99acres, MagicBricks and Housing.com Leads: How to Reply Before Your Competitors Do

Property portal leads are some of the most valuable enquiries a builder or broker receives, and some of the easiest to lose. A buyer browsing 99acres, MagicBricks or Housing.com is actively looking, has a budget in mind, and usually knows the locality. The catch is that the same buyer has probably clicked "contact" on five or six other listings in the same session. Whoever calls back first, and makes the call useful, gets the site visit.

This guide covers why portal buyers behave this way, a daily routine for replying fast, keeping every enquiry in one list, handling duplicates, and finding out which portal produces site visits.

01Why portal buyers enquire with several listings at once

A buyer on a portal filters by city, locality, budget and BHK, scrolls through similar projects, and taps the enquiry button on every one that looks reasonable. It costs them nothing.

So property portal leads are rarely exclusive. You are in a queue with other developers and brokers who received the same name and number at the same minute. Research published in the Harvard Business Review found that most companies respond to online enquiries far too slowly, and a portal enquiry goes cold quickly while it waits.

Two things follow. Speed matters more than polish: a short, helpful call in ten minutes beats a perfect pitch the next morning. And the first call has to give the buyer a reason to remember you among everyone who called that day.

02Decide who owns property portal leads

The most common reason portal enquiries are slow is not laziness. It is that nobody is sure whose job they are. The alerts go to an owner's email, and telecallers assume someone else has picked it up.

• Name one owner per portal account. This person checks the portal inbox and email alerts and makes sure every enquiry is assigned. They do not have to make every call.
• Decide how leads are split. By project, by locality, or in rotation. Write the rule down so there is no argument later.
• Set a backup. When the owner is on leave or at a site visit, someone else checks the inbox. A portal account with no one watching it on a Sunday is a leak.
• Agree a response target. For example, every new portal enquiry gets a call within 30 minutes during working hours. Pick a target your team can actually meet.

03A response routine your team can follow every day

Do not rely on someone noticing an alert in a busy inbox. Build a schedule for property portal leads.

1. Check the portal inbox and email alerts at fixed times. For example at 9:30, 11:30, 1:30, 3:30, 5:30 and 7:30. Between checks, whoever has the alerts on their phone acts on them immediately.
2. Move every new enquiry into your lead list at each check, with the portal name as the source. An enquiry that lives only inside the portal dashboard will be forgotten.
3. Assign and call. The assigned person calls within the target time.
4. Log the outcome and the next step before moving to the next lead: reached or not reached, interested or not, and a next follow-up date.
5. Retry unanswered calls later the same day and again the next morning. Many portal buyers do not pick up unknown numbers on the first try.

If your business gets enquiries late at night, also read our guide on replying to property enquiries on WhatsApp fast, which covers out-of-hours replies.

04The first call: a short script that earns the site visit

The buyer may not remember your listing among the many they tapped. Open by reminding them, then be useful quickly.

• Introduce and anchor: "Hello, this is Priya from the Green Valley project in Wakad. You enquired about our 2 BHK on a property portal a little while ago. Is this a good time for two minutes?"
• Confirm the basics: budget range, BHK, preferred locality, and whether they are buying to live or to invest.
• Ask about timeline: are they looking to buy in the next month, the next three months, or just exploring?
• Give one specific reason to visit: a particular floor plan, a sample flat that is ready to see, or a payment plan that fits the budget they mentioned.
• Offer two visit slots, for example Saturday at 11 or Sunday at 4, rather than asking "when are you free?"
• Ask permission to WhatsApp: "Can I send you the brochure, location and floor plan on WhatsApp?"

The names are only an example. Keep the call under five minutes: the goal is to be remembered and to fix a visit, not to sell the flat on the phone.

WhatsApp follow-up, with consent

WhatsApp is where most Indian buyers prefer to receive brochures and locations, but it should follow a clear yes. The WhatsApp Business Messaging Policy says you may contact people only after they have given you their number and opt-in permission to receive messages from you. A portal enquiry alone is not the same as agreeing to marketing messages, so ask on the call and note the answer.

Once the buyer agrees, send the brochure, a location pin and the floor plan for the configuration they asked about, together with the visit slot you agreed. Keep marketing messages for people who have said yes. In ArthaLeads each WhatsApp lead carries a consent status, and marketing templates skip anyone who said no.

05Getting property portal leads into one list

The biggest operational problem with property portal leads is fragmentation. Some enquiries sit in the 99acres dashboard, some in MagicBricks, some in Housing.com, some in an owner's email, and a few have been copied into a telecaller's notebook. Nobody can see the full picture.

Bring them into one list, every day, with the source recorded. To be clear about how this works in ArthaLeads: there is no automatic connection to 99acres, MagicBricks or Housing.com. Portal leads are either added manually, one at a time, or imported from a sheet. A practical routine is to export or copy the day's enquiries into a CSV or Excel file and import it, with a column for the portal name so the source is tagged on every lead. For a handful of enquiries, adding them by hand at each inbox check is quicker.

Whatever system you use, the rule is the same: every lead has a source, an owner, a stage and a next follow-up date. Our guide to real estate lead management from enquiry to site visit explains how to set up those stages.

06Handling duplicates without losing history

Because buyers enquire on several portals and several projects, the same phone number often arrives two or three times. If each copy goes to a different telecaller, the buyer gets three calls from your office in an hour, which looks disorganised.

• Search before you call. Check the phone number against your existing list before dialling a new enquiry.
• Keep one record per buyer. Add the new enquiry as a note on the existing lead, mentioning which portal and which project it came from.
• Keep the original owner. The person already talking to the buyer should keep the lead unless there is a clear reason to reassign.

On the Growth plan, ArthaLeads has duplicate lead detection, which flags a lead whose number already exists. It is still worth training the team to search first.

07Tracking which portal produces site visits

Portal subscriptions are a real expense, and every owner eventually asks which one is worth renewing. Counting enquiries does not answer it.

Track three numbers for each portal, every month:

1. Enquiries received with that portal as the source.
2. Site visits done from those enquiries.
3. Bookings from those enquiries, looked at over a rolling three months because property decisions take time.

Say, as a purely hypothetical example, one portal sends 200 enquiries and 10 site visits in a month, and another sends 80 enquiries and 12 site visits. The second is doing more for your sales even though it looks smaller. This only works if the source is recorded on every lead from day one, which is why the import step above matters. Our guide to measuring a real estate sales team covers how to review these numbers each week.

08Listings that bring better portal enquiries

Replying fast matters most, but the listing decides who enquires in the first place. A clear, current listing brings fewer enquiries that waste a call and more that turn into visits:

• Show the real starting price and the configurations on offer, so buyers outside your range scroll past instead of enquiring.
• Use real photos of the sample flat and the site, and keep the possession date up to date.
• Give the exact locality and a well-known landmark, so buyers looking in another area do not enquire by mistake.
• Remove or update listings for units that are sold, so your team is not answering enquiries it cannot fulfil.
• Put the RERA registration number on the listing. Buyers increasingly look for it, and it answers a question before they have to ask.

09Start replying faster this week

You do not need a new system to start handling property portal leads better. Name an owner for each portal account, set fixed inbox check times, use a short first-call script, ask before you WhatsApp, and keep every enquiry in one list with its source. Within a month you will know which portal is earning its fee.

If you want those leads, follow-ups and source reports in one place, see all ArthaLeads features or start a 14-day free trial.