Speed to lead: what the research actually says

The research on speed to lead says one thing clearly: the odds of reaching and qualifying a web lead fall off sharply within minutes, and keep falling for hours. Most of the numbers you see quoted come from just two studies, both involving Dr. James Oldroyd, and they are often misquoted.

This post goes back to those two sources, reports only what they say, notes where they fall short, and then translates the findings into what they mean for a real estate agent’s week.

Where do the speed-to-lead numbers come from?

Almost every speed-to-lead statistic traces back to one of two pieces of research:

1. The Lead Response Management study, by InsideSales.com with Dr. James Oldroyd, then a faculty fellow at MIT. It was presented in October 2007 and is the source of the “5 minutes versus 30 minutes” findings.
2. “The Short Life of Online Sales Leads,” by James B. Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran and David Elkington, published in the March 2011 issue of Harvard Business Review. This is the source of the “within an hour” findings.

The two are frequently blended together. The 100x figure is often credited to Harvard, but it comes from the earlier study. Here is what each one actually reports.

What did the Lead Response Management study find?

The Lead Response Management study summary describes three years of data across six companies that generate and respond to web leads, covering more than fifteen thousand leads and more than one hundred thousand call attempts. Its one question was when companies should call web-generated leads for the best contact and qualification rates.

The headline findings, in the study’s own terms:

• 5 versus 30 minutes. “The odds of contacting a lead if called in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drop 100 times. The odds of qualifying a lead if called in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drop 21 times.”
• 5 versus 10 minutes. Going from 5 to 10 minutes, the contact odds decreased by 5 times and the qualify odds by 4 times.
• The first hour. The odds of contacting a lead decreased by over 10 times in the first hour, and the odds of qualifying by over 6 times.
• After 20 hours. The authors reported a statistically significant effect that after 20 hours, “every additional dial your salespeople make actually hurts your ability to make contact to qualify a lead.”

The study also looked at timing. It found Wednesdays and Thursdays were the best days to call, with 4 to 6 p.m. the best time block for making contact, and 8 to 9 a.m. and 4 to 5 p.m. the best times to qualify.

Two details are worth keeping in mind. A “contact” meant a call that connected with a live person for a defined length of time, and “qualify” was defined by each company in its own way. And the study says plainly that it “did not address close ratios.”

What did the Harvard Business Review article find?

The HBR article reported two things.

First, how fast companies actually respond. The authors audited 2,241 U.S. companies by sending each a web-generated test lead:

Among companies that responded within 30 days, the average response time was 42 hours.

Second, what that delay costs. In a separate study of 1.25 million sales leads received by 29 B2C and 13 B2B companies in the U.S., firms that tried to contact potential customers within an hour were “nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead” as those that tried even an hour later, and more than 60 times as likely as companies that waited 24 hours or longer. The authors defined qualifying as having a meaningful conversation with a key decision maker.

The article also named why companies are slow, and the list will sound familiar: retrieving leads from CRM databases “daily rather than continuously,” sales teams focused on generating their own leads rather than reacting to inbound interest, and rules for distributing leads based on geography and “fairness.”

Where does this research fall short?

It is worth being precise about the limits, because the numbers get stretched a long way.

• It is not real estate data. The HBR article mentions industries like financial services, automobiles, education, software and health care. Neither source reports real estate results.
• It is old. The studies were published in 2007 and 2011, before texting became a normal first touch and before AI calling existed.
• It measures calls. Both studies measure attempts to call. They say nothing about whether a fast text changes the curve.
• It stops at contact and qualification. Neither measures closed deals. The LRM study says so explicitly.
• It is observational. Companies that respond fast may also be better run in other ways. The studies show a strong association, not a controlled experiment.

None of that makes the finding wrong. The direction is consistent across both studies and every time window they measured. It just means you should quote the principle, not the multipliers, when you talk about real estate leads.

What does it mean for real estate agents?

Agents are still central to how people buy and sell homes. In NAR’s 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, 88% of buyers purchased through a real estate agent or broker and 91% of sellers sold with the assistance of an agent. The lead that fills out a form is, in most cases, going to work with someone. The question is who reaches them while they are still paying attention.

The problem is that an agent’s schedule is built around exactly the moments when leads arrive and nobody can respond:

• Showings. You cannot take a call from a new lead while walking another buyer through a kitchen.
• Nights. A lead that comes in at 10 p.m. usually waits until someone checks their phone in the morning. By the research’s own time windows, that is hours of lost ground before the first call.
• Weekends. Open houses and weekend showings fill the very days when a new inquiry has nobody free to answer it.
• Round-robins and batch checks. These are the real estate versions of the “fairness” rules and daily CRM pulls the HBR authors described.

By the research’s own logic, a lead that waits through a showing has already lost most of its early advantage. A lead that waits overnight is closer to the “more than 24 hours” group than the “within an hour” group.

How automation closes the gap

The fix the research points to is structural: respond continuously, not in batches, and do not make the first touch depend on someone being free. That is a job software does well, as long as it also does the parts that matter to the lead: identifying who they are, checking consent and contact rules, and sounding like a person on your team. We walk through that sequence step by step in The first 60 seconds after a lead fills out a form.

Forward Flow was built around this. A new lead gets its first touch within the first minute. Each lead then gets its own campaign of calls, texts, emails and voicemail, run at the hours that lead actually answers, for as long as it takes. Calls are real conversations, and when a lead is ready to talk, the call transfers to you live with a short brief. If you want to know how those calls work, see How an AI follow-up call works.

The research says the first minutes matter. The most useful test is to be the lead yourself: go to /experience, fill out the form as a buyer or seller, and time how long it takes for your phone to ring. Or book a 20-minute demo on your own leads.