these three steps.

Sign up for our telephone answering service here, telling us a little bit about your business and whether you would like a mobile or landline number to use.
Select which CallChimps tier you would like for your property management answering service - our first two tiers can be set up through the online sign-up process entirely, but the higher two tiers require a callback to ensure we have all the specifics we need.
Go live on the same day, feel free to test it out by calling your new number (the first 30 minutes at least are free) and get in touch if anything isn't 100% as you'd like it.

Try our Pro plan for free!

Find out why customers prefer our Pro plan, with a risk-free 30-day free trial.
Cancel or downgrade to our Business (free) plan at any time.

24/7/365 Call Handling
60 min of call time included
Personalised greeting
Answers questions about your business
Call transcripts and summaries sent to your email and/or phone
Unlimited parallel calls: 100% answered within 3 rings

See all plans here

CallChimps Pro

60 min call time included - £0.37 per min thereafter

Starts at

£29Free for 1 month

Then, starts at £29/month

FAQ

Don’t Sit There Scratching Your Head...

We get asked a lot of questions, so here are answers to some of the most common ones.

Is CallChimps right for larger organisations?

Whether your business is large or small, CallChimps has a solution for you. While CallChimps helps many small teams and new businesses, it's equally adept at serving larger organisations.

As a cutting-edge virtual receptionist and answering service, CallChimps offers scalable solutions that can handle a high volume of incoming calls efficiently. Its advanced telephone answering service adapts seamlessly to the complex needs of bigger companies, ensuring that every caller receives prompt, professional attention.

Whether you're a growing startup or an established corporation, CallChimps' flexible business solutions can streamline your communication processes, freeing up your in-house staff to focus on core tasks while maintaining excellent customer service standards.

What is the difference between a telephone answering service and a virtual office?

While both offer valuable support for businesses, a telephone answering service and a virtual office have distinct differences. A telephone answering service, like CallChimps, primarily focuses on handling calls, providing a virtual receptionist to answer your calls, take messages, and manage customer inquiries. It's an excellent solution for businesses needing professional call answering and message management all on one call.

On the other hand, a virtual office offers a broader range of services. In addition to telephone answering, it typically provides a physical business address, mail handling, and sometimes meeting room access. This comprehensive package allows a company to establish a professional presence without the cost of a traditional office space.

Both services can use your company name when answering calls, maintaining a consistent brand image. However, the virtual office goes a step further by offering a physical address for your business correspondence.

Ultimately, while a telephone answering service concentrates on managing your calls and messages, a virtual office provides a more complete package of business support services. The choice between the two depends on your specific needs and how you want to present your company to clients and partners.

Does CallChimps replace my telephone team?

The short answer is a telephone answering service does not mean you need to replace your in-house team. CallChimps works as a seamless extension of your existing business to handle incoming calls.

Reserve your real people for higher value calls and customer services. The call handling service from CallChimps can manage calls when your agents are stretched, or out of office hours, providing a reliable system to handle enquiries and ensure messages reach the appropriate person within the business in a timely manner. - no more missed calls!

How Does an AI Answering Service Compare to a Call Centre?

An AI answering service like CallChimps represents a modern evolution in handling service for businesses, offering distinct advantages over traditional call centres. While both provide telephone answering capabilities, AI services excel in efficiency and scalability, making them particularly attractive for small businesses and larger companies alike.

Unlike a call centre, an AI-powered telephone answering service operates 24/7 without human limitations, consistently providing high-quality call answering and message taking. It can seamlessly handle fluctuating call volumes without the need for additional staffing, a common challenge for traditional call centres.

AI services also offer more personalised interactions. They can be programmed with your company name and specific telephone answering protocols, ensuring each call is handled according to your business needs. This level of customisation extends to how calls are routed and messages are delivered, often surpassing the capabilities of a typical call centre.

Moreover, AI answering services usually provide a dedicated telephone number for your company, enhancing your professional image. They can efficiently manage a wide range of services beyond basic call handling, including appointment scheduling and customer inquiries, often more cost-effectively than traditional call centres.

In essence, while both options offer valuable support, an AI answering service provides a more flexible, efficient, and often more economical solution for modern businesses seeking professional telephone management services.