Real Estate Lead Follow Up: A 30-Day Schedule

To follow up with a real estate lead, answer within five minutes, touch them again on days 1, 3, 7, 14 and 30, and stop the moment they reply. Keep your drip campaign, IDX website and personal email at least a day apart, so nobody gets three emails in one afternoon.

The first reply counts most, and speed to lead shows how to measure yours. The schedule below covers what comes after it.

A 30-day follow-up schedule for a new lead

Use this as a starting point and adjust it to how your leads respond. Swap email for a call or text when that's how the lead reached you.

If day 30 gets no answer, move the lead to a slow monthly drip. If they answer at any point, the schedule ends and a person takes over.

What to write in each follow-up

Make each message stand alone, because a lead may not remember the last one. Name the home or the area, ask one question, and give one next step.

A day-3 email can be this short: "A 3-bed on Oak Street came up at $420,000, close to the one you saved. Want to see it Saturday?"

Skip "just checking in", which leaves the lead to work out why you wrote. Our inquiry reply templates show the same pattern for first replies.

Stop a Follow Up Boss action plan when the lead replies

Follow Up Boss can pause a plan on its own, but you switch it on for each plan.

1. In Follow Up Boss, go to Admin > Action Plans.
2. Open the plan, or click + Action Plan to start one.
3. Check Automatically pause this action plan when the lead responds.
4. Save the plan.

Steps based on Follow Up Boss's help article, November 2026.

Sierra Interactive's automated plans pause when a lead texts, emails, calls or submits a form. There, you choose whether a reply stops the plan or only pauses it.

Keep drips, IDX emails and your own email a day apart

A CRM action plan, an IDX website and a vendor's drip can all email one lead without knowing about each other. Fix it once, before the next lead arrives.

1. List everything that emails a new lead: action plans, drip campaigns, your IDX website and any vendor sending for you.
2. Give the first email to one of them. If an action plan already welcomes new leads, turn off the others.
3. Stagger what's left, so no two senders are scheduled on the same day.
4. Open three recent leads in your CRM and count what each one received in week one.
5. Cut whatever doubled up.

Note: Saved-search alerts are different. The lead asked for those, so leave them on.

If leads write back while you're at a showing

A schedule handles the leads who stay silent. The ones who answer need a reply that knows what they asked.

InboxPilot (we make it) drafts that reply in Gmail or Outlook from the thread and the lead's Follow Up Boss record. It can also send its own follow-ups.

Before each one, it checks what Follow Up Boss shows for that lead. If a drip campaign or action plan just reached them, the email holds for the gap you set, 24 hours by default.

For the other tools, see the AI email assistants for Follow Up Boss users comparison. For the rest of a real estate inbox, see the AI real estate assistant.