Why real estate teams lose portal leads, and a follow-up routine that fixes it
Maxup team · · 4 min read
A buyer fills an enquiry on a property portal at 9 pm. By the time someone calls the next morning, they have spoken to three other builders. Most real estate teams know this happens. Fewer have a routine that stops it.
This post covers where portal leads usually slip and a simple follow-up routine you can start this week, with or without a CRM.
Where portal leads slip
Nobody owns the lead. Portal emails land in a shared inbox or a manager's phone. Everyone assumes someone else has called.
The first call is late. Enquiries peak in the evening and on weekends, which is exactly when your team is off.
Follow-ups live in people's heads. The executive means to call back on Thursday. Thursday gets busy.
Context gets lost. When the lead is passed to a site visit team or a new executive, the budget and requirement have to be asked again.
A follow-up routine that works
1. Assign every lead within minutes
Decide the rule in advance. Round-robin works for small teams. Larger teams often split by project or by shift. The point is that no lead waits for someone to decide who calls.
2. Make the first contact the same day
If a call is not possible, send a WhatsApp message with the project name, a brochure and a question about their requirement. A reply on WhatsApp is often easier for the buyer than picking up an unknown number.
3. Fix the next step on every call
Every call should end with a date: a callback, a brochure follow-up or a site visit. Write it down where the whole team can see it.
4. Escalate what goes cold
Set a time limit for the first call, for example 30 minutes during office hours. If it passes, the manager should know. This one rule changes behaviour quickly.
5. Hand over with notes
Before a site visit, the person meeting the buyer should know the budget, configuration, purpose and objections already discussed.
Where a CRM helps
You can run this routine on a spreadsheet for a while. It starts to break when leads come from four sources and ten people share them. A CRM such as Maxup pulls portal leads in automatically, assigns them by your rules, reminds each owner of the next step and alerts managers when a lead is not touched in time.
If you want to see how that looks with your own projects, book a demo.