For a sales or leasing agency the arithmetic is lopsided: one recovered enquiry on a mid-priced sale is worth more than a decade of any plan on this page. So do not choose on the monthly fee. Choose on what happens when six people ring during Saturday open homes and your agents are all standing in someone’s lounge room.
AiDial publishes this comparison and AiDial is one of the options in it. Providers were included because they publish enough to be checked, and rows are ordered by entry price, not by preference. Every figure comes from the provider’s own current public pages, checked on 25 August 2026.
This page is about sales and leasing agencies — buyer and tenant enquiry, appraisal requests, open home questions. Property management is a different job with a different phone problem, and it has its own comparison at best property management answering service. If your calls are mostly maintenance requests and rent questions, read that one instead.
Start with the number that actually matters
Agency commission on a residential sale commonly runs around 2% of the price, varying by state and negotiation. On an $850,000 sale that is roughly $17,000 in gross commission on a single transaction. Every plan compared below costs between $300 and $1,800 a year.
You do not need a conversion model to see the shape of that. If a phone service recovers one additional listing or one additional buyer who would otherwise have rung the next agency on the portal, it has paid for itself many times over. Which means the entire “which plan is cheapest” question — the one every comparison page leads with — is close to irrelevant here.
What is relevant is whether the call is answered at all, and whether the person answering can do anything useful with it. Those are different questions and most providers are strong on the first and weak on the second.
Saturday, 11am. Three open homes running, every agent on site, and the office line rings four times in ten minutes. Where do those four calls go — and how many of them are still there on Monday?
Why real estate breaks the standard answering service
Agency call patterns are unusually hostile to a shared human roster, for four reasons that compound each other.
- The volume is spiky, not steady. Portal listings go live and the phone goes with them. Saturday morning is not a busier version of Tuesday; it is a different order of magnitude.
- Your people are unreachable exactly when the calls come. Transfer-to-agent is the headline feature of most reception plans, and it is worth the least to an agency, because the agent is mid-inspection.
- The caller has a list. A buyer looking at a portal has four comparable listings open. An unanswered call is not deferred, it is redirected to a competitor within about twenty seconds.
- The useful answer is specific. “What’s the price guide”, “is it still available”, “when’s the next open”, “does it allow pets”. A generic operator with a script cannot answer any of those; a message saying someone called about 14 Smith Street is worth a fraction of an answer.
Campaign activity can increase charges under both human and AI plans. AiDial includes a monthly call allowance and bills additional calls at the published rate, so model a launch week as well as an ordinary month. The functional question is which enquiries can be answered and which need an integrated action or staff handover.
Swipe to compare →
| Sales and leasing | Virtual HQ | OfficeHQ | Oracle CMS | Your Phones Covered | AiDial |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Saturday problem | |||||
| Simultaneous calls answered | Queued shared roster | Queued | Queued | Queued | Answered together no queue |
| Cost rises with a busy campaign week | Yes $3.89 to $3.99 per call | Yes per-call plans | Yes per-call plans | Yes “from $1.33 per Call” | Yes, when calls exceed the chosen plan allowance |
| Weekend and after-hours cover | Surcharged $1.00 per call outside 8am–6pm weekdays | “24/7 availability” location not stated | Yes all year round | Not published | Yes no time-of-day surcharge |
| Sales and leasing | Virtual HQ | OfficeHQ | Oracle CMS | Your Phones Covered | AiDial |
| Can it answer the actual question | |||||
| Answers listing-specific questions | No message taken | No | Custom scripting available | No | Yes from your listing data |
| Books an inspection or appraisal | MyDiary add-on $49/mo plus $2.99 per minute, setup from $99 | MyDiary from $49/mo | Not published | Diary add-on | Included |
| Qualifies buyer vs tenant vs vendor | No | No | Scripted | No | Yes routed separately |
| Sales and leasing | Virtual HQ | OfficeHQ | Oracle CMS | Your Phones Covered | AiDial |
| Commercials | |||||
| Published entry price | $33/mo + $3.89 per call, plus GST | $33/mo MyReceptionist, plus GST | approx. $30/mo virtual receptionist | “from $4 a Week” | $149/mo Core, 60 calls |
| Cost of a 100-call campaign month | $422.00 plus GST | Not published included calls not stated | Not published | Not published | $248.60 |
| Setup fee | None on answering plans | Not published | Not published | Not published | None |
What a campaign month actually costs
The table compares the published human-service examples with AiDial Core, which includes 60 calls for $149 and charges $2.49 for each additional call. A launch month can therefore increase the AiDial invoice too. Competitor rates retain their original checked date and stated GST treatment; AiDial amounts exclude optional add-ons and any applicable taxes.
