Bot type
The buyer hears about the listing before the portal does
A Telegram property bot captures what a buyer is looking for, alerts them when a matching listing appears, and hands warm enquiries to an agent with the search criteria attached. It gets you to a buyer faster than a portal refresh. It does not replace portal listings, and it will not create inventory.
Real estate listing bots: price, timeline and limits
- Fixed price
- $4,600 USD
- Delivery
- 21 calendar days from kickoff
- Media group
- 10 items per message
- RERA permit
- Required on every Dubai property advertisement
- Broadcast ceiling
- ~30 messages/second bot-wide
- Photo handling
- Telegram compresses photos; send as documents to preserve detail
As of 2025-10-01, Telegram Bot API 13.4
The problem this solves
Dubai brokerage is a speed business at the top end and a filtering business everywhere else. A well-priced two-bedroom in a sought-after tower is gone in days, and the agent who reaches the right buyer within the hour wins it. Meanwhile the same agent is fielding enquiries from people who want three bedrooms for a one-bedroom budget, and cannot tell the two apart until they have spent twenty minutes on each.
Portals solve discovery and nothing else. They tell a buyer what is listed today; they do not remember that this particular buyer wants a specific view in a specific tower under a specific price, and they certainly do not message them the moment it appears. That memory is what a brokerage actually owns, and most brokerages keep it in an agent's head or in a WhatsApp thread they will never search again.
Holding the criteria structurally, and matching new inventory against it automatically, changes which listings you win. It also changes what an agent's first conversation looks like — instead of establishing requirements from scratch, they open with a property that already fits. The build is worth doing when you have consistent new inventory and enough registered demand for matching to fire regularly. Below that it is a well-designed empty room.
How the build runs
The buyer states criteria once, in a short structured flow
Area, budget range, bedrooms, ready or off-plan. Six questions with buttons, not a form. The point is to capture something matchable, not to interrogate.
inline-keyboardNew listings are matched as they are added
The moment an agent adds inventory, it is checked against every registered buyer. The buyers who fit hear within seconds, which is the whole competitive point of the build.
webhookThe alert carries enough to decide on
Images, price, size, the tower, and the permit number where advertising rules require it. A teaser that forces a call to learn the price wastes the speed advantage you just built.
broadcastInterest routes to an agent with context attached
The agent receives the buyer, the listing, and the criteria that matched them. The first call starts from a shared understanding rather than from the beginning.
forum-topicsAgents manage inventory from their phone
Adding a listing, marking it under offer, dropping the price — all from the chat, because agents are not at a desk and a system that requires one does not get updated.
commandsStale criteria are refreshed rather than left to rot
A buyer who has not engaged in two months is asked whether they are still looking. Alerting people who bought six weeks ago is how a matching bot earns itself a mute.
broadcast
What Telegram will and will not let you do
A media group in Telegram is limited to 10 items per message.
A listing with thirty photographs cannot be sent as one album. Alerts carry a selected handful with the rest behind a link, which is better for the recipient anyway.
A bot may send roughly 30 messages per second overall.
A new listing matching four hundred registered buyers takes about fourteen seconds to reach all of them. Not an issue in practice, but it means "instant" is approximate and simultaneous is not achievable.
Dubai advertising rules require a RERA permit number on property advertisements.
The permit field is mandatory in the listing record and the bot refuses to send an alert without it. Enforcing it at the data layer is what keeps a busy agent from creating a compliance problem at speed.
A bot cannot message a buyer who has not started a conversation with it.
Existing buyer lists cannot be imported and alerted. Registration is a real acquisition step, and the build plan has to include how buyers are driven into the bot in the first place.
Telegram compresses images sent as photos.
Property photography loses noticeable quality. Alerts use compressed images for speed and link to full-resolution originals, because a compressed marketing shot undersells the asset.
When not to build this
- Your inventory turns over slowly. Matching fires rarely, buyers forget the bot exists, and the alerts that do arrive feel random.
- Your listings live only on a portal you do not control. Without a feed you can read, matching has nothing to match against.
- Your agents will not update listing status. A bot that alerts buyers to a property that went under offer last week damages more trust than it builds.
- You are a single agent with under twenty active listings. You can hold the criteria in your head and will do it better.
What it runs on
| Component | Version | Why |
|---|---|---|
| grammY | 1.45 | Bot framework, with separate buyer and agent conversation trees. |
| Cloudflare Workers | current | Runtime, with matching triggered on listing write. |
| Cloudflare D1 | current | Listings, buyer criteria, match history and alert suppression. |
| Cloudflare R2 | current | Full-resolution listing images behind the compressed alert. |
| TypeScript | 5.9 | Strict mode, with the permit field required by the type rather than by discipline. |
Questions people ask before committing
Does this replace Property Finder and Bayut?
No, and it should not try. Portals are where buyers discover you. This is where buyers you have already met hear about inventory first, which is a different and complementary job.
How does the permit number requirement work?
It is a required field on the listing record, and the bot will not send an alert for a listing without one. Enforcing it in the data model rather than in a checklist is what stops a rushed agent creating an advertising compliance issue.
Can it pull listings from our portal feed instead of manual entry?
Where the portal provides a feed you have access to, yes, and that is the better arrangement because it keeps one source of truth. Where it does not, agents add listings from the chat, which takes about thirty seconds.
How do buyers find the bot to begin with?
A QR code on signage, a link in your portal listings where permitted, and agents sending it directly after a viewing. Telegram does not allow messaging people who have not started a conversation, so acquisition is a real part of the plan rather than an afterthought.
What stops it becoming spam?
Matching is strict by default and buyers set their own alert frequency. A bot that alerts on everything near a buyer's criteria gets muted within a week, and a muted bot is indistinguishable from no bot.
Which languages should we run?
English, Arabic and Russian cover the great majority of the Dubai buyer market. Language is per buyer, so the same listing alert renders differently for different recipients without duplicating the listing.