This shows how much of your inquiry volume lands outside the hours
you actually cover, what the median renter waits as a result, and a response
target your team can hold every day — rather than the five-minute rule, which
was measured on business-to-business sales leads and not on renters.
Speed matters in leasing; the argument is with the number. A target you
meet every day is worth more than an ambitious one you hit on Tuesdays, because a
target that gets missed within a fortnight teaches the team that the firm's
stated targets are decorative. Everything below runs in your browser, and the
only figures in it are yours.
The reasoning behind this, in full: How fast should you respond to rental inquiries?.
How this is calculated, and what it assumes
- Outside-hours share = the hours of the week you do not cover, ÷ 168.
Covered hours = days covered × hours covered each day.
- The median wait. An inquiry arriving inside covered hours waits your
median. One arriving outside waits until the window opens, then your median.
If more than half your inquiries land inside covered hours, the median renter's
wait is simply your median — the damage is in the tail, not the middle, which
is why the monthly check should look at the worst cases and not the average.
- Worst realistic wait = your longest uncovered stretch (for a
Monday-to-Friday, 09:00–17:00 week, that is Friday evening to Monday morning)
plus your median.
- The suggested target is the next standard rung at or above twice your
median: 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours, 4 hours, the same working day,
the next working morning. A rule of thumb, not a measured figure — a target set
at your median is missed half the time by definition.
- Inquiries are assumed to arrive evenly across the week. They do not.
The article's point is that the worst waits cluster on evenings, weekends and
whichever day your busiest person is off — so if your volume skews to evenings,
treat the outside-hours count here as a floor.
- Coverage is assumed to be the same window on each covered day, with
the covered days consecutive. A split shift or a Saturday-only rota needs its
own run.
Why this does not suggest five minutes
The five-minute rule is real research about somebody else. It traces to the Lead
Response Management study by Professor James Oldroyd, then at MIT, using data
from InsideSales.com: more than 15,000 leads and over 100,000 call
attempts across six companies over three years, finding a 21-fold drop
in the odds of qualifying a prospect as response time stretched from five minutes
to thirty. The dataset is web-form leads to sales teams, validated in the
mortgage and insurance sectors. Not renters, and not housing.
A renter has looked at your building on a map, knows what it would cost them and
has usually decided the location works before they contacted you. Borrowing a
target measured on an insurance-quote buyer is how a firm ends up with a number
it cannot hold and did not need. The five-minute rung is in the ladder above
because some firms genuinely want it; the point of the headcount line in the
results is that it is a hiring decision, not a discipline problem.
What has to be in the reply besides speed
A reply that arrives in ninety seconds and answers nothing is a fast
non-answer. Whatever target you set, the reply needs four things: whether the
unit is available, stated explicitly; the answer to what they actually asked, or
a straight statement that a person will answer it; the next step as a link rather
than an instruction to call during business hours; and one line on what happens
after that.
