The problem started with a direct message from a Surat real estate operator: roughly 60 to 70 inbound WhatsApp leads every single day, and nearly 90% never received a reply because the business did not have enough sales staff to respond fast enough.
That is not a minor operational gap—it is a capital destruction problem. Public industry estimates in Indian real estate put the cost of acquiring a single qualified lead anywhere between ₹5,000 and ₹50,000 depending on channel, city, and project tier. Even at the conservative end, 60 unreplied leads per day represents ₹3 lakh or more in wasted acquisition value daily. At scale, that is the advertising budget working against the business instead of for it.
The urgency gap is well documented. In the Lead Response Management study published through Harvard Business Review (Oldroyd, McFarland, Elkington, 2011), firms that contacted web leads within five minutes were 21 times more likely to qualify the lead than firms that waited thirty minutes. MIT Sloan and related sales-operations research on online lead behavior reinforce the same pattern: speed-to-lead is one of the highest-leverage variables in conversion, and delay compounds quickly.
In Surat's WhatsApp-first market, the reality is worse than the thirty-minute benchmark. Buyers message multiple brokers at once. If one broker replies in seconds with relevant options and another replies two hours later with "Sir please share budget," the slow broker has already lost the conversation before a human ever joins.
The operator who contacted me was not an edge case. Small and mid-size brokerages across Gujarat run Meta and portal campaigns, collect high-intent WhatsApp traffic, and then choke on manual triage: greeting, budget, area, timeline, purpose, matching inventory, sending photos, offering site visits, and notifying the right salesperson. A three-person team cannot do that consistently for seventy conversations a day.
They needed first-touch automation that still felt local and human—not a generic chatbot—and a way for the broker to see qualified leads, take over hot conversations, and stop burning money on silence.
