Portal Leads in NYC: What Slow Follow-Up Costs and How to Fix It

Picture a buyer who saves a two-bedroom in Astoria at 8:47 on a Tuesday evening and taps "Contact Agent." She is also looking at listings on two other sites. Whoever replies first, and replies usefully, has the first real conversation. Whoever replies tomorrow morning may be talking to someone who got there earlier.

That scenario is hypothetical, but the pattern behind it is documented. This post covers what is known about reply speed, how NYC portal leads are actually paid for, and how to work out whether better follow-up is worth paying for on your team.

How NYC portal leads are paid for

An older version of this post modeled NYC portal spend as a fixed monthly fee per agent. We could not source those figures, so we removed them. Portals charge in different ways (monthly advertising, per-lead fees, or a share of commission at closing), and the right figure for your team is on your own invoices and agreements.

One NYC-specific fact we can source: StreetEasy's Experts program says there is no upfront spend and you only pay when a deal closes (opens in a new tab). Reporting in September 2026 added two changes. StreetEasy said it will pause new Experts additions from any company that represents 20% or more of the program (opens in a new tab) (Compass was the only company over the line), and it cut the success fee on lower-priced sales: 15% instead of 25% at $249,000 and below, and 20% instead of 25% from $250,000 to $399,999. The article gave no fee information above $399,999, so check your own agreement for higher-priced deals.

Why this matters for follow-up: when a lead costs nothing until it closes, a slow reply does not waste ad spend. It costs the commission on the deal you never got. When you pay per lead or per month, slow follow-up costs both.

What the response-time research shows

Our companion post, What Missed Calls and Slow Replies Cost an NYC Real Estate Team, lists what each study measured and what it cannot tell you. The short version:

• •In a cross-industry set of 1.25 million leads, contacting a lead within an hour made it nearly seven times as likely to be qualified as contacting it an hour later (Harvard Business Review, 2011 (opens in a new tab)). Qualified there means a meaningful conversation with a decision maker, not a sale.
• •A study of six companies and over fifteen thousand leads (opens in a new tab) found the odds of qualifying a prospect fell 21-fold when the reply took 30 minutes instead of 5. It is not a real estate study.
• •In real estate secret shopping, 47% of online inquiries to more than 25 brokerages were ignored (opens in a new tab) (2024), and a 2014 mystery shop of 384 brokers (opens in a new tab) found 48% of buyer inquiries never answered. Where there was a reply, the 2024 average was 8 hours 17 minutes and the median 39 minutes.

None of this measures closed deals, and none is specific to NYC. It does support a narrow conclusion: reply times vary enormously, and slow ones leave a gap that a faster competitor can fill. How much that gap is worth to you is something to measure, not assume.

Keep portals in perspective

In NAR's 2025 survey of recent buyers (opens in a new tab), 11% first reached their agent through an inquiry on a third-party website and 26% by phone, while 43% found their agent through a friend, neighbor or relative. Three in four buyers (74%) interviewed only one agent. Two takeaways: the first real conversation carries a lot of weight, and past-client and referral work usually outweighs any single portal. The survey only covers people who completed a purchase and is national, so it cannot show you the leads that gave up.

A break-even example you can change

Here is the arithmetic for judging any follow-up system. Every input is an assumption chosen for illustration, not an industry statistic.

Today those 40 leads produce 0.8 deals a month. At 2.4% they produce 0.96, an extra 0.16 deals a month, which is worth about $1,440 a month. That is the break-even: a follow-up system that costs more than that, with these inputs, does not earn back its cost. With 100 leads a month and $15,000 net per deal, the same lift is worth about $6,000 a month. With no lift, it is worth nothing. The result depends almost entirely on your lead volume, your commission and the lift you actually get.

The commission leakage calculator lets you set these inputs, including the lift, and the speed-to-lead calculator starts from your actual reply times.

What a follow-up system has to do

1. 1.Acknowledge immediately. An automatic text or email that names the property and offers a way to book or ask a question. Check the portal's terms and your consent wording before automating messages.
2. 2.Get a person or a voice agent on the phone fast. During working hours that can be an agent or ISA. Outside them it can be an AI voice agent, with the legal caution below.
3. 3.Keep going after day one. The 2014 WAV Group shop found an average of 1.5 call-back attempts after the initial contact and 2.07 email attempts. Persistence looks like an easy place to beat the average, but that is 2014 data and we cannot tell you the right number of touches.
4. 4.Hand off with context. The agent who calls back should see what the lead asked, what was said and when, so the buyer does not repeat themselves.
5. 5.Record time to first contact for every lead, by source. Without it you cannot tell whether anything improved.

A legal caution on AI-voiced outbound calls

In February 2024 the FCC ruled that calls made with AI-generated voices are "artificial" under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (opens in a new tab), and the TCPA requires telemarketers to get prior express written consent before robocalling. Whether the consent on a portal inquiry form covers an AI-voiced call back is a legal question that depends on the form's wording and the portal's terms. Ask a lawyer before you turn on outbound AI calling. Answering inbound calls with an AI voice agent is a different situation, but recording and disclosure rules are worth checking with a lawyer too.

Test it for 30 days before you buy anything

• •Measure your current time to first contact, by lead source and by hour, for two weeks.
• •Set a target (for example, a first reply within five minutes during the day) and change one thing at a time.
• •Compare appointments set and showings booked per 100 leads before and after. Closings lag, so judge on those earlier steps first.
• •Compare the gain, valued as in the break-even above, with what the system costs per month.

The bottom line

Reply times in real estate are slow and uneven, and a slow reply costs more when a lead is free until it closes than most teams realize. What a faster reply is worth depends on your volume, your commission and your lift, which is why we show the arithmetic instead of a headline number. OMII AI builds follow-up and call-answering systems for real estate teams, and the same break-even applies to ours.

About this update

On October 3, 2026 we rewrote this post. We removed the uncited conversion rates, the average-response-time claim, the portal-cost model, the "8 to 12 touchpoints" claim and the statement about what agents on teams we work with report, none of which we could support. Each figure left was read on the page linked next to it; the Harvard Business Review figures were confirmed from a printed copy of the article. OMII AI sells follow-up systems, so we have a stake in the topic.