# The response gap: what the research actually says about unanswered enquiries

> Both Dubai portals now score you on how fast you reply. Here is what the independent research found, what it does not say, and how to measure your own desk against it.

Source: https://www.askeric.io/blog/the-enquiry-response-gap

Published 2026-08-30.

Tags: lead-response, brokerage-operations, market-data

## The short answer

The response gap has been measured properly twice, most recently in August 2024, and both times it was much wider than the businesses being measured believed. Neither study was run in Dubai. What is specific to Dubai is more useful than a benchmark anyway: both major portals now treat your response speed as something they measure and reward. That turns replying quickly from a virtue into a ranking input on money you have already spent.

## The part that is specific to Dubai

Property Finder's published guidance to UAE brokerages is to aim for a first response within five minutes during business hours. Its SuperAgent programme, which actually scores this rather than just advising it, sets a looser bar: a reply within two hours on WhatsApp leads and an overall response rate above 80%. Bayut runs the same idea through TruBroker, a points-based framework that scores agents partly on responsiveness and gives stronger profiles more visibility on the platform. Bayut reported passing 9,000 active TruBrokers in December 2025, up from just over 2,000 in February that year.

Read those two facts together and the commercial logic is blunt. You are already paying for placement. On both platforms, part of what decides how much visibility that spend actually buys is how fast your desk replies. Slow responses are not only losing you the individual buyer who got bored, they are quietly reducing the return on the subscription you have already committed to for the year.

That is a stronger argument than any imported statistic, and unlike a benchmark you can check it yourself in an afternoon by opening your own agents' profiles.

## What the two independent studies measured

**The recent one, and the one that matters most.** In August 2024 the analyst Mike DelPrete ran over 100 secret shops across more than 25 US brokerages, including Redfin, RE/MAX, Berkshire Hathaway, eXp, Douglas Elliman and Compass, enquiring about specific median-priced homes through each brokerage's own website. The findings were covered by HousingWire and the Miami Herald.

Forty-seven per cent of those enquiries received no response at all. Among the ones that did, the average time to a reply was 8 hours and 17 minutes, though the median was a far more reasonable 39 minutes. The gap between that average and that median is the shape of the problem: most replies were fine, and a long tail of them effectively never arrived.

The detail that matters most is easy to skim past. **Every enquiry was sent during normal business hours on a weekday.** This is not a story about nobody being awake at midnight. It is what happens to an enquiry that lands while the person it was routed to is in a viewing, in a car, or looking at something else.

DelPrete's shoppers also walked into open houses. Forty-two per cent of the time the hosting agent never asked for contact details at all, and of the agents who did ask, a third never followed up, so 62% of people who physically turned up to view a home heard nothing afterwards. His summary of the whole exercise was that interactions were "consistently inconsistent": there was no pattern to whether anyone followed up, it was a roll of the dice each time.

**The older, wider one.** In March 2011 Harvard Business Review published an audit by James Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran and David Elkington covering 2,241 US companies across many industries. Thirty-seven per cent replied to a test web enquiry within an hour, 16% within a day, 24% took longer, and 23% never replied at all. Among those that eventually did, the average was 42 hours. A companion study across 1.25 million leads found that contacting someone within the hour made a firm nearly seven times more likely to have a real conversation with a decision maker than contacting them an hour later, and more than sixty times more likely than waiting a day.

For completeness, the number most often quoted at brokerages, 917 minutes, comes from a WAV Group study in January 2014 across 384 US brokers in 11 states, which also found 48% of enquiries went unanswered. It is a decade old and it is the figure DelPrete's more recent work has largely superseded. If someone quotes 917 minutes at you as current, they have not checked.

## What none of it says

None of it says anything about Dubai. The two studies are American, one is fifteen years old and the other one year old, and neither sampled a UAE brokerage. Anybody presenting them as a description of your desk is overreaching, and that includes us.

They also do not say agents are lazy. The HBR authors' own explanation of the causes is worth reading: leads pulled out of a CRM in a daily batch rather than continuously, teams built around generating their own leads rather than reacting to inbound ones, and routing rules that distribute enquiries by geography and fairness rather than by who can answer now. Every one of those is a process choice the business made. WAV Group's follow-up counts point the same way: an average of 1.5 call-backs is not somebody who could not be bothered, it is somebody with no system telling them a fourth attempt was worth making.

And be careful with the numbers circulating locally. There is a good deal of content aimed at Dubai brokerages quoting confident figures about lost commission and recovered leads. Almost all of it traces to a supplier selling the fix, and several come from companies selling roughly what we sell. Our own position on that is set out separately, and it applies to us too.

## How to measure your own desk

Take a week of enquiries from one source. For each, record when it arrived and when a genuine human reply went out, not an autoresponder. Then count the ones with no second timestamp at all. Two figures fall out: your median first response, and your never-answered rate. The second is almost always the one nobody has ever counted, and it is usually the worse of the two.

Then split the same list by hour of arrival. If your median holds up during office hours and collapses in the evening, you have a coverage problem, and coverage does not respond to training or to a stricter internal rule, because the agent driving down Sheikh Zayed Road at 21:40 was never going to obey it. If your median is poor even during office hours, which is what DelPrete found, then it is a routing and ownership problem instead, and software that only covers the night will not fix it.

While you are there, open your own agents' Property Finder profiles and look at what the platform is telling buyers about how quickly each of them replies.

## What we do about it, stated plainly

Eric answers the enquiry when it lands, at any hour, and runs the qualifying conversation on WhatsApp before an agent is involved. That is a coverage fix and a consistency fix, which are the two things software is genuinely good at.

It is not a conversion claim. We have no measured askEric result to set beside the numbers above, because we have not run at enough desks for long enough to have earned one, and a manufactured multiple would be worth less than nothing. When we have one it will be a pilot brokerage's own figure, published with their name on it and their permission.

Until then the honest version is this. The research says the gap is real, structural, and wider than businesses believe. The portals say they are watching yours. Your own week of timestamps will tell you whether it is a problem at your desk, and if it is not, you do not need us.

## Sources

- [Mike DelPrete: Secret Shopping, 47% of Online Property Inquiries Are Ignored (August 2024)](https://www.mikedp.com/articles/2024/8/13/secret-shopping-47-of-online-property-inquiries-are-ignored)
- [HousingWire: Almost half of listing inquiries don't receive a response from an agent (August 2024)](https://www.housingwire.com/articles/almost-half-of-listing-inquiries-dont-receive-a-response-from-an-agent-delprete/)
- [Harvard Business Review: The Short Life of Online Sales Leads (Oldroyd, McElheran, Elkington, March 2011)](https://hbr.org/2011/03/the-short-life-of-online-sales-leads)
- [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/)
- [Bazaar Times: UAE property market shifts toward data-driven decisions as end-user demand strengthens (July 2026)](https://bazaartimes.com/uae-property-market-shifts-toward-data-driven-decisions-as-end-user-demand-strengthens/)
- [Gulf News (in association with Bayut): Bayut's TruBroker community surges past 9,000 agents (December 2025)](https://gulfnews.com/business/property/bayuts-trubroker-community-surges-past-9000-agents-1.500381362)