The Challenge
Speed to lead has become one of the most decisive factors in real estate performance.
When buyers and sellers submit an online inquiry, the clock starts ticking—and the difference between a five-minute response and a 30-minute response can mean the difference between a qualified conversation and a lost opportunity.
That reality is exactly what led Royal LePage Canada to rethink how leads move through its national network.
In this video, Kelly McCain, Vice President of Services Development and Delivery, explains how Royal LePage partnered with Bluebird to ensure the right lead reaches the right agent—fast—while still giving local brokerages the flexibility they need to operate their businesses effectively.
Results
Today, Royal LePage responds to online leads in under five minutes on average nationwide, with top-performing agents responding in under one minute. Leads are routed based on geography, property type, price point, and buyer intent, and delivered to agents exactly how they already work—by text or email—without new logins or behaviour changes.
For brokers, the impact goes beyond speed. With full visibility into lead flow and pipeline performance, brokerages can coach more effectively, identify top performers, and improve conversion outcomes across the board.
The result: Royal LePage is closing four times the industry average on online leads, with top performers reaching six times the benchmark, and brokers generating meaningful incremental revenue as a result.
Watch the video to hear how Royal LePage built a system that works at both the national and local level—and why speed, flexibility, and adoption matter more than ever.
Transcript
Hello, I’m Kelly McCain. I’m Vice President of Services Development and Delivery with Royal LePage Canada.
One of the most important things when we partnered with Bluebird was getting the right lead to the right agent as quickly as possible.
In terms of speed to lead, what we know is a lead that is answered in 30 minutes versus five minutes, you’re 100 times more likely to qualify that online lead when you’re responding in five minutes versus 30 minutes.
So speed is absolutely important, and I’m happy to say that with the systems that we’ve put in place to our partnership with Bluebird, we are able to respond to leads in less than five minutes nationally on average. And our top quartile is actually coming in at less than one minute.
In addition to getting the lead to the agent as quickly as possible, it’s absolutely critical that the right agent is getting the right lead.
And for us, it was very important to be able to route leads based on geography so that’s the neighbourhood that realtors specialize in, property type, so also including price, things that we need to know about the property, like whether it’s waterfront, as well as the type of consumer—so are they an investor? Is it a lead for a commercial property? Is it a traditional buyer and seller?
Having those things known and understood upfront through the online lead capture system enables us to leverage Bluebird to ensure that the right agent is getting the right lead and that they’re getting that lead correctly.
In generating hundreds of thousands of leads for realtors on an annual basis, being able to route those leads to the right agents at the right time, as we’ve talked about, is absolutely critical but the other part of that is getting those leads to an agent in a way that they’re used to receiving them. So, no extra steps here.
What is really great about Bluebird is agents are already using their phone, every day. So getting an online lead opportunity by email or text is integrated into what they already do.
And once they accept that lead, the best thing is that it goes right into their CRM and then they can manage that lead from beginning to end, there’s no extra steps for them, so there’s no new behaviors required from realtors, and it just seamlessly integrates into what they’re already doing.
It was very important for Royal LePage to find a partner that could deliver a robust system, that was flexible enough not only to service at an enterprise level and meet our goals and requirements, but also to serve our brokerages at the local level in every province across the country.
And Bluebird’s system enabled us to not only mandate certain requirements at the national level, but it enabled brokers to not only follow those mandates, but also execute at their level, regionally, the way that they saw fit, the way that they wanted to execute the program.
So having a system that enabled that robust experience and a flexible experience, helped us deliver.
It was very important for Royal LePage Canada to enable our brokers to understand how their agents were managing their online leads through the entire pipeline experience, from lead receipt to actual flows and Bluebird’s system actually enables us to track and measure that not only at a franchise level, but absolutely at a broker level where the brokerage is going to, you know, provide coaching and can see where they need to provide coaching.
They can understand how successful individuals are at moving leads through the pipeline, ultimately to conversion.
Through our partnership with Bluebird, we’re outperforming the industry at least by four times the industry average for online lead close rates. When we look at our top performers, we’re closing at over six times. They’re closing at an incredible rate of 6%. And that is our ongoing average over the past eight years that we’ve partnered with Bluebird.
Having the ability to do that ultimately means that our brokers and our agents benefit from closing more business and generating more revenue.
For our brokers, on average, they’re generating 5 to 6 figures in incremental revenue that they wouldn’t have been able to close without the support of Bluebird’s flexible and robust system.
