Exclusive: AI chatbot that helps estate agents handle portal leads wins £500,000 backing

A London estate agent has joined a group of investors putting £500,000 into a company developing an artificial intelligence (AI) based chatbot service exclusively for estate agent and developers designed to help them handle portal leads.

Life Ventures, which is the proptech investment arm of London sales and lettings firm Life Residential, has stumped up the cash after its parent company LiFE has trialled Blyng for 3 months (12 weeks).

Called Blyng, Life Residential claims that the chatbot processed 2,000 leads, ‘spoke’ to 800 users on its website and handled 14,000 questions about properties for sale, to let or under management.

The company also claims that it was directly responsible for generating 720 viewings and 50 sales and letting deals during the trial.

There are several AI-based chatbots in the market but Blyng claims to be the first to be designed specifically for the real estate market and be able to ‘speak property’.

It is available via Facebook Messenger, a smartphone Web app and soon WhatsApp. The estate agent is contacted by a potential lead through the portals and the Blyng virtual assistant then engages and qualifies the lead and simplifies the customer journey.

“Testing and using Blyng is the beginning of the future way of doing business,” says Jonathan Werth, Managing Director of LiFE Residential (left).

Blyng has been developed by entrepreneurs Alex Boulenger and Julien Vidal (pictured above) and has the backing of Pi Labs and Ascension Ventures as well as Life Residential.

“Blyng is the first AI chatbot for property negotiators in the UK and has already been trained with a large amount of data, making Blyng smarter every day,” said Vidal.