A fast-growing brokerage with 25 agents gets leads from Zillow, Realtor.com and Facebook. The brokerage wanted every lead contacted right away, shared out fairly and tracked from inquiry to closing. Three numbers showed how far off they were. Within two months of launch, all three had moved.
3 hours to under 2 minutes
A new lead waited about 3 hours, on average, for a first reply. Leads sat idle while agents tracked prospects by hand.
Now n8n watches every lead source. When an inquiry arrives, the system scores it by source, location and property type, then assigns it to the next agent in a fair rotation. That agent gets a text and an email right away with the lead’s details and links to act on it.
If the agent has not responded in 15 minutes, an AI text sequence starts with the lead, opening with “Hi, this is Alex from Premier Realty…”. It adjusts its tone to how urgent the lead is and what they have said so far. The messages keep going until the lead is reached or books a showing, then stop. First replies now go out in under 2 minutes.
18% of leads missed to none
About 18% of leads were missed. Leads were not shared out evenly, and managers could not see who had answered what.
Now a live dashboard shows response times, open leads and booked appointments for the whole team. Team leads get a daily report each morning. If any lead goes an hour with no contact, a Slack alert goes out. A monthly leaderboard ranks agents by response rate. Every lead is now tracked from start to finish.
22% to 34% of inquiries booking a showing
Only 22% of online inquiries turned into a showing.
Now, on top of the fast replies and follow-up above, Calendly lets a lead book a showing on their own. Showings rose to 34% of inquiries. That is a 55% lift in inquiries that reach a showing, and about $90K more in commissions each quarter, a return of 12 times the cost.
In the team lead’s words
“Before automation, we’d lose hours chasing leads and half of them went cold. Now every inquiry gets a response in seconds, and agents don’t have to think about follow-up: it just happens.”
- Team Lead, Premier Realty
How it was built
The work took 8 weeks. Weeks 1 to 2 traced every lead source into the CRM and found the 3-hour delay. Weeks 3 to 6 built the routing, the AI follow-up and the dashboard. Weeks 7 to 8 trained agents on the dashboard and the AI message templates, tuned the lead scores and added Calendly booking.
It runs on HubSpot as the CRM, n8n for the routing and timing, Twilio for the texts, Calendly for showings and Google Sheets for a daily log of the numbers.
Since then, the brokerage added a sync with the MLS, the shared listing database, so messages include details about the property. It also tracks sentiment to adjust the tone of follow-ups. Planned next: AI appointment confirmations and feedback after each showing.