# The speed-to-lead sum for a Dubai desk, run with your own numbers > Speed to lead is the gap between an enquiry landing and a real reply going out. Here is the exact arithmetic to run on your own numbers, not a borrowed benchmark. Source: https://www.askeric.io/blog/speed-to-lead-arithmetic-for-a-dubai-desk Published 2026-09-11. Tags: brokerage, lead-qualification ## The short answer Speed to lead is the gap between an enquiry landing and a genuine human reply going out. The one study that measured it at scale, a 2014 WAV Group audit of 384 US brokers, found 48% of buyer enquiries were never answered at all, and the ones that were took an average of 917 minutes. Measure your own desk the same way, because that industry number tells you nothing about yours. ## The three numbers your enquiry log already has You do not need a benchmark to run this sum. You need three numbers your own enquiry log already contains for last month, taken from one source at a time (one portal, one campaign, one referral channel), so the arithmetic stays clean. **Enquiries.** How many actually landed from that source. Not leads assigned, not leads an agent opened, the raw count that arrived. **Reached.** How many got a reply from an actual person, not an autoresponder or a WhatsApp template acknowledgement. If nobody currently logs that second timestamp, start this month. You cannot run this sum retroactively without it. **Converted.** Of the ones that were reached, how many turned into a genuine two-way exchange, rather than one message that went unanswered in return. Three numbers, one source, one month. Everything below is what to do with them. ## Why 917 minutes is not a Dubai number The most complete study of this gap is neither new nor Dubai. In January 2014 WAV Group, working with Weichert Lead Network, posed as consumers across 384 different brokers in 11 US states, enquiring about listings on broker websites, Zillow, Realtor.com and Trulia. Forty-eight per cent of those enquiries never received a reply at all. The average number of call-back attempts after the first contact was 1.5, and the average response time across the sample was 917 minutes. The same whitepaper also reported Weichert Lead Network's own internal numbers, because the study began as an attempt to benchmark Weichert against the industry it competes in: 60,663 leads a month, 100% of buyers responded to, an average response time of three minutes, and five to eleven follow-up attempts per lead. Put those two sets of numbers side by side and speed is not the only variable worth noticing. Weichert's own agents also made three to seven times as many follow-up attempts as the industry average of 1.5, on top of replying over 300 times faster. Same industry, same era, both gaps pointing the same way: a desk that treats a second and third attempt as part of the job looks nothing like one that does not. For the fuller research picture, including a more recent 2024 audit and what the two Dubai portals now do with your own agents' response speed, see our piece on the [response gap](/blog/the-enquiry-response-gap). None of the WAV Group numbers describe your desk, and a decade-old US study should never be quoted at it as if they do. What they are useful for is a working assumption worth testing: response rate is set by whether a process exists at all, not by the quality of the enquiry. Check that against your own three numbers before assuming the gap does or does not apply to you. ## Turning the gap into a number worth presenting Once you have Enquiries, Reached% and Converted% for one month, the sum is short. Conversations = Enquiries x Reached% x Converted% That is the number of genuine two-way exchanges your desk produced from that source last month. Now ask the question a coverage fix is actually meant to answer: if Reached% moved from what it is now to something closer to 100%, holding Converted% constant, how many more conversations would that same batch of enquiries have produced? Extra conversations = Enquiries x (Target Reached% minus current Reached%) x Converted% That figure is yours, built from your own log, and it is the one worth taking into a management meeting rather than any percentage quoted at you by a vendor. If you want the deeper version of turning a portal invoice into a real per-conversation cost rather than a per-enquiry one, that is the whole subject of our piece on [working out your real cost per enquiry](/blog/work-out-your-real-cost-per-enquiry). If you want to put a rough value on the gap rather than leave it as a count, Dubai Land Department's own 2025 figures, published by Dubai Media Office on 9 March 2026, give a market-wide anchor: AED 13.59 billion in brokerage commissions across 96,440 broker-executed transactions in 2025, which works out to roughly AED 140,900 of commission per broker-handled transaction, as of 2025. That is a citywide average, not a figure for your desk or your typical deal, so use your own average commission per closed transaction if you know it, and reach for the market figure only if you do not. Extra conversations, multiplied by your own conversation-to-deal rate, multiplied by your average commission per deal, is the roughest possible version of what the gap in your Reached% is costing you. It will not survive scrutiny as a forecast, and it is not meant to. It exists to turn a percentage nobody in the building currently owns into a number somebody has to explain. ## Whether your problem is speed or persistence Split whichever number you have, Reached% or Converted%, by hour of arrival, and you will usually find one of two shapes. If the split is flat across office hours and falls off a cliff in the evening and at weekends, the gap is a coverage problem: an enquiry sits unanswered because nobody was rostered to see it, and training or a stricter internal target will not fix a roster gap. If the split is poor even during office hours, the gap looks closer to what the WAV Group study actually described: a routing and follow-up problem, an enquiry assigned to somebody who is busy, with no second or third attempt scheduled if the first one goes nowhere. The fix for each is different, and running the split by hour is what tells you which one you actually have. ## What this sum cannot tell you Converted% depends on things this arithmetic cannot see: the quality of the enquiry, whether your source sends genuine buyers or window shoppers, your market and your price point. A desk with a strong Reached% and a weak Converted% has a qualification problem the sum above will not fix, and treating it as a speed problem would waste whatever you spend solving it. Run both numbers before deciding which one is worth the budget. ## What we do about the first number Eric answers an enquiry the moment it lands, at any hour, and keeps a WhatsApp conversation going rather than waiting for an agent to become free, which is a direct answer to the Reached% side of this sum. It is not a claim about Converted%, and we have not measured what our own conversion rate looks like against a desk's baseline, because a manufactured multiple would be worth less than the arithmetic above. Run your own three numbers first. If your Reached% is already close to 100%, the gap this piece is about does not exist at your desk, and you do not need us to close it. ## Sources - [WAV Group: Agent Responsiveness Study Reveals Critical Flaws in Real Estate Lead Response (January 2014)](https://www.wavgroup.com/2014/01/13/agent-responsiveness-study-reveals-critical-flaws-in-real-estate-lead-response/) - [Dubai Media Office: Dubai's brokerage sector strengthens its role as a key driver of market growth in 2025 (9 March 2026)](https://mediaoffice.ae/en/news/2026/march/09-03/dubai-brokerage-sector-strengthens-its-role-as-a-key-driver-of-market-growth-in-2025)