Real estate automations: five follow-up problems, five tested fixes

Real estate agent automation for US solo agents and small teams on Follow Up Boss: a lead auto-reply that texts only leads who agreed to texts, contract deadlines on everyone's calendar, a weekly lender and title status check, open house follow-up from the sign-in form, and home-anniversary emails to past clients. Each recipe is an n8n workflow with setup steps, a monthly cost from the vendors' own price pages and the result of our test run. No AI model is used: every message is a template you approve, names you and your brokerage, and stops when someone replies STOP.

Problem 1
New leads wait hours for a first reply
Fix: Speed-to-lead auto-reply for Follow Up Boss: email right away, text only with recorded consent.
Verified with mocksLast tested 2026-10-28
Problem 2
Contract deadlines live in a PDF and a sticky note
Fix: Contract deadline calendar: confirmed dates to Google Calendar with reminders (optional dotloop pre-fill).
Verified with mocksLast tested 2026-10-28
Problem 3
Chasing lenders and title for status updates
Fix: Lender and title status requests by email, with replies logged and a client update draft.
Verified with mocksLast tested 2026-10-28
Problem 4
Open-house sign-ins never get followed up
Fix: Open-house sign-in to Follow Up Boss, with a thank-you and one follow-up.
Verified with mocksLast tested 2026-10-28
Problem 5
Past clients forget their agent
Fix: Home anniversary emails and call reminders for past clients (Follow Up Boss).
Verified with mocksLast tested 2026-10-28

Why these five

New leads and open-house visitors

Mike DelPrete's secret-shopper test, reported by HousingWire: of 100 inquiries sent through brokerage websites during weekday business hours, 47% got no reply at all. The median reply that did come took 39 minutes. HousingWire (Aug 2024) on Mike DelPrete's secret-shopper test of 100 listing inquiries and open-house visits Mike DelPrete's secret-shopper test, reported by HousingWire: about 42% of open-house visitors weren't asked for their contact details, and 62% of in-person shoppers got no follow-up after the tour. HousingWire (Aug 2024) on Mike DelPrete's secret-shopper test of 100 listing inquiries and open-house visits

Deadlines and chasing

In Sifta's count of 7,439 agent comments, transaction paperwork and deadlines was the second most common complaint (319 comments), after prospecting (426). Vendor analysis. Sifta: What real estate agents complain about (7,439 r/realtors and r/RealEstate comments, July 2026) In Sifta's count of 7,439 agent comments, chasing lenders, title and other agents for documents and updates came up 179 times. Vendor analysis. Sifta: What real estate agents complain about (7,439 r/realtors and r/RealEstate comments, July 2026)

Past clients

NAR's 2025 Member Profile: the typical Realtor got 20% of their business from repeat clients and 21% from referrals by past clients and customers. NAR, Income Steady, Even as Market Slows: 2025 Member Trends (Aug 6, 2025, on the 2025 Member Profile)

What each recipe does

Speed to lead: reply in minutes, text only with consent

When a new lead lands in Follow Up Boss, the workflow emails them right away (from you, naming your brokerage), texts them only if your lead form recorded written consent to texts, and only between 8 am and 9 pm in their time zone. You get a text alert and a note on the lead. If you haven't reached them 24 hours later and they haven't replied, they get one follow-up and you get a call task. That's the most it ever sends: two automatic touches. Setup, costs and test results.

Contract deadlines on everyone's calendar

After you or your transaction coordinator confirm the dates in a short form (option period, inspection, appraisal, financing, title, final walkthrough, closing), the workflow puts each one on Google Calendar as an all-day event with an email reminder 3 days before and a pop-up the day before, invites the TC, and emails a summary with an .ics file. Weekends and federal holidays are flagged, not moved: your contract decides how they count. Amendments move the existing events; a terminated deal removes them. Every morning you get a digest of what's due in the next 3 days. Setup, costs and test results.

Lender and title status updates without the chasing

Every Tuesday the workflow emails the lender and the title or escrow officer on each open deal one short status request with a deal code in the subject. Replies come back through Resend's inbound email, are matched by code and sender, logged in a Google Sheet, and 'clear to close' or delay words text you right away. On Thursday it nudges only whoever hasn't answered. On Friday you get a client update draft for each deal, written from fixed phrases with a wire-fraud reminder; it never forwards the lender's wording to your client. Setup, costs and test results.

Open house follow-up that starts at the sign-in

Visitors sign in on a tablet form (included). Each sign-in becomes a 'Visited Open House' event in Follow Up Boss, so the person is created or matched and your own action plan can pick them up. Two hours after the visit they get a thank-you email; a text only if they ticked the unticked-by-default consent box, inside quiet hours. Two days later at 10 am they get one follow-up, unless you've already talked to them. Visitors who say they work with another agent get a thank-you email only. Setup, costs and test results.

