Why the First Agent to Call Back Usually Wins the Buyer

Ask anyone who has shopped for an apartment in New York what happened after they hit "contact agent" on a listing. Most will tell you the same story. One agent called within a few minutes. Two more emailed the next morning. One never replied at all. The buyer went to see the apartment with the agent who called.

That pattern is not a New York quirk. It is the most consistent finding in two decades of research on online inquiries, and it explains more about which agents grow than almost any other habit.

The inquiry is a timestamp, not a relationship

When a buyer sends a message from StreetEasy, Zillow or a brokerage website, they are usually still on their phone, still looking at the photos, and still open to a conversation. Many have sent the same message to two or three other listings in the same session. The agent who starts a real conversation first gets to set the showing, learn the budget, and quietly become "my agent" before anyone else has read the email.

The numbers behind this are older than most people assume. In 2007, researcher James Oldroyd, then at MIT Sloan, analyzed more than 15,000 web leads and roughly 100,000 call attempts. Calling a lead within five minutes, rather than thirty, was associated with about 100 times higher odds of reaching the person and 21 times higher odds of qualifying them. Thirty minutes was the losing side of that comparison. Not a day. Not an hour. Half an hour.

Four years later, Oldroyd and his co-authors published a follow-up audit in the Harvard Business Review. They sent a test web inquiry to 2,241 US companies and timed the replies. Only 37 percent responded within an hour. Twenty-three percent never responded at all. Among companies that did reply, the average wait was 42 hours.

Real estate was not singled out in that study, but anyone who has sent a listing inquiry on a Sunday evening knows the industry is not an exception.

The pattern has not improved with time. Blazeo's 2026 Speed-to-Lead Benchmark Report, a February 2026 survey of 573 service businesses, found that more than 40 percent of high-intent web inquiries arrive in the evening or at the weekend, and that 81.2 percent of companies taking more than an hour to respond say they lose leads as a result, against 46.6 percent of those replying within 15 minutes.

Why buyers reward speed so heavily

The National Association of Realtors' 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers reports that 52 percent of buyers found the home they purchased online and 70 percent searched on a mobile device or tablet. The search itself ran a median of ten weeks.

Put those two facts together. The buyer is on a phone, in a browsing session that will end when they put the phone down, and they will be doing this for ten weeks. An agent who answers while the session is still open becomes part of the search. An agent who answers tomorrow is a name in an inbox next to several others.

Speed also signals something buyers care about beyond convenience. A fast, personal response tells them this agent will probably return calls during negotiations, chase the board package, and show up when the inspector does. Slow first contact suggests the opposite, fairly or not.

What top-producing agents do differently

Talk to agents who consistently convert online inquiries and you hear three habits.

First, they call. A text or email is a placeholder. A phone conversation is where the showing gets booked and the budget gets discussed. Many agents now treat the first call as the only real response and everything else as a follow-up.

Second, they cover the clock. Inquiries do not arrive during office hours. They arrive at 9pm after dinner, on Sunday afternoons during open-house season, and at 6am before the commute. Agents who win those hours either take the call themselves, share a rotation with a team, or use software to make the first call for them. A growing number of teams use an AI voice agent for real estate that rings every new inquiry within seconds, asks the qualifying questions, offers two showing times, and writes the notes into the CRM, so a human picks up a booked appointment rather than a cold email.

Third, they measure it. The two numbers worth tracking are the median minutes from inquiry to first live call, and the share of inquiries that never got a call at all. Most teams that pull these numbers for the first time are surprised by both.

What this means if you are the buyer

If you are shopping, the agent's response time is useful information. Note who called, who emailed, and who went quiet. The one who called within minutes is showing you how they work. You will want that same urgency when a counteroffer lands at 8pm on a Friday.

If you are selling, ask your listing agent a direct question: what happens to an inquiry on your apartment that arrives at 10pm on a Saturday? The honest answer tells you a lot about how many buyers your listing is actually reaching.

What this means if you are the agent

The research has been clear since 2007. The buyer's attention is measured in minutes, and the competition for it is whichever other agents received the same message. Technology has made the first call easier to make at any hour, but the principle has not changed. Be the one who calls.

Prakhar Gupta is the founder of mergro, a real estate voice AI that calls and qualifies every new inquiry in seconds.