Speed matters in leasing. That is not in dispute here and it is not what this article is arguing with. The renter who gets an answer first is very often the renter who books first, and every operator who has watched a good applicant book elsewhere over a weekend already knows it.
The argument is with the number. Somewhere along the way, a specific response-time target became the industry's received wisdom, and it is quoted at property managers constantly by people who have never checked where it came from. It came from somewhere real. It just did not come from housing.
So: what should your target actually be, and how do you hold it without hiring an evening shift?
What a first reply is for
Before choosing a number, be clear about the job the first reply is doing, because "fast" is only one of its requirements.
A first reply has to do three things. It has to tell the person the unit is still available — which is the actual question underneath most inquiries. It has to answer what they asked, or say honestly that a person will. And it has to give them the next step while they are still holding their phone.
A reply that arrives in ninety seconds and does none of those is not a fast reply. It is a fast non-answer, and the applicant goes back to their other three tabs. Speed only converts when it arrives attached to something the applicant can act on — which is section 6, and it is the part most response-time advice skips entirely.
The number you have probably been quoted, and what it was measured on
The five-minute rule is real research. It is just research about somebody else.
It traces to the Lead Response Management study, conducted by Professor James Oldroyd — then at MIT — using data from InsideSales.com. The study examined more than 15,000 leads and over 100,000 call attempts across six companies over three years, and it found a 21-fold decrease in the odds of qualifying a prospect when response time stretched from five minutes to thirty. That is where the number comes from, and it is a serious piece of work.
Look at what it measured. The dataset is web-form leads to sales teams, with the real-world validation carried out in the mortgage and insurance sectors. The related Harvard Business Review article — "The Short Life of Online Sales Leads" by Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran and David Elkington, March 2011 — audited companies on how quickly they followed up online sales leads.
Not renters. Not housing. Not somebody choosing where to live.
That distinction is not pedantry, and this is the only paragraph in this article that spends any time on it. A person filling in a form for an insurance quote is a different buyer with a different clock from a person who has seen a listing for a two-bedroom near their kid's school. The insurance buyer may have no particular attachment to any one provider and is often comparing on price alone. The renter has physically looked at your building on a map, knows what it would cost them, and has usually decided the location works before they ever contacted you.
Borrowing a target measured on the first population and applying it to the second is how a firm ends up with a number it cannot hold and did not need.
Why a five-minute human target is a headcount decision
Suppose you adopt it anyway. Price it honestly.
A five-minute response commitment means somebody is watching the inbox continuously during whatever hours you have committed to. Not "checking regularly" — continuously, because a five-minute target with a twenty-minute coffee break is a twenty-minute target with good intentions. Extend it past business hours and you are staffing evenings and weekends.
For a firm running a few hundred units, that is a hiring decision. It is not a discipline problem, it is not a training problem, and no amount of asking the team to be more responsive converts it into one. This is the most common failure in response-time policy: a target gets adopted because it appeared in an industry article, it is missed within a fortnight, and missing it becomes normal — which is worse than never having set one, because now the team has learned that the firm's stated targets are decorative.
A target you can hold every day is worth more than an ambitious one you hit on Tuesdays.
Different properties, different targets
The other reason a single number does not work is that a portfolio is not one market.
Your target should be set by how much competition an applicant has for that particular unit, and that varies enormously inside one firm. In Canada, CMHC reported the national vacancy rate for purpose-built rentals at 3.1% in 2025, but that national figure hides the spread that actually matters to you: CMHC put Montréal at 2.9% and Halifax at 2.7% for 2025, while Calgary sat at 5.0%. In the United States, the Census Bureau put the national rental vacancy rate at 7.3% in the second quarter of 2026, against 7.0% a year earlier.
A furnished unit in a tight Canadian market where CMHC's balanced range starts at 2.5% is competing for an applicant who has few alternatives and will wait a few hours. A single-family home in a soft US market where the applicant has a dozen options and landlords are advertising incentives is a different commitment entirely — there, hours genuinely cost you.
