Fifteen hours, and four other brokers had the same lead. By morning it was somebody else's client — and you still paid for it.
For brokers, builders, channel partners, rental agents — anybody buying leads from a portal.
The reply that matters is the one that arrives while they are still scrolling.
A generic "thank you for your enquiry" tells them nothing and gets ignored. Naming the flat they were looking at tells them you know which one — and that is what gets a reply.
Property portals mostly send by email rather than an API, so there is a forwarding address for them — one rule in the mailbox and the leads arrive here.
Forward the lead emails. Name, number and the listing are read out of them.
The same. Both send a tidy enough email to read reliably.
The same again.
Lead forms come straight through, no email in between.
Lead form extensions, answered before they leave the results page.
Point the enquiry form at a URL and it lands the same way.
Worth saying plainly: these are emails, and portals change their layout without warning. If a portal ever gives you API access, use it — the email route is the one that works everywhere, not the one that works best.
Property is the slowest decision anybody makes. Almost nobody follows up for that long, which is exactly why it works.
Named property, photos, and a site visit offered. Most of the value of the whole lead is in this one message.
"Kaisa laga?" — with two more that match what they said they wanted. The visit tells you more about the budget than the enquiry ever did.
Only if it genuinely matches. Sending everything to everybody is how a broker's number gets muted in a week.
The two things a serious buyer actually wants to hear about. Everything else is noise while they are deciding.
One line, and a way to say no. The people who say yes here are the closest thing to a free client there is.
Any reply stops the sequence and hands the conversation to a person. Somebody who has started talking should never get the automatic version of the same conversation.