Notes for owners · CRM, automation and RevOps
CRM and lead follow-up for real estate companies
Real estate loses leads between the portal and the site visit. A CRM that records source, routing and follow-up turns paid enquiries into bookings.
The GullySales team · Updated 15 Sept 2026 · 8 min read
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On this page
- Why property loses more enquiries than any other business we work with
- What the CRM has to record for every enquiry
- Who gets the lead, and in how many minutes
- The sequence between enquiry and site visit
- Portal leads, duplicates and the honest cost per lead
- What management should look at weekly
- What to do next
Real estate companies rarely lose leads because the advertising is weak. They lose them in the gap between the portal enquiry and the site visit. Nobody owned the call, the follow-up was verbal, and the same buyer was rung by three executives. A CRM fixes this only when it records the source, routes the enquiry to one named person within minutes, and holds every follow-up with a date. Everything else in this article is detail on those three things.
Why property loses more enquiries than any other business we work with
Three reasons stack on each other.
The enquiry volume is high and the intent is thin. A single Meta lead form for a plotted project can bring 400 registrations in a week, of which perhaps thirty are buyers in the next year. Executives learn to treat all of them as junk, and the thirty are lost with the rest.
The decision is long and involves people who were not on the call. A 3BHK purchase involves a spouse, often a parent contributing to the down payment, and a bank. Six months of silence is normal buyer behaviour, not a dead lead.
And the sale has a handover in the middle of it. Pre-sales qualifies and books the visit; a closing manager or channel partner handles the site. Whatever is not written down between those two people disappears.
What the CRM has to record for every enquiry
Not thirty fields. These, filled every time:
- Source, down to the specific portal, campaign or channel partner, not "online"
- Project and phase enquired about
- Unit type and budget in the buyer's words
- Purpose: own use or investment, and for own use, the expected move-in
- Funding: own funds, home loan in process, loan not started
- Location of the buyer today, because distance predicts site visit attendance better than budget
- Owner: one named person
- Next action and its date
- Every call, WhatsApp and visit with a date stamp
The funding field is the one most companies skip and the one that separates a buyer from a browser. A family with a sanctioned loan and a rent agreement ending in March behaves nothing like an enquiry from someone comparing five projects for a purchase "sometime".
Who gets the lead, and in how many minutes
Route on entry, automatically, by project and language. Then put a clock on it. A portal enquiry answered in five minutes reaches a person who is still on their phone looking at properties. The same enquiry answered next morning reaches someone who has already spoken to two other builders.
For example, a plotted development near Devanahalli spending ₹6,00,000 a month across portals and Meta and receiving 1,200 registrations has an illustrative cost of ₹500 a registration. If it converts 60 site visits, the cost per site visit is ₹10,000. Lifting the answered-in-ten-minutes rate from half to nearly all lifts site visits on its own, before any change to the media plan. The cost per site visit falls without another rupee of spend.
The sequence between enquiry and site visit
| When | Action | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Within 5 minutes | Call from the assigned executive | Reach the buyer while they are still looking |
| Immediately after the call | WhatsApp with the project name, location pin, price band and RERA number | Give them something to show the family |
| Same day, if no answer | Second call at a different hour, then a WhatsApp asking when to call | Most no-answers are timing, not refusal |
| Day 2 | Site visit offer with two specific slots, transport arrangement named | A choice of two beats "when are you free" |
| Day 4 | Send the floor plan and payment plan they asked about | Moves the conversation to the real question |
| Day 7 | Call to ask what is holding the decision | Surfaces the loan, the spouse or the possession date |
| Every 3 weeks after | Contact only when there is news: new phase, price revision, construction update | Keeps the long-cycle buyer without irritation |
Portal leads, duplicates and the honest cost per lead
Deduplicate on phone number at the point of entry. Record which portal each duplicate came from. After two months you will see that one portal delivers the same buyers you already paid another portal for, and you can move that budget.
Also record the site visits and bookings against the source, not just the enquiries. Portals with the cheapest cost per lead frequently have the worst cost per booking, and a report that stops at leads hides it.
What management should look at weekly
Enquiries by source. Percentage answered within ten minutes. Enquiries to site visits booked. Site visits booked to site visits attended, which is the number most builders never see. Site visits to bookings. Cost per site visit and cost per booking by source. And the count of open enquiries with no next action date, which is the CRM hygiene number that predicts next quarter.
What to do next
Pull last month's enquiries out of your CRM or your portal panels into one sheet, and add two columns: minutes to first call, and date of last contact. Sort by the second column. The rows with no contact in three weeks are the pipeline you have already paid for and are not working.
If you want that read done with you, tell us what you need. We look at your enquiry-to-site-visit funnel and score where it leaks first.
