Oriki Homes: Real Estate Speed-to-Lead Agent: the thinking.
An AI assistant, Joy, who answers a Nigerian property enquiry in under a minute on WhatsApp or by live voice, qualifies the buyer against a tested scoring rubric, and alerts a human the moment a hot lead appears.
The starting point.
What made this worth building.
Leads contacted within five minutes are far more likely to be reached and to qualify than leads contacted after thirty, yet first responses are commonly measured in hours, and nobody answers at 2am, which is exactly when diaspora buyers are awake. Nigerian buyers live on WhatsApp, pay on instalment plans, and worry most about title documents and fraud.
The direction I chose.
The approach taken.
Joy reaches every enquiry on the channel the lead chose: WhatsApp, or live voice on the website. She qualifies one question at a time (land or house, location, budget in naira, outright or payment plan, timeline, Nigeria or diaspora, who else decides) and passes the answers to a deterministic scoring function in n8n. Hot leads trigger an instant Telegram alert to a human; warm leads are offered a site or virtual inspection; cold leads go to nurture. Every step lands in a lead table.
How the pieces connect.
Each stage exists because the one before it cannot be trusted on its own.
- 01Website enquiry (fictional developer, Oriki Homes)
- 02WhatsApp or live voice in under a minute
- 03One-question-at-a-time qualification
- 04Deterministic score and tier in n8n
- 05Signed post-call report
- 06Human alert · inspection · nurture
The decisions behind it.
The constraints I set deliberately, and would defend.
- Score in code, not by model judgement. The same answers always give the same tier, and every score stores its reasons.
- Make WhatsApp the default and never place a phone call without explicit consent.
- Match the WhatsApp conversation to the web enquiry with a reference code in the pre-filled first message, falling back to the phone number.
- Verify every post-call report with an HMAC signature and reject forged or unsigned ones.
- Joy states she is an AI, never takes payment, and never guarantees a title or a return. “Stop contacting me” becomes a do-not-contact flag.
- Treat the public voice agent as untrusted: an allowlist of sites, concurrency and daily caps, and a five-minute limit per conversation.
What has to hold true.
How I would know it works — and how I would know it does not.
- Scoring rubric covered by an 8-case test suite, including Nigerian payment types and hard disqualifiers.
- A real WhatsApp conversation ran end to end: scored hot (97), matched to its web enquiry, signed report verified, Telegram alert delivered.
- A forged and an unsigned post-call report were both rejected on the live workflow; a correctly signed one was accepted.
- A tool call without the shared secret is refused with 401.
- Not yet verified: phone calls and live transfer (needs a paid telephony account), WhatsApp voice calls (Meta requires a verified 1,000-conversation tier, and business-initiated calls to Nigerian numbers are not permitted), and live calendar booking.
Where this stands today.
Stated plainly, with nothing implied.
This project is complete.
Researched the speed-to-lead market, then designed and built the agent, the scoring rubric and its tests, the n8n workflows, the signature verification, the WhatsApp and browser-voice channels, and the Oriki Homes site. Oriki Homes is fictional; property images are AI-generated and no real listings or customer data are used.
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