A US portal takes 30 per cent of a commission at closing for routing an enquiry, 35 per cent above a price line. That is this stage left unbuilt.
Round robin is bought. Dropping is not. Every tier of the CRM you pay for hands the next enquiry to the next agent. Then it stops watching. At a six-person brokerage the Saturday enquiry has an owner by Sunday, and no call from anyone.
By hand today
Round-robin is on every tier of the CRM you already pay for. Follow Up Boss lists “Round robin lead distribution” and “Advanced lead distribution based on price/ZIP Code” on its cheapest plan, at $69 a user a month (followupboss.com). This chapter builds no routing. What none of the products does is take a lead back when the person it went to does nothing with it.
The deepest public build stops in the same place. InsulaCRM runs a locked round-robin and, every minute, force-assigns any lead nobody claimed inside three minutes. Then it looks away. A lead handed to an agent who does nothing for three weeks is never taken back.
“I’ve lost a ton of money due to leads slipping through the cracks”
Trevor Y., Realtor, on Capterra
A 2011 audit of 2,241 US companies named the cause: “rules for distributing sales leads among agents and partners based on geography and ‘fairness.’”. It did not study real estate, and one author sold response software; the sentence still describes the rota. Fairness is chosen because the alternative is an argument.
What it costs you each week
30 per cent
Of the commission, taken by a US portal at closing, for routing an enquiry to an agent who claims it. Above a price line it is 35 per cent. That is the market price of this stage left unbuilt.
Source: ReadyConnect Concierge referral fee, reported by Clever Real Estate, read 14 September 2026
Realtor.com’s ReadyConnect Concierge, formerly Opcity, phones the enquiry itself, alerts agents by text or push, and an agent clicks to claim it (support.therealbrokerage.com). The fee is 30 per cent of the commission at closing on sales under $150,000 and 35 per cent above (listwithclever.com). A brokerage that cannot keep its own enquiries moving pays a third of the revenue on every deal, forever, to a portal that can.
The build
Open Codex. Ask for the timer. It reads each enquiry with an owner and nothing done in N minutes, and moves it, reason on the record. N is a ruling you make once. A lead never sits unowned, and never sits owned and untouched.
Open Codex in the engine folder. The enquiry chapter 10 routed to a viewing sits on a contact, with the owner the rota gave it. Connect the CRM’s own server. HubSpot’s remote server reads and writes contacts and the calls, notes and tasks on them, and reads owners and teams (developers.hubspot.com). Follow Up Boss publishes no server of its own; the live community one, written by a broker in Austin, covers the whole API, ponds included (github.com). Write window.md once: N, the minutes an owned enquiry may sit with nothing logged; what counts as action; and the order a lead moves in, the next name in the rota, then the shared pool, then you. Then say what you want:
Every five minutes, read every contact routed to viewing that has an
owner. Find the newest call, note, message or task the owner logged on
it. Where nothing has been logged for longer than the minutes in
window.md, move the contact to the next person in window.md, note on
the record who had it, how long it sat and who has it now, and create
a task for the new owner. Where an enquiry has no owner, give it one
the same way. Never delete anything and never message the client.
Report each morning: received, touched inside the window, moved, and
moved twice.
What comes back is a script, a schedule and four counts, and on every moved lead a note that says why.
Three honest limits, which Codex will tell you about. The timer reads what was logged, so a call from a personal phone that was never written down reads as no action, and the lead moves from someone who was working it; chapter 16 stops the logging depending on typing. A HubSpot account with sensitive data turned on blocks the activities the server reads (developers.hubspot.com), so a run that sees nothing says so. And the Follow Up Boss server is one person’s project with full write access; it can delete, and the instruction says never.
What it feeds
The viewing. The next stage books the viewing and stops the ones where nobody turns up. It needs an owner who acted. The number to read: enquiries with no action after N minutes, beside the total received, and how many moved.
Chapter 13 books the viewing and recovers the ones where nobody turns up. It needs a lead whose owner has done something.
The number that proves this stage worked is enquiries with no action after N minutes, beside the total received, and the count moved. A timer that never moves anything is either perfect or not watching.
What stays with a person
Who is right for this client. The rota says who is next. Sometimes the principal should overrule it, and that overruling is protected here. N is a ruling, made once. What happens to a name moved three times is a conversation.
The rota answers who is next. Who is right for this client is a different question, and the principal sometimes answers it against the rota. The build never chooses between two people who both would act.
N is set once, in window.md, by a person who knows the team. A name that keeps appearing in the moved column is a management matter:
“If they didnt have an emergency reason for missing the appointment, I would reévaluate their employment with me. They are representing you (as the Broker), not only is it disrespetful but reflects poorly on your company.”
Jacklyn Van Hoef, Fortune International Realty, Miami FL, on ActiveRain
The tools you already pay for
Nothing new to buy.
CRM gains a note on every moved lead and a task for its new owner; HubSpot here, or Follow Up Boss, Pipedrive or Zoho through their own servers.
Rota is the product’s round-robin, untouched.
Pool is the pond on Follow Up Boss: where a lead goes when the rota runs out of names.
Every enquiry has an owner who acted, and every one that sat is counted and moved. Then the viewing can book itself.
Ask: Of the enquiries that landed on Saturday, who found out on Monday that nobody had called?
This is stage 12 of twenty, after running the whole first conversation on WhatsApp and before stopping viewings where nobody turns up. The whole engine in order is the book, Building a real estate sales engine with Claude Code and Codex, end to end.