Past clients: home anniversaries and check-ins

Every morning the workflow finds Follow Up Boss past clients whose closing anniversary is today and sends one short personal email from you, with your office address and a working unsubscribe link (plus the one-click unsubscribe header that mail apps such as Gmail use). Clients with recorded text consent also get a text. Three days before, you get a Follow Up Boss call task so you can call or drop by first. One email per client per year; unsubscribes are tagged in Follow Up Boss and respected next year. Setup, costs and test results.

Overlap to know about: Follow Up Boss Automations 2.0 and Action Plans can already send a first email and drips, so don't run both on the same leads (our lead reply skips "Open House" leads, which the open-house recipe handles). Transaction coordinators, TC software and dotloop task templates cover deadlines; open-house sign-in apps often send their own thank-you. If you already use those, you may not need our version.

TCPA, Do Not Call, advertising and Fair Housing rules we design around

Not legal advice, and not a compliance guarantee. These recipes are built to keep risk low, but no download makes your marketing lawful. Check with your broker and counsel, and your state's telemarketing and license-advertising rules, before you turn any of them on. Rules checked on October 28, 2026.

Texts need written consent. Under 47 CFR 64.1200, autodialed marketing texts to cell phones need prior express written consent, defined in (f)(9) as a signed (e-signature counts) agreement that says the person agrees to such messages and isn't required to agree to buy anything. Our lead and open-house recipes text only people whose form recorded that consent, with its wording, time and source; everyone else gets email only. Bought or shared portal leads aren't treated as consented.
The one-to-one consent rule is gone. The FCC's rule requiring consent for one seller at a time was struck down by the Eleventh Circuit (Insurance Marketing Coalition v. FCC), and the FCC formally removed it, restoring the earlier (f)(9) wording (Federal Register, Aug 29, 2025). Some industry pages still describe it as taking effect in January 2025; that's out of date. Written consent is still required.
Quiet hours, STOP and Do Not Call. No solicitation before 8 am or after 9 pm in the recipient's local time (64.1200(c)(1)); our recipes check the lead's time zone, and where a state spans two time zones, a text goes only when it's within those hours in both. "Stop", "quit", "end", "revoke", "opt out", "cancel" and "unsubscribe" revoke consent, and so does any reply a reasonable person would read as a request to stop ((a)(10)). Our recipes treat both as opt-outs, record them on one shared list that every recipe checks, and pass any other reply to you. National Do Not Call rules (64.1200(c)(2); 16 CFR 310.4) are why we don't build cold-calling or FSBO/expired outreach.
Every message names you and your brokerage. Texas requires the broker's name in ads, including texts and email (22 TAC 535.155); California requires a license number on first-contact material (B&P 10140.6); the NAR Code (Article 12) requires a true picture and disclosing your firm. The signature with name, brokerage and license numbers is required setup, and the anniversary email avoids calling anything "free" (Standard of Practice 12-1).
Commercial email and Fair Housing. Anniversary and nurture emails follow CAN-SPAM: a real postal address, a working unsubscribe honored right away, and no misleading subject lines; your counsel may want an ad label. Templates must not state any preference based on a protected class (42 U.S.C. 3604(c), 24 CFR 100.75, NAR Article 10), and since the drafts are yours to edit, so is that check. State and local laws add protected classes.

US only for now. kvCORE/BoldTrail, Lofty and SkySlope versions are not built, and we make no claim that these recipes work with them. Some pain figures come from a vendor that sells software to agents; each is labeled on the recipe page. All recipes were verified with mocks of Follow Up Boss, dotloop, Google Calendar, Twilio and Resend, using made-up people; no real client data was used.

From the blog

Speed to lead for real estate agents: an auto-reply that texts only leads who said yes
Almost half of listing inquiries in one test got no reply. How to answer new leads within minutes without breaking TCPA text-consent and quiet-hours rules.
Is missed-call text-back legal?
TCPA, A2P 10DLC and CASL for HVAC and plumbing shops that text back missed callers: what the rules say, where it's gray, and a setup checklist.

How we test

Every workflow was imported into n8n 2.45.4 and run end to end on our test machine. Follow Up Boss, dotloop, Google Calendar, Google Sheets, Twilio and the email sender (Resend, including its inbound webhook) were replaced by a local mock server built from their official API docs: it checks the same request shapes and required fields, enforces Follow Up Boss's rate limit (HTTP 429 with Retry-After), expires dotloop's access token so the refresh path runs, and records every call. Webhook signatures (Follow Up Boss FUB-Signature, Twilio X-Twilio-Signature, Resend/Svix) are really computed and checked. These recipes use no AI model; every decision is a written rule. Leads, clients, agents, brokerages and addresses are invented. Nothing was sent to a real phone, person or account.

Software covered: Follow Up Boss + dotloop (kvCORE/BoldTrail and SkySlope not built yet). Prices checked October 2026.

All recipes with costs · How we test and what we don't claim