So the target is not one line. It is one line per property type:
- Tight market, high demand per unit — a same-day answer is often sufficient, and the quality of the answer matters more than shaving an hour off it.
- Soft market, high competition per applicant — this is where speed earns its reputation, and where the next-step link matters most.
- Scattered single-family — the reply itself is not the bottleneck; the showing logistics are. A fast reply that leads to a viewing four days away has not solved anything.
Two notes on the numbers above, because they are easy to misuse. The Canadian and US vacancy figures are not comparable — different universes, different survey periods, genuinely different market conditions — and must never be averaged. And the behavioural research on how renters search is overwhelmingly US-sourced; no equivalent Canadian national renter survey was found, so a Canadian operator should treat CMHC's market data as solid and treat US renter-behaviour findings as indicative rather than local.
Business hours, after hours, and the difference between an answer and an acknowledgement
Here is the distinction that makes a response target affordable.
An answer resolves the question. It requires either a person or something that knows your buildings and your rules well enough to be trusted with a stranger.
An acknowledgement confirms receipt and sets an expectation. It is worth much less than an answer, and much more than silence.
A next step is different from both, and it is the one most operators under-use: the applicant does not need you at all in order to move forward.
That last one is where a small team gets its response commitment back. An inquiry that arrives at eleven at night, and can qualify itself and put a viewing on your calendar without anyone at your firm being awake, does not need a five-minute human. It needs a front door that is open.
Releaser does this part today. Each property is one shareable link; the person completes your screening before they reach your calendar; and the ones who meet the criteria you set book their own showing. Your criteria gate the calendar — an applicant who does not meet them does not reach it — so the slots that fill are filled by people who already qualify.
None of that is a response-time trick. It changes what the response target has to cover: your team's target now applies to the questions that genuinely need a person, rather than to every message that arrives.
What has to be in the first reply besides speed
Assume you have hit your target. What did you send?
Whether the unit is available. State it explicitly. Most inquiries are asking this even when they appear to ask something else, and "yes, it's available" at the top of a reply does more work than any other sentence in it.
The answer to what they actually asked, or a straight statement that a person will answer it. Both are acceptable. A reply that ignores the question and pivots to booking reads as a form letter, and it is treated like one.
The next step, as a link, not as an instruction. "Call the office to arrange a viewing" is a next step that only works during business hours and only for people willing to make a phone call. A link they can use at 11pm is a next step that works for everyone.
What happens after that, in one line. What the screening asks for, roughly how long it takes. Applicants abandon flows they cannot see the end of.
Speed gets your reply read. Those four things are what makes having sent it worth anything.
Writing it down, and checking yourself against it
A target that lives in somebody's head is not a target. Write it down, one line per property type, in the form: inquiries about [property type] receive [what] within [how long] during [which hours].
Then check yourself against it, which is easier than it sounds. Once a month, take twenty inquiries at random and measure the gap between when each arrived and when a real reply went out. Not your impression of it — the timestamps. Two things usually fall out of that exercise: the average is better than the team feared, and the worst cases are much worse than anyone realised, clustered on evenings, weekends and whichever day your busiest person is off.
Those clusters are the actual problem, and they are not a speed problem. They are a coverage problem, and coverage is solved with a front door that stays open rather than with a stricter number.
A target you meet every day, on every property type, with a next step in every reply, beats five minutes on paper and forty minutes on a Saturday.
Releaser is available to property management firms in the United States and Canada. Each property becomes one shareable link, applicants complete your screening before they reach your calendar, and the ones who meet your criteria book their own showing.
Sources. Lead Response Management study, Professor James Oldroyd (MIT) with InsideSales.com — study summary. Oldroyd, McElheran and Elkington, "The Short Life of Online Sales Leads", Harvard Business Review, March 2011. Canada: CMHC 2025 Rental Market Report and the 2026 Mid-Year Rental Market Update. United States: US Census Bureau, Housing Vacancies and Homeownership, Q2 2026.