Real Estate Lead Response Time: What the Data Says

Most articles about missed calls in real estate lean on the same handful of numbers: that most callers never call back, that a reply inside five minutes makes a lead 21 times more likely to convert, that roughly six in ten real estate calls go unanswered. We published some of those on this page. When we traced them back, several came from other industries, from small samples, or from no study we could find.

This version starts from the sources. It says what each study measured and what it cannot tell you, lists the figures we removed, and ends with a way to find your own number. None of the studies below is about NYC brokerages specifically; we did not find a published one.

What each study measured

Seven sources come up again and again. Only some are about real estate, and the older ones measure reaching and qualifying a lead, not closing a deal.

Oldroyd, McElheran and Elkington, Harvard Business Review, 2011 (opens in a new tab)
What it measured: an audit of 2,241 U.S. companies that each received a web-generated test lead. 37% responded within an hour, 23% never responded, and the average response time among those that replied within 30 days was 42 hours. A separate set of 1.25 million leads at 42 companies found that contacting a lead within an hour made it nearly seven times as likely to be qualified (a meaningful conversation with a key decision maker) as contacting it an hour later, and more than 60 times as likely as waiting 24 hours or longer.
What it does not tell you: anything specific to real estate (the article names financial services, automobiles, education, software and health care, among others), or how many qualified leads became sales.
Lead Response Management study, InsideSales.com with MIT's James Oldroyd (opens in a new tab)
What it measured: three years of data from six companies, over fifteen thousand leads and more than a hundred thousand call attempts. Waiting 30 minutes instead of 5 cut the odds of qualifying a prospect 21-fold, and the study reports a 100-fold difference in contact ratios.
What it does not tell you: the study page describes web-generated leads in general, not residential real estate, the data came from a sales-software vendor, and it measures contact and qualification rather than closed deals. This is where the popular "21x" comes from.
411 Locals, January 2016 (opens in a new tab)
What it measured: 85 businesses across 58 industries monitored for 30 days; 62% of phone calls went unanswered.
What it does not tell you: the article gives no separate figure for real estate. This is the source usually behind the 62% figure that gets quoted for real estate.
WAV Group Agent Responsiveness Study, January 2014 (opens in a new tab)
What it measured: a mystery shop of 384 brokers in 11 states, with inquiries sent through broker websites, Zillow, Realtor.com and Trulia. 48% of buyer inquiries were never answered, and the average response time was 917 minutes (15.29 hours).
What it does not tell you: how things look today, how NYC compares, or the result by channel (the report does not split it).
Mike DelPrete secret-shopping study, August 2024 (opens in a new tab)
What it measured: over 100 secret shops across more than 25 U.S. brokerages, by website inquiry and by visiting open houses. 47% of online inquiries, all sent on weekdays during business hours, were ignored. Among replies, the average took 8 hours 17 minutes and the median 39 minutes. 62% of open house visitors got no follow-up.
What it does not tell you: how online inquiries sent in the evening or on weekends fared, or whether faster replies closed more deals.
Roof AI secret-shopper test, 2025 (updated June 2026) (opens in a new tab)
What it measured: website inquiries to 74 top brokerages. 41% did not respond and 9% responded within five minutes.
What it does not tell you: it was run by a company that sells website chatbots to brokerages, so treat it as vendor research. It covers large brokerages' website forms, not phone calls.
NAR 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers (opens in a new tab)
What it measured: a mailed survey with 6,103 responses from people who bought a home between July 2024 and June 2025. 74% of buyers interviewed only one agent, 43% found their agent through a friend, neighbor or relative, and 11% first reached their agent through an inquiry on a third-party website.
What it does not tell you: response times, or anything about leads that gave up, because it only surveys people who completed a purchase. It is national, not NYC.

Read together, the real estate shop studies (2014, 2024 and the vendor test) point the same way: a large share of online inquiries get a slow reply or none. The cross-industry research explains why that matters, because reaching and qualifying a lead gets much harder as minutes pass. What none of them gives you is the increase in closed deals from replying faster in your market. That number is yours to measure.

