Follow Up Boss automation for real estate teams, so no lead waits for whoever is free.
Follow Up Boss automation for real estate teams is the layer around the CRM that answers the call, writes the lead in with what was said, sends the first message in your window, and nudges the agent who has not moved. We build and run it for Canadian brokerages; a person approves anything a client sees.
The leak sits between the inquiry and the first real conversation.
Follow Up Boss fires an action plan when a lead lands. It cannot answer the phone, and its rules are as good as whoever last maintained them.
- Portal leads that get the auto text, then wait until Monday
- The office line ringing out at 7pm, every agent at a showing
- Leads gone quiet with one agent, sitting in a pond nobody sweeps
- Calls from a cell never logged, so the next agent starts over
What we build around Follow Up Boss.
Follow Up Boss keeps the record; we build what happens around it, then run it.
- Call to lead, summary attached. A voice agent picks up the brokerage line when nobody can and asks what a good ISA would ask. The lead lands in Follow Up Boss through the events endpoint, transcript as a note, recording on the call. See voice agents.
- Speed to lead, in your window. The first message goes out inside your window, with factual answers from the listing data and two or three qualifying questions. Anything resembling an offer or a price pages a person.
- A nudge, then a re-route. A lead untouched past your window earns the agent a Slack nudge with the history summarised. Past a second window it is reassigned through Follow Up Boss's own lead distribution, logged.
- Pond and stale-lead sweeps. A scheduled pass over a Smart List filtered by last activity and stage, in small dated batches. A person approves the segment first; every reply, including the no, updates the record.
Plugs into what you already run
What the marks show: Follow Up Boss holds the record, BoomTown and Wise Agent get the same layer, Twilio carries the line, appointments land in Gmail and Google Calendar, nudges in Slack, Zapier only where nothing better exists.
What building inside Follow Up Boss taught us.
The audit starts by switching on what you already pay for: Action Plans, Automations, Smart Lists, the Team Inbox. The work is at the edges.
Leads go in through POST /v1/events, never /v1/people, because Follow Up Boss's docs say the people endpoint skips deduplication, Lead Flow assignment, agent notification, and action plans. Most integrations we are asked to fix wrote to the wrong one.
Webhooks say that something changed, not what, so the build reads the record back and tolerates repeats. Nothing runs on a personal API key: it is the whole database and leaves with the person.
On a Toronto brokerage's line we run, calls over 17 days in June split 65 from realtors and 102 from renters and buyers; the recurring asks were a showing, whether a unit was still available, and a callback after an offer. That is a count; nobody measured the window before.
Who this is for.
- Teams with a lead budget and no proof of who works it. Portal leads or ads, the return decided in minutes, and a suspicion the CRM cannot prove that leads die with certain agents.
- Brokerages where the office line is the front door. Agents at showings, a line that rings out, and a cooperating agent trying to book. The phone goes first.
- Who we are wrong for. A solo agent whose phone rarely rings out, a team that wants the system to negotiate, or anyone after a smaller office. We say so on the free call.
Questions, answered straight
What does Follow Up Boss automation cost for a real estate team? You get the number on the free call. The audit is a fixed fee agreed before it starts, a build is quoted against it, and operating it is a monthly fee. Bands on the pricing page.
Does this replace our action plans? No. They stay yours. The build feeds them properly, often meaning leads finally enter through the events endpoint so plans fire at all, and covers what they cannot, starting with the phone.
What does the agent see after a call? A lead with the source set to what happened, a note with the call summary and transcript, the recording, and the stage or task your rule assigns. There is no voicemail to play.
Can it text leads, and is that legal in Canada? It can, and CASL governs every follow-up text and email it sends: consent, express or implied, business identification, a working unsubscribe. A person approves any segment before a sweep; unsubscribes are actioned within ten business days.
How long, and what stays with a person? The audit takes two weeks, a voice build four to ten. Offers, conditions, price, and commission page a person, as does anyone who asks for one. Once it hands a conversation to a human, it never takes it back.
One spoke of AI for real estate. The intake layer in front of the CRM is AI lead intake for real estate brokerages; kvCORE and BoldTrail get the same layer on CRMs and automation; lead volume rather than follow up is real estate marketing; the whole practice, AI consulting in Toronto.