A qualified real estate lead costs ₹500–2,000 in an Indian metro. The money is not in the calling — it is in not spending a sales team's Saturday on someone whose budget is half the entry price.
Two facts shape the whole problem. Portal leads from 99acres, MagicBricks and Housing convert to site visits at 15–25% with good follow-up. And builders who call back inside 60 seconds book three to five times more visits than teams that call the next day. A human team cannot hold a 60-second response time across evenings, weekends and campaign spikes. That is the gap.
What the call establishes
Four things, in roughly 90 seconds, and then a grade:
- Budget band — the single most useful field, and the one that decides whether anything else matters.
- Configuration — 2BHK, 3BHK, plot, commercial.
- Possession timeline — ready to move, or a buyer who is fine waiting two years. These are different customers for the same project.
- Loan requirement — which determines whether the next conversation involves a banking partner.
In, per call: lead name, project name, enquiry source, city.
Out, per call: budget_band, configuration, possession_timeline,
loan_required, site_visit_slot, lead_grade.
The sales team then works a graded list. That is the entire economic argument: the call is cheap and the Saturday is not.
Why RERA makes this easier to automate than to delegate
This is the part that gets left out of the pitch, and it is the strongest reason to use a scripted agent here.
Marketing a registered project is regulated speech. Every claim must be truthful and verifiable against the registration. The registration number has to be disclosable on request. Any area quoted to a buyer must be carpet area, not super built-up.
So the template is built to under-claim by construction. It:
- quotes a starting price and never a final one;
- repeats the registered possession date and never an earlier one;
- refuses to state any area at all;
- will not discuss appreciation, rental yield or resale value;
- never uses a scarcity script — "only two units left", "prices go up Monday".
Every one of those is a sentence a keen human closer says without thinking, and every one is a potential complaint to the authority. The scarcity line is banned for a second reason too: it is usually false, and coming from an agent it would be a fabrication the software invented rather than a claim someone gave it.
Here is the part worth sitting with. A voice agent that says these things says them identically on ten thousand calls, with a recording of each. That cuts both ways, and it is exactly why the script matters more than the model. Get it right once and it is right ten thousand times; get it wrong once and you have ten thousand recorded instances of the same violation.
What it cannot do, and says so
There is no calendar on this template, so it cannot book a slot. It captures when the buyer would like to come and says the sales team will confirm.
That honesty is a design decision, not a limitation we forgot to remove. An agent that says "you're booked for Saturday at 11" when nothing was booked produces a buyer who drives to a locked site office — which costs more goodwill than the call ever created. If you want real booking, connect a calendar as a tool and the agent can commit to something that exists.
The compliance treatment
This call is promotional, and that is not a close call.
Filling in a portal form is consent to be contacted. It does not turn a sales call into a service call — this is marketing to someone who is not yet a customer. The consent makes the call permissible; it does not reclassify it.
So it takes the strictest treatment: a 140-series number, DLT registration, a do-not-call scrub, and the calling window enforced before the call is placed. Tone (usetone.ai) runs those as a pre-dial gate that fails closed — a check that errors blocks the call rather than logging a warning and dialling anyway, because "we skipped a mandatory check" must never read as a pass.
One practical consequence of the classification: a promotional agent will not dial outside the calling window, and a deferred call is not an error anywhere obvious. If your campaign sits at zero dialled in the evening, the window is the first thing to check — it looks exactly like a dialer that never woke up.
What it costs
₹6 per minute on Tone, billed per second, decomposing as agent ₹3.50 + telephony ₹0.50 + platform ₹2.00. A 90-second qualification call is about ₹9.
Against ₹500–2,000 of acquisition cost per lead, the call is a rounding error. The thing it is actually competing with is the alternative use of the sales team's time.
Building it
The real estate qualification agent ships as a template with the prompt, the RERA constraints, the input variables and the graded outputs already written. Point it at your enquiry webhook so a lead triggers a call in seconds rather than in batches — the 60-second response time is most of the value, and a nightly batch throws it away.
Agents covers configuring one, and outbound calls has the request shape for placing the call when the enquiry lands.