Four numbers we removed

•"Most callers never call back after reaching voicemail." We could not trace the percentage usually attached to this claim to a primary study.
•"78% of buyers work with the first agent who responds." We could not trace this either. What NAR does report is that most buyers interview a single agent (above), which says the first conversation matters, not that speed alone decides it.
•A 62% unanswered-call rate attributed to real estate. That is the all-industry 2016 figure from 411 Locals; real estate was not broken out.
•"21x more likely to convert." The study behind it measured the odds of qualifying a lead at 5 versus 30 minutes, at six companies. That is not conversion to a sale, and it is not real estate.

A worked example you can change

The inputs below are assumptions chosen to show the arithmetic. They are not statistics, and your numbers will differ.

Worked example of annual commission lost to missed calls, with assumed inputs
Step (assumption)	Value	Running result
Calls missed per week, from your phone log	10	520 a year
Share that are real buyer or seller inquiries	50%	260 a year
Share that never reach you another way	60%	156 lost inquiries
Share of reached inquiries that eventually close	4%	6.24 deals
Average gross commission per closed deal	$12,000	$74,880 a year
If better coverage wins back half of them	50%	about $37,000 a year

Two cautions. This is gross commission before your split and the brokerage's share, and "wins back half" is a guess. The result is also very sensitive to the inputs: a team that misses two calls a week instead of ten loses a fifth as much, and one that closes 2% of reached inquiries instead of 4% loses half as much.

The missed call revenue calculator runs this kind of estimate with your own inputs, starting from a real estate preset.

Finding your real number in a month

1.Count the misses. Export four weeks of call logs from your phone system and tally calls that went to voicemail or were abandoned, by day and hour.
2.Shop your own team. Send inquiries through your website form and your portal profiles from a personal number at different times, including evenings and weekends, and record the time to the first reply. That is the method the studies above used, pointed at yourself.
3.Check open house follow-up. Count sign-ins and how many got a real message within 48 hours. The open house ROI calculator turns that gap into an estimate.
4.Log time to first contact for every new lead in your CRM from now on. The speed-to-lead calculator converts your response times into a dollar estimate.

If four weeks of data show you miss very few calls and reply quickly, you do not have this problem, and the budget is better spent elsewhere.

Ways to cover the calls

•A staffed rotation or receptionist. Reliable for business hours; it needs backup for lunch, sick days and evenings.
•A live answering service. Adds hours of coverage; callers still reach a person who does not know your listings.
•Instant text-back and booking links. Cheap, and it works for people who would rather not talk; it does little for callers who want an answer now.
•An AI voice agent. It can answer every call at any hour and hand off with notes; it can also misunderstand callers, so it needs testing and a clear escalation path.

We compare the staffing and AI options in more detail in AI voice agent vs. human ISA, and the portal-lead side in follow-up for Zillow and StreetEasy leads.

Hear what an AI voice agent sounds like on a real call.

Call (347) 757-4410 to talk to Emma, OMII AI's voice agent. It is a demo line, so please do not share anything sensitive. Then judge for yourself whether it fits your team.

Call (347) 757-4410 Talk to us about your phones

The bottom line

Slow or missing replies to online inquiries are well documented in real estate, and the cross-industry research shows why speed matters. What is not documented is how much a faster reply is worth to your team in NYC. Measure your own misses and reply times for a month, put them into the worked example, and decide from your numbers rather than ours.

OMII AI's real estate page describes what we build for teams that decide coverage is worth paying for.

About this update

On October 3, 2026 we rewrote this post. We removed statistics we could not trace to a source and a loss model that was built on them, and added the sources above. Each figure was read on the linked page; the Harvard Business Review figures were confirmed from a printed copy of the article. OMII AI sells call-answering and follow-up systems, so we have a stake in the topic; the links are there so you can check us.