A real-world audit of Australia’s biggest residential builders revealed response times stretching from 25 minutes to never. The research behind the numbers is even more confronting and the opportunity for builders who act on it is significant.
In 2018, a team working inside a national home building franchise did something the Australian residential construction industry rarely does: they audited themselves.
They submitted genuine enquiries to some of the country’s biggest home builders major national brands, franchise networks, volume builders and tracked exactly how long each one took to respond. The same type of enquiry, the same information, sent across Queensland, New South Wales, and Victoria. Then they started the clock.
What they found was, in the words of the person who ran it, “ugly.” And according to the data available today, not much has changed.
What the Audit Found
Across approximately 20 enquiries submitted to major national builders in three states, the spread in response times was enormous.
At the faster end, a handful of builders responded within 25 to 30 minutes a result the audit team considered solid. But the rest of the field was a different story.
Some builders took three, four, or five hours. Others came back at 18 hours, or close to 24. One took 32 hours. In one state, a builder took nearly 50 hours, more than two full days to respond to someone who had expressed interest in building a home. In another, two builders took more than 140 hours. That’s approaching six days.
And then there were the builders who never responded at all.
Not small, hard-to-reach operators. Major national brands with marketing departments, CRM systems, dedicated sales teams, and significant advertising budgets. Potential clients who had taken the time to fill out a form, people actively looking to build a home had their enquiry disappear into what can only be described as a black hole.
Critically, the business conducting the audit was not immune. In one region, their own response time exceeded three hours. In another, it was over 18 hours. In one case, their office never responded at all.
That realisation that this was not a competitor problem but an industry-wide problem is what made the results land hard.
What the Research Says
The audit findings are not an anomaly. They align with some of the most comprehensive research available on lead management, research that has only become more troubling with each update.
A landmark study from researchers at MIT and InsideSales now rebranded as XANT examined hundreds of thousands of call attempts across thousands of leads. The core finding is consistent across every update: contacting a lead within five minutes makes you 21 times more likely to qualify that lead than waiting just 30 minutes longer.
After five minutes, the odds of making meaningful contact drop by a factor of ten. Not by ten percent by ten times.
Separate research adds another dimension: roughly 78 percent of customers end up going with the business that responds first. Not the cheapest option. Not the most well-known brand. The first one to pick up the phone.
“Roughly 78 percent of customers go with the business that responds first — not the cheapest, not the biggest, the first.”
Updated Data: 2021–2024
The original MIT and InsideSales research was conducted in 2007. An updated study in 2021 analysed more than 55 million sales activities across 5.7 million inbound leads at over 400 companies. The results did not improve.
More than 57 percent of first contact attempts were happening more than a week after the lead came in. And only 0.1 percent of leads were being contacted within the first five minutes — the window research identifies as the most critical.
A 2024 study by lead conversion firm RevenueHero, covering more than 1,000 businesses, found that more than 63 percent of those businesses never responded to a lead at all. Among those that did respond, the average wait time was over 29 hours.
Across broader industry data, roughly half of all leads generated online are never contacted. Ever. That represents a significant proportion of marketing spend producing no return — not because the marketing failed, but because the follow-up never happened.
Why This Matters for Residential Builders
The residential construction sector faces some specific challenges that make slow lead response especially costly.
A builder on a slab pour cannot stop to answer the phone. A two-person operation does not have a dedicated sales function. Enquiries come in through multiple channels; website forms, Instagram DMs, Hipages, Facebook, referrals and keeping across all of them while managing a live build is genuinely difficult.
But the data does not give weight to those circumstances. From the moment a potential client submits an enquiry, a clock starts. And every minute that passes, the probability of winning that job decreases not because of anything related to quality, price, or reputation, but because of elapsed time alone.
The typical scenario looks something like this: a prospective client submits enquiries to five builders on a Tuesday afternoon. Two respond within the hour. One responds the next morning. One responds on Thursday. One never responds at all.
The client is most likely to take a meeting with the first two. By Thursday, they may have already signed with one of them. The builder who responded after two days is not losing on merit, they may never even get the chance to demonstrate their merit at all.
Speed as a Competitive Advantage
The counterpoint to the problem is a straightforward opportunity.
If the majority of builders are slow to respond and the data clearly shows they are then being fast is one of the most accessible competitive advantages available to any building business, regardless of size. It does not require a bigger marketing budget. It does not require a rebrand or a new website. It requires a process.
Even a brief acknowledgement, a short text message letting someone know their enquiry has been received and that a proper conversation is coming is enough to put a builder ahead of a significant portion of the competition. Because most builders will not send that message. Some will not respond for days. Some will not respond at all.
There is also a less quantifiable effect worth noting. How quickly a builder responds to an initial enquiry is, for many clients, the first real signal they receive about how that builder operates. A fast, professional response communicates organisation, care, and reliability. A delayed or absent one communicates the opposite before a single site visit has taken place.
Speed, in this context, is not just a tactical variable. It functions as a proxy for trust.
Four Practical Steps
For builders looking to address this directly, there are four practical starting points:
1. Audit your notification setup. Know where your leads are arriving and confirm that alerts are active. A common failure point is a website contact form that sends to an email address nobody monitors regularly or at all.
2. Set a response standard. The target to aim for is a response within two hours; under 30 minutes is better. The first response does not need to be a full conversation it needs to acknowledge the enquiry and indicate that a proper follow-up is coming.
3. Delegate the first response. If you are on site during the hours most enquiries arrive, you need someone or something else handling the initial contact whether that is an office team member, a virtual assistant, or a pipeline management tool.
4. Audit yourself. Pull the last month of enquiries and measure the actual response times. How many came in? How many were responded to? How fast? The numbers are often a surprise, even to builders who believe they have the process covered.
The Real Cost of Slow Response
It is worth putting some rough numbers to this. A builder spending $20,000 a year on marketing to generate 50 enquiries is paying $400 per lead. If half of those enquiries are never followed up, a figure consistent with the research that represents $10,000 in marketing expenditure producing no return. Not because the campaigns did not work, but because the leads were never contacted.
The problem is almost never the volume of leads. It is the conversion rate from lead to contact and that conversion rate is determined, more than most builders realise, by how quickly the phone gets picked up.
The audit data from 2018, the MIT research, the 2024 RevenueHero study they all point to the same conclusion. The industry has a lead response problem that is structural, persistent, and correctable.
For builders willing to address it, the competitive advantage is both immediate and significant. Most of the field will not respond for hours. Some will not respond for days. Being the one who responds in 20 minutes does not require resources that most builders lack. It requires a decision and then a process to back it up.
🎙 Listen to the Full Episode
This article is drawn from The Daily Dose, the podcast from The Good Builder hosted by Az. In the full episode, Az walks through the original audit in detail, breaks down the research, and gives a practical follow-up framework to pair with it. If this topic is relevant to your business, the episode is worth 10 minutes of your time.
The Daily Dose #253 — I Audited How Fast Builders Respond to Leads. The Results Were Ugly. Listen to the full episode here.
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