Lead response for a real estate team

An example engagement for real estate firms in Houston.

This is an example engagement, not a client story. It shows how we would run an audit and build for a typical firm of this kind. The research figures come from the public sources cited, and nothing here reports a specific client's results.

A Houston real estate team with several agents, leads arriving from listing portals, the team website, and sign calls, and no one dedicated to inside sales.

Leads arrive at all hours, often while every agent is at a showing or a closing. The first reply goes out whenever an agent gets back to their phone, and by then the buyer has often talked to someone else.

Follow-up after the first conversation depends on each agent's memory. Booking a showing takes a string of texts. The website gets traffic but captures few contact details.

What the research says02

In an audit of 2,241 U.S. companies, firms that tried to contact a web lead within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to have a meaningful conversation with a decision maker as firms that waited even an hour longer, and more than 60 times as likely as firms that waited 24 hours or more.

Oldroyd, McElheran and Elkington, "The Short Life of Online Sales Leads," Harvard Business Review, March 2011↗

88% of recent home buyers purchased through a real estate agent or broker, and 91% of sellers sold with one.

National Association of REALTORS, 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers↗
Audit, build, measure03

What the audit checks

  • Export 90 days of leads from the CRM and portals and measure time to first reply by source, agent, and hour.
  • Submit test leads through each source and record what the buyer actually receives.
  • Review how leads are assigned and what happens to the ones nobody claims.
  • Check the website on a phone for speed and for how easy it is to leave contact details.
  • Rank each fix by expected return using the team's own commission and conversion figures.

What we build

What we measure

  • Median time to first reply, by lead source
  • Share of leads that reach a two-way conversation
  • Showings and listing appointments booked per month
  • Leads with no agent activity after seven days

Every measure starts from the firm's own baseline, taken during the audit, so results are compared with how the firm ran before anything changed.

Keep reading03
Industry

Real estate firms

Brokerages and teams where response time decides who wins the client.

Example engagement

Listing appointment follow-up for a real estate team

A real estate team gets home value requests from sellers who are months away from listing, then forgets them. The fix is a fast reply and follow-up that keeps going until a listing appointment is booked.

Example engagement

Buyer agreement intake for a brokerage

A brokerage must get a written buyer agreement before every tour, and agents handle it differently. The fix is one intake flow with e-signature before scheduling, and advertising that meets TREC rules.

Start with an audit.