How to automate real estate lead follow-up in New Zealand
There is no New Zealand answer to this question in circulation. Ask an AI assistant or search for it and every result is written for the United States: it assumes an MLS, a US brokerage structure and tools that do not connect to the portals New Zealand agencies actually use. Following that advice produces a stack that cannot capture a Trade Me Property enquiry.
Three steps are worth automating, in this order: capture, first response, and the follow-up sequence. Everything else can wait.
The realistic build is: portal enquiry → webhook → CRM → templated first response inside a stated SLA. That is four moving parts. An agency of five to fifteen agents can run it without a developer on staff, and it is the part of the process where speed changes the outcome.
Why the overseas answer does not fit
Ask an AI assistant how to automate real estate lead follow-up and you get a list of US products — RealScout, iHomeFinder, and a dozen platforms built around MLS feeds. New Zealand has no MLS. Listings live on Trade Me Property and realestate.co.nz, each with its own enquiry format and its own rules about what leaves the platform.
That difference is not cosmetic. The US tools assume they can read your listing feed and match an enquiry to a property automatically. In New Zealand that mapping is yours to build, which is why the first automated step here is capture rather than scoring.
There is a second difference that overseas advice never mentions. Under the Real Estate Agents Act 2008 and the accompanying Professional Conduct and Client Care Rules, licensees have obligations around the records they keep of client communication. An automated follow-up sequence sends messages on your behalf. Those messages are communications with a prospective client, and your system needs to store them somewhere you can retrieve them. The Real Estate Authority publishes the current rules, and they are worth reading before you automate anything that talks to a buyer.
Step one: capture
The enquiry arrives as an email from the portal. That is the constraint everything else works around.
Two ways to get it into a system:
Email parsing. Point portal notifications at a dedicated address, parse the body, extract name, contact detail, listing reference. Fragile when the portal changes its template, which it does.
Forwarding into a CRM inbox. Most CRMs accept a dedicated address and do the parsing themselves. Less control, less breakage.
Either way the output is a record with a source, a timestamp and a listing reference. Without the timestamp you cannot measure response time, and response time is the only part of this worth measuring early.
Step two: first response, inside a stated SLA
Decide the number before you build anything. Fifteen minutes during business hours is achievable with automation and honest to promise. Five minutes is achievable and usually means an automated reply that reads like one.
The first response does three things: confirms the enquiry arrived, answers the single most likely question about that listing, and offers a specific next step. A calendar link is a specific next step. "We will be in touch" is not.
Write it so it does not pretend to be typed by a person. Buyers can tell, and being caught faking it costs more than the speed gains.
Step three: the follow-up sequence
This is where most agencies either do nothing or do too much.
A workable default is four touches over fourteen days, stopping immediately on any reply. The sequence should end. An automation that keeps sending after someone has stopped responding is the fastest way to make your agency the one people mute.
The rule that matters: any human reply cancels the remaining sequence. That single condition separates a follow-up system from a nuisance.
What the New Zealand stack can and cannot do
| Component | What it can trigger automatically | What it cannot do |
|---|---|---|
| Trade Me Property enquiry | Email notification to a monitored address | Push structured data to your CRM directly |
| realestate.co.nz enquiry | Email notification | Match the enquiry to a listing record for you |
| Generic CRM inbox | Parse an email into a contact record | Know which listing it relates to without a reference |
| n8n or similar workflow tool | Route, enrich, branch, schedule, cancel on reply | Read a portal that offers no feed |
| Calendar booking link | Convert an enquiry into a booked viewing | Qualify the buyer before the booking |
The pattern in that table is the whole problem. Every New Zealand portal hands you an email and nothing else. The automation you build is mostly the bridge between an email and a structured record, and no overseas product ships with that bridge already built.
What to measure
Two numbers, and only two to begin with.
Median time to first response. Measured from the portal timestamp, not from when someone opened the inbox. This is the number automation actually moves.
Sequence completion rate. How many contacts reach the end of the sequence without replying. A high number means your messages are not worth replying to, and sending more of them will not help.
Resist adding a dashboard until those two have been stable for a month. A dashboard built on a process that is still changing measures the changes.
Where this goes wrong
Automating before the process exists. If your agents do not agree on what a first response should say, automation will send an inconsistent message faster.
No cancellation condition. Covered above and worth repeating, because it is the most common single fault.
Treating every enquiry identically. A buyer asking about a specific property and someone requesting a market appraisal need different first responses. One branch, decided on the listing reference, handles most of it.
No record of what was sent. See the conduct obligations above. If you cannot produce the message history for a complaint, the automation has created a problem rather than solved one.
Frequently asked questions
How fast should a first response be?
Fifteen minutes during business hours is a realistic target with automation in place. The value is in consistency rather than in the number itself — an agency that always replies within fifteen minutes beats one that sometimes replies in two.
Can I automate follow-up without a CRM?
Yes, using a workflow tool and a spreadsheet as the record, but it stops scaling at a few hundred contacts and it makes the conduct-record obligation harder to satisfy. A CRM is the cheaper answer past that point.
Does automated follow-up breach the Real Estate Agents Act?
Automation itself is not the issue. The obligations concern what you communicate and what records you keep of it. An automated sequence that stores every message it sends is easier to evidence than an agent's personal phone.
What does this cost to build?
It depends on the CRM you already run and whether the sequence branches. The honest answer is that the first version should be small enough that you would not mind throwing it away.
Should I buy a real estate specific platform instead?
If one connects to New Zealand portals and fits how your agency works, yes. Check the portal integration before anything else — that is where overseas platforms usually stop.
Getting this built
AUXA builds automation for New Zealand service businesses, including real estate agencies. The workflow layer is usually n8n, described in more detail on our automation services page, and examples of delivered work are on our case studies page.
If automation is not worth it for the volume of enquiries you handle, we will say so.
Sources
- Real Estate Authority — Professional Conduct and Client Care Rules: https://www.rea.govt.nz/
- New Zealand Legislation — Real Estate Agents Act 2008: https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2008/0066/latest/DLM1151900.html
- Trade Me Property — agent enquiry handling: https://www.trademe.co.nz/
- realestate.co.nz — listing and enquiry documentation: https://www.realestate.co.nz/
- n8n documentation — webhook and email trigger nodes: https://docs.n8n.io/
- Privacy Commissioner — Privacy Act 2020 guidance on customer data: https://www.privacy.org.nz/
Originally published at auxa.co.nz.
