Never lose a lead with the top real estate answering service
Automatically capture new leads and answer common questions from your customers 24/7 with Sona, OpenPhone’s AI agent. Share numbers as a team, sync Sona calls with your CRM, and handle your phone communications effortlessly.
Trusted by over 60,000 businesses
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Capture every opportunity, without the phone fatigue
Sona greets callers, answers questions, and captures messages for your team, all on its own when you’re unavailable during or after working hours. Give your team a better work-life balance without sacrificing your growth.
Why Sona is a better virtual receptionist for realtors
Curious how Sona is a better option for realtors? Here are four reasons why it outperforms traditional live answering services:
1. Direct business phone integration
OpenPhone is a flexible and easy-to-use phone system for growing businesses. Agents and brokers make calls, send texts, and stay in sync with our business phone platform. Real estate teams love OpenPhone because it helps them move fast and stay organized.
Sona is directly integrated into OpenPhone. Add Sona to your existing call flows, customize how it answers customer questions and takes messages, and review its performance in your OpenPhone workspace. Sona’s call summaries and transcriptions appear in your inbox right after a call ends.
With traditional call answering services, you’re forced to use another app to track their conversations, and your team has to spend additional time and effort mapping these calls to your contacts. When your lead interest and property availability are constantly evolving, trying to figure out which lead wants to reschedule their appointment and which one is ready to buy can quickly get confusing.
Keep your answering service in your business phone, not outside of it, with Sona.
2. More cost-effective
Sona saves you thousands of dollars every month. Most real estate phone answering services cost 4x-7x more than Sona. These services charge high monthly plans with a limited number of call minutes. Once you exceed that limit, they charge you for every minute they take your calls. It’s a pricing model that quickly adds up, especially when you’re growing fast.
Sona charges a flat fee for the first 50 AI phone calls it handles every month. After that, it charges a fixed per-call fee instead of per-minute fees. Calls that run for less than 15 seconds aren’t billed to you.
Get the most value out of your AI answering service with Sona.
3. Consistent service
What if your virtual receptionist service could answer client questions accurately all the time, at any time of day? Or if it could ask your clients basic qualification questions when they express interest in a property? Sona can accomplish both of these tasks for you in minutes.
Train Sona on your company’s policies and documentation in minutes. As an AI receptionist, it can quickly learn about your business and share the right information with callers. Test Sona and put it through its paces before it handles calls for you. Provide custom instructions to Sona so that it asks the follow-up questions that align with your business needs.
With a phone answering service, you can never fully control how live receptionists represent your business. It takes weeks to train and onboard these services on your business. Even after all that training, there’s room for error. Live answering services also face a lot of staff turnover, which can affect how they represent your business. AI voice agents like Sona, on the other hand, always show up for work and deliver the same quality of service every time.
4. Works for multiple regions
If you operate in multiple markets or manage multiple properties, OpenPhone is right for you. You can add multiple local numbers with specific area codes and a common toll-free support number for all your regions.
Agents on your team don’t have to share their personal numbers with clients anymore. Assign dedicated numbers to each agent and share numbers so that you can split responsibility for incoming leads. You can also control who has access to a shared number at any time in your business phone settings.
Sona works for multiple numbers as well. Add Sona to any of your individual or shared numbers and train it on custom documentation related to different regions. For example, if you operate in New York and New Jersey, you can add Sona to your New York and New Jersey numbers and share information about available properties in each region.
How Sona works
Train Sona in minutes. Assign Sona to your calls in seconds.
Drag and drop Sona into your call flows
Don't lose out on potential leads after hours. Add Sona into your existing call flows alongside OpenPhone’s other call routing features, like ring order, phone menus, and call forwarding.
Share your policies, FAQs, and more
Save time for your real estate agents so that they can focus on getting deals through. Sona can answer basic customer questions like general buyer eligibility, featured properties, and weekend business hours. Give Sona your key policies and answers to FAQs so it can give the right information to your callers.
Provide instructions for follow-ups
Take detailed messages with Sona. It can ask follow-up questions based on specific keywords in a conversation. For example, if a potential lead is interested in an upcoming viewing, Sona can ask them your standard intake questions to help you qualify them for other properties in your portfolio.
Sync Sona's calls with CRM integrations
Sona’s call summaries, transcripts, and messages are available in your OpenPhone inbox when a call ends. Sync Sona’s calls with your CRM automatically — use our integrations with HubSpot and Salesforce or build your own integration using Zapier, Make, or the OpenPhone API.
Feature comparison
See how Sona compares to traditional call answering services.
Features
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Sona
Traditional answering services
Starting price per month
$49 for 50 calls, $0.99 per call for additional calls
~5x-7x the cost of Sona
Setup time
Instant
2-4 weeks
Brand voice and tone
Consistent
Highly variable
Monitoring
100% in OpenPhone
Custom solution or daily email summary
Integrations
HubSpot, Salesforce, Zapier, Make, Jobber, and more
Limited integration options
How to set up Sona in four steps
It only takes four steps to get started with Sona:
- Start with a free trial.
- Try our free trial features, including calls and recordings.
- Configure your Sona settings and test Sona in OpenPhone’s call flow builder.
- Once you’ve confirmed it’s a good fit, activate your OpenPhone account and get the Sona add-on.
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“With Sona, I never worry about missing a call again. It’s like having a smart, reliable assistant who always picks up. It’s professional, friendly, and on it 24/7.”
