How fast should an agent reply to an online lead?

Reply in under five minutes, and aim for under one. The MIT and InsideSales lead response study found the odds of reaching a lead are 100 times higher at five minutes than at 30, and the odds of qualifying that lead are 21 times higher. Most agents are nowhere near that. When the WAV Group sent test inquiries to 384 brokers, the average reply took 917 minutes and 48% of inquiries never got one at all. The buyer who filled in your form also filled in two others. Whoever answers first gets the conversation.

How much does conversion drop after 5, 30 and 60 minutes?

Most of the drop happens in the first half hour. The MIT and InsideSales study, run by Dr. James Oldroyd on 15,000 leads and 100,000 call attempts across six companies, plotted contact and qualification odds against the minutes since the lead came in. Between five and 30 minutes the odds of making contact fell 100 times. The odds of qualifying the lead fell 21 times over the same window. By the hour mark the lead has usually either been reached by someone else or stopped looking.

A later Velocify analysis of 3.5 million leads across 400 companies, summarised by the National Law Review, put a number on the first minute: a call attempt within 60 seconds was associated with a 391% increase in conversion. The same analysis found that 93% of leads that eventually converted were reached within six call attempts. Speed gets you the first conversation. Persistence gets you the ones who did not pick up.

None of these studies is specific to real estate. The WAV Group one is, and it shows the same shape from the other side: the brokers who did reply averaged 1.5 call backs and 2.07 emails, then stopped.

Do Zillow and Realtor.com leads go to several agents at once?

Assume yes, in one way or another. A buyer who wants a house does not fill in one form. They tap “contact agent” on the listing, then on the same listing on another portal, then on the brokerage site. The WAV Group researchers placed their test inquiries on broker websites, Zillow, Realtor.com and Trulia for exactly that reason.

Zillow Premier Agent adds its own clock. Zillow’s Premier Agent FAQ describes a “connection” as a live phone call: a buyer inquires, Zillow verifies they are actively looking, then Zillow calls the agent, and once the agent accepts, the buyer is transferred. Answer it and Zillow also sets a “My Agent” relationship, so you show as the only buyer’s agent on the listings that buyer views in your service areas. Zillow says a missed call does not cost you your place in the queue for the next connection. It does mean that buyer, who was live on the line, did not get you.

What is the average response time to a real estate lead?

About 15 hours, for the agents who reply at all. The WAV Group study posed as buyers and timed real brokers, which is why its numbers are the ones worth comparing yourself against. Across 384 brokers in 11 states:

Measured	Result
Inquiries never answered	48%
Average time to first reply	917 minutes (15.29 hours)
Average call back attempts	1.5
Average email attempts	2.07

The same study measured one brokerage network that had put a system on it: 100% of inquiries answered, three minutes average, five to 11 follow up attempts. The gap between 917 minutes and three minutes is not talent. It is whether a system or a person is on the other end of the form.

The study is from 2014, and the portals have since added more ways for the same buyer to contact more agents. If you want a current number for your own office, send an inquiry to your own website tonight from a phone your CRM does not know, and time the reply.

Should the first reply be a text or a call?

Both, in that order. A text goes out inside the first minute, from your own number, while the buyer is still looking at the listing. A call follows within five minutes. The text is what you can guarantee at any hour. The call is what the MIT data measured, and it is where the qualifying happens.

The order matters because of what each one does. The text proves someone is there and gives the buyer a thread to reply to when the call goes to voicemail. The call turns “interested in 14 Oak Street” into a budget, a timeline and a showing.

What should the first reply to an online lead say?

Three things: the property they asked about, one question, your name. Nothing else.

Hi Dana, Adrian here. You asked about 14 Oak Street. Are you looking to see it this week, or still comparing a few?

It names the property, so it reads as a reply and not a blast. It asks one question the buyer can answer with a thumb. It comes from a person. What it does not do is pitch, apologise for being automated, or ask for a phone appointment before the buyer has said a word.

The reply from a form is not the place for a link to your reviews, a mortgage calculator, or a paragraph about your brokerage. Every extra line lowers the odds of a reply.

How do you reply in under a minute while you are showing a house?

You do not. A system does, and you take over when you can. The flow that hits the numbers above looks like this:

1. The lead lands in the CRM (Follow Up Boss, GoHighLevel, or whatever you run) through the portal’s integration or a webhook.
2. The CRM fires a text from your number within seconds, written the way the example above is written, with the property name filled in.
3. A voice agent or an inside sales agent calls the lead within five minutes, asks the three qualifying questions, and books a showing or a call into your calendar.
4. You get the transcript and the booking on your phone. If the buyer asks for you by name, the call transfers to you live. If you are in a showing, the agent offers a time and books it.
5. If nobody picks up, the follow up sequence keeps going on a schedule, up to the six attempts the Velocify data points to, then drops to a slower cadence.

Who does step three is the decision. The options, without inventing prices:

Who makes the five minute call	Typical reply time	Nights and weekends	Books into your calendar
You, between showings	Hours	No	Yes
An inside sales agent on your team	Minutes, during their shift	Only if you staff it	Yes
An answering service	Minutes	Yes	Usually takes a message
A voice agent connected to your CRM	Under a minute	Yes	Yes

This is the system behind the first service on the homepage. The CRM you already run stays where it is. What changes is that the form is answered before you have seen it.

Does an automated first reply hurt trust with a buyer?

It hurts when it is generic, and it hurts when it pretends. It does not hurt when it is fast, specific and honest about what it is.

The generic version is the one that says “Thanks for your interest in our listings” with no property name. Buyers have seen thousands of these and treat them as no reply. The pretending version is an agent that insists it is human when asked. Both lose the buyer at the moment they notice.

The version that works follows three rules. It names the property and the buyer’s question. It says it is an assistant when asked, and offers a person immediately. It transfers to you the moment the buyer asks for you, or books a time when you are not free. A buyer who gets a relevant reply in 40 seconds and a booked showing two minutes later does not care that a system did it. They care that the other four agents have not replied yet.

What I see when I build this

I have not built this exact flow for a real estate team yet, so I will not pretend otherwise. The closest thing I have shipped is a voice agent for a US solar contractor: field crews call a dedicated number, a Vapi agent identifies the crew and the job, captures the details, and n8n writes a structured record into Salesforce. It handles roughly 500 calls a month without an operator, and anything urgent still escalates to a live person.

Two things from that build carry straight over to lead reply. The first is that the hand off rule has to be decided before the agent takes a single call: what counts as “get a human now”, and what happens to the call while that human is found. The second is that the agent is only as good as what it writes into the CRM. A perfect conversation that lands as an unstructured note is a lead someone has to read and re-enter. The record has to arrive as fields.

Where to start

Measure before you buy anything. Send an inquiry to your own site and to your own Zillow listing tonight, from a number your CRM has never seen, and write down how long the first reply takes and who sends it. That number, next to 917 minutes and next to five, tells you how much of the problem is yours. Then decide who makes the five minute call.