For real estate investors
There is no measured benchmark for this market, so a vendor quoting you one has borrowed it from another industry. I build to a ceiling of two minutes, and the audit times your own path from the form to the first call so you know what yours is.
I went looking for a response-time benchmark for real estate investors and did not find one. The figures that circulate in this market were measured somewhere else, on somebody else’s buyers, and they get repeated until nobody remembers whose customers they were.
So when a vendor puts a response-time figure in front of you, ask what they measured and when they measured it. If the answer is a link to somebody else’s article, they are selling you with a number about a different business.
Hatch published data from its own platform in December 2024, covering 132,188 speed-to-lead campaigns run by HVAC businesses over six months. In it, 88% of those businesses replied slower than five minutes, and 3% replied within one minute.
The data covers HVAC businesses, and I am not going to stretch it to yours. What it does tell you is where the bar sits for a business that pays for leads and then has to work them.
You do not need a benchmark to clear that bar. You need to know your own number, and most operators do not have it.
In the systems I build, the clock starts when the seller submits the form or calls the number on the ad.
The assigned rep’s phone buzzes. At one minute, if no call has gone out, every rep gets it. At two minutes the owner gets it. It is built so that no lead waits more than two minutes for a call.
One minute and two minutes are settings you can look up in the system, and not an average of anything. The reason for having a ceiling at all is money. You have paid for that lead. A ceiling means it cannot sit there while three people each assume somebody else picked it up.
Speed to lead is the market’s term, and its clock starts at the form. Before that, a visitor lands on your site from your ad and reads for a while, and nothing in your tools knows they were there.
An alert on the visit closes that gap. Before anything is submitted, your rep has the page the visitor is on, how long they have been there, and which ad brought them. It works best when you run your own ads, because the click is what tells your rep where the seller came from.
That is a different service from answering faster, and it is priced separately. It also does not remove the need to answer fast. A visitor who does fill in the form still needs somebody on the phone.
Pull one lead from last month and line up these four times.
The distance between the first and the last is your real answer for that lead. Do it for five leads and you will have a range.
Doing it properly is tedious, because those four times live in four different tools. The $999 audit does this for you. It times the path from the form to the first call, and it times each automation in between, step by step, so you can see what comes out of each one and how long it took to reach the seller.
If that gap is where your money is going, the report tells you so, shows the arithmetic, and prices what closing it takes. If your money is going somewhere else, the report tells you that instead and shows you that arithmetic too. You keep the report either way.
Source: Hatch, HVAC speed to lead response rates, December 2024.