Homeflow's 2023 mystery-shop research reported an average response time of 229 business minutes to its sales enquiry, with half of the agents who responded doing so within an hour. Homeflow also described 39 percent of agents as missing potential clients by not responding promptly; its published page does not define that figure as a 24-hour cutoff. The study measures response behaviour. It does not establish how much faster response changes instruction conversion.
What speed solves
Speed solves the acknowledgement problem. A seller who sends an enquiry and hears nothing for forty-eight hours forms a negative impression of the agency before any conversation has taken place. That impression is difficult to recover from. Responding quickly signals that the agency is attentive and organised.
A faster acknowledgement also shortens the period in which an enquiry is sitting untouched. That is operationally useful. The Homeflow study does not, however, measure whether the first agent to respond ultimately wins the instruction.
Response time is therefore a measurable service standard. Treating it as a direct proxy for instruction conversion goes beyond what this evidence establishes.
What speed does not solve
Speed does not solve the prioritisation problem. An agency that responds to every enquiry within five minutes but in the order they arrive is still treating a seller who is ready to instruct within thirty days identically to a seller who is eighteen months from a decision.
The fast acknowledgement goes to both. The personalised follow-up call, the carefully prepared valuation, the attentive relationship management — these finite resources are distributed without reference to which seller deserves them most.
Speed is a binary improvement: either you responded quickly or you did not. Quality is a gradient: the response can acknowledge the enquiry, address the seller's specific situation, demonstrate relevant knowledge, and establish the right tone for a relationship that will lead to an instruction. A fast generic acknowledgement achieves the first. A considered, contextual response achieves all four.
When speed and quality conflict
Speed and quality conflict when volume is high and the response process is not differentiated. An agent managing thirty incoming enquiries on a Monday morning cannot respond to all of them quickly and well. Something is traded off.
Agencies can optimise the response-time metric by automating acknowledgement and sending the same response to everyone. That improves the measured speed. It tells us nothing by itself about the quality or commercial effect of the response.
Quality before speed
The more productive framing is quality before speed, not quality instead of speed. The goal is to respond quickly to the enquiries that matter most and to respond well, while managing lower-priority contacts at a pace that does not compromise the quality of attention directed at imminent instructors.
That sequencing requires knowing which enquiries matter most before the response is written. Which means the assessment has to happen at intake, not after the acknowledgement has already gone out.
Pulsero's argument is that speed and prioritisation should be treated as separate decisions: acknowledge promptly, while using the evidence in the enquiry to decide where deeper human attention should go next.