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“Sona has my back. Even when I miss a call, I know it’s handled—and handled well. Total game changer.”
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“Sona has transformed the way I handle my calls. It’s like having a trusted partner who ensures I never miss an opportunity, no matter how busy I get.”
"OpenPhone is definitely saving us time We have multiple people on the office line who can answer at any time. We love the fact that we can set our schedules and we don’t have to remember to put our phones on out-of-office every day. I haven’t found that on any other provider."
Why real estate professionals love OpenPhone
See why thousands of real estate agencies, including Keller Williams and Hubbard Realty Group, choose OpenPhone as their business phone provider.
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Get phone numbers for all your real estate agents
Give every agent their own phone number with OpenPhone. Choose between local US or Canadian numbers and North American toll-free numbers. Local numbers help you build trust with clients looking to buy property in specific regions. Toll-free numbers give your clients a dedicated avenue for customer support.
All OpenPhone plans include a phone number for every user who joins your workspace. Your team members can have individual numbers, or you can share numbers and give access to everyone at your company. Additional numbers cost just $5 per number per month.
Work more efficiently as a team
Stay in sync with your colleagues using OpenPhone. Split responsibility for incoming calls and text messages from potential clients with shared numbers. View all your client interactions — phone calls, texts, voicemails, call recordings, and more — in one place with shared inboxes.
Collaborate on a client response in real time or assign follow-up tasks to your teammates with internal threads. See whether a colleague is caught up on a conversation or a call recording with inbox viewers — no additional follow-up required.
Call handling made easy
Manage your inbound call volume smoothly in OpenPhone. Direct incoming calls based on your preferences with custom call flows. Use our call flow builder to create flows in seconds.
Select how your agents want to receive calls — at the same time or in custom batches — with ring order. Give clients self-serve navigation options with phone menus. Direct emergency phone calls to a secondary number with our call forwarding options.
Need to transfer client calls to a colleague? Warm call transfers help you share the right amount of context with your team when you transfer live calls.
Put appointment scheduling on autopilot
Always send the right text at the right time and elevate your customer experience with OpenPhone. Reply to clients automatically when you’re busy or unavailable with SMS auto-replies. Schedule texts to your customers at a convenient time for them with scheduled messages. Breeze through your inbox by using pre-written text templates (or snippets) to reply to your most common real estate and property management questions.
Automate text messaging to your clients for your most common tasks, like sending open house reminders to help prevent no-shows, with our Zapier and Make integrations. Connect OpenPhone to a scheduling app like Calendly and put your appointment scheduling on autopilot.
Automate repetitive administrative tasks
Give back time to your agents so they can focus on closing deals.
Automatically log calls and texts in your CRM with our third-party integrations. Offer automatic call recording so you can capture all your client information, then summarize calls in minutes with AI-powered call summaries. And if you want to see what a client told you, review the full AI call transcript in your inbox.
Monitor your team’s performance quickly
Get the business and performance insights you need with OpenPhone.
View how your team is performing in real time with call views. Get a sense of their historical performance daily, monthly, and quarterly with call analytics. Use AI to analyze your phone calls and see what clients are sharing with you over time with AI call tags.
Call and text from anywhere
Whether you’re in the office, at an open house, or on the road, OpenPhone travels with you.
Give your team the ability to use their preferred device to communicate with clients. OpenPhone is available on Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, and on the web. All your agents need is an internet connection to get going.
Find out how much you’re investing in your business phone solution upfront on our pricing page.
Frequently asked questions
Can’t find the answer here? Check out our Resource Center.
An answering service is a telephone system that processes incoming calls on behalf of an individual or a business. Answering services can function in-house within a company’s existing tools, like an AI virtual receptionist, or it can be outsourced externally to a third-party provider. Many answering services have three primary functions: reducing missed calls, answering common questions, and taking detailed messages.
Bonus: Find out more about the best AI phone answering services.
If you’re interested in a real estate answering service, here are a few benefits to keep in mind:
- Lead capture: With 24/7 availability, answering services ensure you never lose a lead. Provide service for new clients without burdening your team after business hours. You can also qualify leads with a quick automated client intake as well, similar to dedicated sales AI tools.
- Eliminate missed calls: Answer every call that comes your way. No need to play phone tag with your clients.
- Take detailed messages: Clients often tune out when they’re directed to voicemail. They either hang up or leave a half-baked message. Answering services offer an authentic and interactive way of gathering client requests.
Real estate answering services start at $79 a month with 50 minutes included in their plans, after which fees range from $1.89 to $4.50 per minute. Since every real estate company has different call volumes, it’s hard to say what the average cost can be.
On the other hand, Sona costs $49 per month for 50 calls; additional calls are $0.99 each. With per-call instead of per-minute billing, you might get a more accurate estimate of your monthly spend when you use Sona. Calls less than 15 seconds are excluded, so you don’t have to worry about spam calls inflating your monthly bill.
A call center is a full-service department that handles customer service requests, usually for large enterprise companies. An answering service is a more lightweight function that primarily answers questions and takes messages on behalf of businesses. Call centers are often outsourced to third parties while answering services are usually managed in-house.
In our admittedly biased opinion, Sona is the best real estate answering service. Instantly train Sona on your company’s policies and documentation, add it to your call flows in seconds, and provide custom instructions so that it offers a stellar experience to your clients. Sona is integrated with your business phone, so you don’t need to spend additional time figuring out what clients shared with you during your after-hours calls.
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