Lead Capture, Speed to Contact & Routing
Every lead, from every source, becomes one record with an owner and a time-stamped first contact within minutes, routed to an agent who is actually available, at any hour.
- Tier
- Foundational
- Build order
- 1st of 7 for real estate
- Shape of it
- 8 steps, 1 escalation rule
- At launch
- Runs supervised, with you approving what goes out
The problem this solves
Leads arrive from portals, the team site, social ads, sign calls, open houses, referrals and the sphere, and they arrive at every hour. The routing is usually a round robin that does not know who is on holiday, in a showing, or already handling four leads that morning.
So a lead is assigned to an agent who cannot act on it for six hours, and the system records it as assigned. Assigned is not contacted. Contacted is not connected. The reporting shows healthy assignment and the consumer never spoke to anyone.
Meanwhile the highest-intent leads, sign calls and referrals, often arrive through a channel with no tracking at all: an agent's personal mobile.
How it works, step by step
Every wait, threshold and branch below is a value we set with you during the build, against your stages and your language. None of it is a default we impose.
- What starts it
- It escalates to a person
Step 1Trigger
A lead arrives on any connected source and becomes one record with the source attributed and the arrival time stamped.
Step 2
Duplicate detection runs against phone, email and property interest, because portal leads duplicate constantly and duplicate records destroy the conversion reporting.
Step 3
Routing considers availability, not just rotation. An agent who is in a showing, off-duty or over their live-lead threshold is skipped.
Step 4
An immediate acknowledgement goes out on the channel the lead used, referring to the property or enquiry they actually made, never a generic greeting.
Step 5
The clock starts and is visible. Time to first human contact is the metric, not time to assignment.
Step 6Escalation
If the assigned agent has not made human contact inside the agreed window, the lead reassigns or escalates. This is the mechanism the whole system exists for.
Step 7
Sign calls and referrals arriving on personal mobiles are captured by forwarding rule so they enter the same system.
Step 8
Every lead without an outcome stays on one list until it has one.
How it gets built
Built inside what you already run
- Follow Up Boss
- kvCORE
- Sierra
- Lofty
- or whatever your office already runs on
Nothing to log into and nothing to license. If a system needs a record your platform does not hold, we add the field to your platform rather than starting a second one beside it.
This is the actual build order, in the phases its own steps fall into. It runs in supervised mode first, with you approving what goes out, until you are happy with the tone.
- 1
Map
Inventory every source, including the untracked ones: sign call numbers, agent mobiles, the open house sign-in, the team's social inbox.
Nothing is designed until we have looked at what already exists, including the parts nobody officially owns.
- 2
Build
Connect each and confirm one test lead produces one attributed record.
Built inside the software you already run, against your stages and your language.
- 3
Build
Build duplicate detection first. It is the difference between usable and useless conversion data.
- 4
Build
Build availability-aware routing with the team leader, and agree the live-lead threshold per agent.
- 5
Agree
Write the immediate acknowledgement so it references the actual enquiry.
The thresholds, the wording and the names are yours. We write them down with you and get the consequential ones signed off.
- 6
Agree
Set the human-contact window and the reassignment rule. Expect this to be the contentious conversation, because it means taking a lead from an agent.
- 7
Build
Build the personal-mobile capture, which agents will resist and which is where the best leads are.
- 8
Prove
Run supervised for two weeks.
It runs with a person approving what goes out until you are happy with the tone. Nothing sends unreviewed on day one.
What changes after it goes live
How it runs today
Leads arrive from portals, the team site, social ads, sign calls, open houses, referrals and the sphere, and they arrive at every hour. The routing is usually a round robin that does not know who is on holiday, in a showing, or already handling four leads that morning.
After this one is live
Time to first human contact becomes a number the team can see per agent. Leads stop sitting with agents who cannot act on them. Sign calls stop disappearing. And the difference between assigned and contacted becomes visible, which is usually uncomfortable and always useful.
How to measure whether it worked
Your arithmeticRun with your numbers, not ours
Take last quarter's leads, measure time to first human contact, and count how many never received one. Apply the team's own contact-to-appointment and appointment-to-close rates and average commission. That is the recurring cost of the response gap, on leads already paid for.
We agree the baseline before anything is built, and we do not take credit for things that were going to happen anyway. There is no figure on this page claiming what we have produced for somebody else, because there is no verified figure to publish.
What we will not do
This is from the same delivery document as everything above it. It is on the page because a supplier who has not thought about it will not tell you, and you would find out later.
Agents are independent contractors, and this shapes everything. A system that requires behaviour change will fail. Every system here is built to work whether or not an individual agent cooperates, and anything that cannot be must be flagged to the team leader as a people problem rather than sold as a systems solution.
Fair housing is not negotiable.
- No automation may segment, target, exclude or personalise on race, colour, religion, sex, familial status, national origin, disability, or any protected class under federal, state or local law.
- Life-event triggers are the specific risk. Familial status is a protected class, so an automation that targets people who have recently had a child is a fair housing violation. Life-event prompts in System 6 are human tasks only, never automated messages, and the boundaries must be agreed in writing with the brokerage's compliance officer.
- Geographic targeting can constitute steering. Any farm-area or neighbourhood campaign needs compliance review.
- Advertising rules apply to automated messages exactly as to any other advertising.
Licensing and disclosure.
- Automated messages must comply with state licence disclosure requirements, which vary and often require the brokerage name and licence number.
- Team names and advertising are regulated in many states.
Messaging.
- TCPA and CAN-SPAM apply in full. Consent per number, quiet hours in the recipient's local time, immediate opt-out honoured across every system.
- Portal leads carry their own consent terms which are not the same as a consumer opting in on the team's own site. Treat them as a separate consent category.
- Replies route to a monitored human queue.
Data.
- Transaction files contain financial and personal information. Access controls and retention rules apply, and several states now grant deletion rights that reach a CRM.
Nothing here is legal advice. Fair housing law, state real estate licence law, brokerage policy and MLS rules can each add requirements, and fair housing in particular carries personal liability. Every template requires review by the brokerage's own compliance function before it goes live.
Nothing here is legal advice. Rules in this area have moved more than once recently, and every template that states a commercial term or a guarantee goes to your own counsel before it goes live.
Seven systems forreal estate.
We build one at a time and prove it moved before starting the next. The tiers are the dependency order, not a price list.
Tier 1Foundational
Nothing arrives late or unowned. These come first because everything above them assumes they are true.
- 1Lead Capture, Speed to Contact & Routingyou are hereSpeed to human contact. Fastest visible result and the one that proves the point.
- 2The Appointment, and the Same-Day RescueThe appointment and the rescue. Highest leverage per hour of build in the entire playbook.
Tier 2Growth
The recoverable money. These work the pools the foundational systems have made visible for the first time.
Tier 3Flagship
One connected system end to end, plus what the owner reads on a Monday. Only once the pieces are proven individually.
The tiers are the dependency order for real estate, not a price list. Most firms do not start at the first one, because the order is a default and the call is where it gets changed.
A note on sequencing this trade
Sequencing note. Systems 1 and 2 together usually pay for the entire engagement within a quarter, because the appointment-set rate is the highest leverage number in a real estate team and almost nobody measures it per agent.
Back to the real estate overview for the stage map and where these fit.
Is this the oneyou need first?
Often it is not. On the call we look at what is actually costing you most right now, which is frequently a different system from the one that brought you to this page. If there is nothing worth building yet, we will say so.