| Calls in the month | Live reception, PAYG $33 + $3.89 per call | Live reception 50 $185 inc 50, then $3.99 | AiDial Core $149 includes 60 calls; $2.49 per extra call |
|---|---|---|---|
| 20 — quiet month | $110.80 | $185.00 | $149.00 |
| 50 — steady month | $227.50 | $185.00 | $149.00 |
| 100 — campaign month | $422.00 | $384.50 | $248.60 |
| 200 — multi-launch month | $811.00 | $783.50 | $497.60 |
Price both a quiet month and a launch month. AiDial Core stays at $149 within its 60-call allowance; additional calls cost $2.49 each. A different plan may suit a campaign better, but switching plans should be an explicit choice. Include any listing-data, CRM or booking integration work in the quote.
Five questions to put to any provider
- What happens to the second, third and fourth simultaneous call? Ask for the actual average wait on a Saturday, not the policy.
- Can it answer “is 14 Smith Street still available” without transferring? If not, you are buying a message service, which is fine — just do not pay reception prices for it.
- What does a launch month cost? Model your busiest month, not your average one.
- Can it book an inspection into the agent’s calendar? Check whether that is included or a paid add-on with its own setup fee.
- Does a buyer enquiry get handled differently from a tenant enquiry? They go to different people and have different urgency.
Where each one is genuinely the right answer
Solo agent, low listing count, calls mostly reach you directly
Message-taking, pay as you go
You want an Australian human voice on every call and volume is steady
Oracle CMS
Your enquiry volume spikes hard around launches and open homes
AI reception with a suitable call allowance
You want the caller to get an actual answer about a listing, not a callback
AI reception with a suitable call allowance
Your calls are mostly tenant maintenance and rent
Read the property management comparison instead
Sources and method
Provider figures were read from each provider’s own current public pages on 25 August 2026. Nothing here comes from a review site or a third-party comparison, and where a provider does not publish a figure the table says so rather than estimating it. The commission figure is a widely used industry approximation, not a quoted rate — agency commission varies by state, agency and negotiation, and you should use your own.
| Provider | Source, checked 25 August 2026 |
|---|---|
| AiDial | aidial.com.au pricing page: plan fees, included calls, extra-call rates, setup and contract terms |
| Virtual HQ | Call answering pricing page for plan and excess rates; terms and conditions for the out-of-hours surcharge; FAQs for the follow-the-sun statement |
| OfficeHQ | Pricing page: MyReceptionist and MyDiary entry prices, “Plus GST”, month-to-month terms, 24/7 availability claim |
| Oracle CMS | Live phone answering service page: indicative pricing, 24/7 all-year operation, Australian call centres |
| Your Phones Covered | Pricing page: published “from” rates and per-call billing model |
Prices change. Anything here more than six months old will be removed rather than shown stale.
Frequently asked questions
What does an answering service cost a real estate agency?
AiDial Core includes 60 calls for $149 a month. At 100 calls, Core totals $248.60 including 40 extra calls; Scale is $249 with 150 calls included if that plan is selected. Compare a launch month as well as an average month, and include any separately scoped integrations and optional add-ons.
Can it answer questions about a specific listing?
A human answering service generally cannot, unless you pay for custom scripting, because the operator is covering many unrelated businesses. An AI receptionist connected to your listing data can answer availability, price guide and open-home times directly. That is the main functional difference for an agency, and it matters more than the per-call rate.
Do I need weekend cover?
For sales and leasing, the weekend is the business. Check the weekend rate specifically — Virtual HQ’s terms apply a $1.00 per call out-of-hours surcharge on reception plans outside 8am to 6pm weekdays, which covers your entire Saturday.
Is this different from a property management answering service?
Yes, and the difference is real rather than cosmetic. Property management calls are mostly existing tenants with maintenance and rent issues, arriving steadily, needing tradespeople and urgency triage. Sales and leasing calls are mostly strangers with a portal open, arriving in bursts, needing an answer inside a minute or they are gone.
Talk to an Australian team about it
AiDial provides AI reception and answering on the same call plans, with included calls and published extra-call rates. Booking, CRM and PMS integrations are scoped separately. Tell us your listing count, required actions and campaign call pattern so we can estimate the full cost.
See the real estate answering service, the leasing answering service and AI for real estate agents, compare the after-hours options, check what each answering service tier really costs, or read how the AI providers compare.
