Comment "PRICE" and I'll Send It: Instagram DM Automation for Real Estate (2026)

IN THIS ARTICLE

1. 01Why property is unusually well suited to this
2. 02The setup, in the order that works
3. 03What to automate, and what to never automate
4. 04The enquiry that is worth more than the listing
5. 05The numbers to watch, and the one Instagram will not give you

Property is one of the few categories where a single Instagram comment can be worth a five-figure fee, and it is also one of the categories where those comments are most reliably wasted. A walkthrough reel travels, the comments fill with "price?", "is it still available?", "service charge?", and the agent answers a handful by thumb over the following days. The rest cool off. Nobody did anything wrong. There is simply no version of manual replying that keeps up with a reel that works.

The fix the market has settled on is the keyword hand-off: you say "comment PRICE and I will send the full details", and the DM goes out automatically within seconds. It works because it matches how property enquiries actually behave. The comment is public and cheap for the viewer. The detail, the floor plan, the service charge, the chain status, is private and belongs in a DM. This guide covers the setup that gets used daily, the qualifying questions worth automating, and the line between automation that is fine and automation that puts an account at risk.

Why property is unusually well suited to this

• The question is predictable. Price, availability, service charge, square footage, chain status, parking, viewing times. A short list covers most of the comment section, which means an automation can genuinely answer rather than deflect.
• The answer is a document. A listing link, a floor plan, a brochure. That is a natural DM payload rather than a conversation you have to hold.
• The intent gradient is steep. "Nice kitchen" and "is it chain-free?" are not the same person. One is engagement, the other is a viewing.
• Speed decides who wins. Enquiries convert to the agent who answers first and qualifies cleanest, and property buyers are usually contacting more than one listing.

The setup, in the order that works

1. 1Pick one obvious keyword per listing. PRICE, TOUR, INFO or VIEWING. Single word, no punctuation, no phrase. Long or unusual triggers produce misspellings the automation cannot match, and the reply rate falls for reasons that look like a broken tool.
2. 2Add the misspellings anyway. Real comment sections contain "pirce", "prcie" and "price?" with three question marks. Keyword variants cost nothing and recover DMs you would otherwise never send.
3. 3Write the first DM as the whole answer. Price, address, service charge, floor plan link. Do not send a "hey, checking you are human" hoop first. Every extra step loses people who were ready.
4. 4Ask one qualifying question at the end. "Are you looking to move in the next three months, or keeping an eye on the area?" One question, answerable in four words, and it sorts your inbox for you.
5. 5Turn on the auto public reply. A short "sent you the details" under the comment tells everyone else scrolling that the account answers, and keeps the thread alive for the algorithm.
6. 6Decide what escalates before you go live. Anything about offers, negotiation, mortgages or a specific viewing time should reach a person with the conversation attached.

What to automate, and what to never automate

Property is a regulated, high-trust purchase, and the automation should behave accordingly. The useful split is between facts you have published and judgements only you can make.

The middle column is where the difference between a DM tool and a platform shows. A flow-based automation dead-ends the moment someone asks "is it chain-free?" because nobody scripted that branch. An AI agent grounded in a knowledge base you loaded with the listing details answers it from your own material, in your tone, at whatever hour the question arrives. On Delyt the AI layer and the case inbox are both Influencer Pro at $15/mo; the automation itself starts at $9/mo.

The enquiry that is worth more than the listing

Agents with an audience get a second kind of message that has nothing to do with the property on screen: developers wanting a paid feature, portals wanting a partnership, other agents wanting a referral. Those arrive by email, usually to an address you check less often than Instagram, and they are the messages most likely to be missed because they look like every other unread email.

This is the argument for putting email in the same queue as the DMs rather than leaving it in a separate app. When a partnership approach and a buyer enquiry both land in one list, categorised by what they are, you stop discovering a four-day-old offer on a Sunday night.

The numbers to watch, and the one Instagram will not give you

View count tells you the reel travelled. It does not tell you whether it produced business. The chain worth watching is comments matched to the keyword, DMs delivered, people who replied to the DM, and enquiries that reached a booking. That last hop is the only one that pays, and native Instagram Insights does not report it: Instagram gives you reach and engagement on the post, not the funnel underneath your automation, and it only retains ninety days of history with no raw export.

Which listing type pulls the most qualified enquiries, whether TOUR outperforms PRICE in your market, and what time of day your buyers are actually awake are all answerable questions, but only if something is recording them. That is what automation insights are for, and it is covered properly in our piece on what Instagram Insights leaves out.