How to add dynamic galleries for a property listing in real estate bots.

Managing bot content for real estate agents might be daunting, especially when the list of available properties continually updates. Manage property listings from Google Sheets and generate dynamic galleries based on a visitor’s search criteria in a chatbot seems to be an ideal solution to save time and effort for realtors.

To make this work, you’ll need a Botsheets account, a ManyChat template and a Google Sheets template (includes in the ManyChat template).

P.S. The instructions on Botsheets set up, you’ll find inside the ManyChat template as well. Let’s get started…

Generate a gallery of results.

Once the template is installed and Botsheets is set up, your bot is ready to go however you’ll want to adapt the bot for personal needs. In the main flow, you can see three main actions:

• Property listing
• Search properties
• Multi-step search

Property listing flow generates a gallery from the ‘Properties’ worksheet and shows the list of all the properties available. All you need is to add your data into the columns and it’ll be immediately updated in your ManyChat bot.

Search properties flow searches the keyword column (Column L) of the ‘Properties’ worksheet using a custom user field value taken from the user’s message.

Multi-step search flow searches in the ‘Properties’ worksheet with advanced methods using 2 or 3 criteria provided by users and generate a gallery of search results.

Example: if a user is looking for an apartment with 2 or more bedrooms and also need a parking space, the bot will show only apartments that match these criteria otherwise reply with a message of no success in search.

In this template, the following criteria are set up:

Single-family/House -> How many bedrooms -> Swimming pool
Condo/Apartment -> How many bedrooms -> Parking
Office -> Space size -> Parking
Land/Plot -> Warehouse
Parking -> How many parking spaces

If you need to customize search criteria, refer to the Multi-step search flow and columns E, F, J, H, I and J in the ‘Properties’ worksheet.

Show details of each property.

If you want to show more information about each property type, e.g. add a property description, show more photos, etc., we’ve got you covered.

We’ll need the following columns in the ‘Properties’ worksheet:

addButton2 - set it to the ‘flow’ so the button will open a new flow.
button2Caption - give your button a name.
button2Target - find the flow ‘Property details’, copy the target after files/ and paste it in the worksheet.

button2Action - set it to the set_field_value. When clicking a button under a specific card, the bot will save the value to the ‘property_details’ custom field.
button2ActionName - this is the name of a custom field. It must be exactly the same as in your ManyChat otherwise it won’t be working properly.
button2ActionValue - these are the actual values for these custom fields.

Note: the bot compares these values and refers to column C in the ‘Property details’ worksheet.

So if the ‘button2ActionValue’ in the ‘Properties’ worksheets is ‘3158 Steeplechase, KY’,

the value in the ‘subtitle’ (column C) in the ‘Property details’ worksheet must be exactly the same. In that case, the bot will show photos and description added to columns B and D (‘title’ and ‘image’).

Here’s how you can use Botsheets to show a gallery of photos for each property type in your ManyChat bot. Enjoy and Thanks!

About the author

Eugene Smirnov is the Head of Templates Production at Botmakers with 3 years of experience in the business and Customer Success at https://driverjobs4u.com/ and https://kalejobs.com/.

Contributor at Chatbots Magazine, Chatbots Life, Chatbot Tutorials chatbot media.

Eugene eventually reads every response on Medium. You can chat him up on LinkedIn or email at eugene@botmakers.net if you have any related questions.