A 15-minute weekly check on your team's lead follow-up

How can a team lead check follow-up in 15 minutes a week?

Pick one time each week, open your lead system and look at the same five things: new leads by source, first reply time, leads waiting on a reply, follow-ups that stopped, and opt-outs. Fifteen minutes is enough to spot a lead going quiet before it is lost. The goal is not a report. It is one or two fixes each week.

This check works for a two-agent team or a ten-agent team, in any system that shows lead sources and activity.

Why check every week?

Follow-up breaks quietly. A website form stops feeding your lead system, an agent goes on holiday, a stack of open house sign-ins sits on a desk. Nobody gets an error message. The leads just stop getting answers.

Both speed and persistence matter. In NAR's 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers (US data, as summarized by BAM), 67% of first-time buyers hired the first agent they spoke with. In a 2011 Harvard Business Review study of 2,241 US companies, 23% never replied to a web lead at all. A weekly check is how a team lead catches problems like these on their own team, before a buyer moves on.

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What should you look at each week?

Use the same order every time, so the check gets faster:

Minutes 1 to 3, new leads by source: how many came from REALTOR.ca, the website, ads, sign calls and open houses? A source showing zero may be broken, not quiet.
Minutes 4 to 6, first reply: pick five new leads. When did the first message go out, and when did a person first answer?
Minutes 7 to 9, waiting on you: which leads replied and have not heard back? Assign each one to an agent today.
Minutes 10 to 12, follow-up that stopped: which leads from the last 30 days have had no message in a week? Restart them, or close them out with a reason.
Minutes 13 to 15, opt-outs and wording: did anyone reply STOP, and were they stopped? Does every automated text still name the agent and the brokerage?

What numbers are worth writing down?

Keep a short log, one line per week:

New leads by source
Median time to the first reply from a person
Leads waiting on a reply at the time of the check
Leads with no follow-up in the last 7 days
Opt-outs, and whether each one was honoured

Why use your own numbers instead of industry averages?

The reply-time research cited in these posts is from the US, and we found no Canadian study of agent reply times. After a month of weekly checks you will see your own pattern, by source and by agent. That beats any outside average, because it is your team, your sources and your market.

It also makes coaching easier. Instead of a general push to be faster, you can point to the exact leads that waited and agree on one change.

What do you do when the check finds a gap?

Fix one thing at a time, starting with the leads closest to a decision:

A source shows zero: test it by sending yourself a lead through it.
Replies are waiting: set an alert so the owning agent hears about a reply, not only about a new lead.
Follow-up stops after a few days: add scheduled follow-ups, in approved wording, until the lead replies or says STOP.
Paper sign-ins are late: set a same-day rule or add a QR sign-in form.
Texts are missing the brokerage name: update the templates. RECO in Ontario and RECA in Alberta both expect the brokerage to be clearly identified when you advertise.

Can this check run by itself?

Parts of it can. Many lead systems let you save a view or report for new leads by source, leads waiting on a reply and leads with no recent activity. Setting those up once turns the weekly check into a quick review instead of a search.

The judgment still belongs to a person: which agent takes a lead, which wording to change, and when to pick up the phone instead of sending another text.

Questions

Who should do the weekly check?

The team lead, or an assistant who reports to the team lead. Whoever does it needs to see every agent's leads and be able to reassign them.

What if we only get a few leads a week?

Then the check is even quicker, and each lead matters more. Look at every new lead, not a sample of five.

If you'd rather walk through this check once with someone, book an AI Review. We go through your lead sources and trace one recent lead with you, and you pick the three jobs you'd most like to take off your plate. It's a short screen share, and you leave with a short written summary of your top three.

Sources

Brendon Bellerose, founderToronto, Ontario