Who do you call first? The buyer signals worth paying attention to

You finish an open home with eight groups through the door.

One loved the kitchen.

Another asked about the school catchment.

Someone else barely said a word.

A neighbour came through for a stickybeak.

Now you’ve got eight people to follow up.

Who gets the first call?

That was one of the questions we put to James Price, Principal at Hudson McHugh, during our recent webinar with Rhys Rogers from Before You Buy and David Bliss from Reapit.

It’s a question worth asking.

Hudson McHugh completed 282 sales worth more than $450 million last financial year, so James and his team spend a lot of time talking to buyers.

Their approach starts with something surprisingly simple.

Start with you’re A, B and C buyers

James groups buyers into three broad categories.

An A buyer wants the property. Maybe it’s on the same street as their parents, has parking they need or sits inside the right school catchment. Whatever the reason, they’re motivated. As James explained during the webinar, these buyers tend to be pretty good at making their interest known.

A C buyer sits at the other end. The property doesn’t suit them and they’re unlikely to buy it.

Then you’ve got the B buyers.

This is where James believes an agent can make a realdifference.

A B buyer has some interest, but they’re not quite there yet.

James finds that value is often the sticking point.

They might like the home, but not enough at the current price.

Hudson McHugh spends a lot of time working with these buyers.

And this is where buyer signals start to become useful.

Your buyers are leaving breadcrumbs

A buyer rarely puts their hand up and announces, “Hello, I’m your hottest buyer. Please call me first.”

Would make Saturdays easier, though.

Instead, they leave little clues.

They request a contract.

They download a building and pest or strata report.

They come back to a property.

They ask more detailed questions.

Before You Buy captures some of these actions and feeds that info into Reapit Sales, giving the agent more context around the people they’re following up.

For Hudson McHugh, downloading a report is a particularly useful signal.

James explained that if someone downloads the report after an open home, his team may call that person on a Saturday afternoon. They don’t necessarily wait until Monday to work through the call back list.

The buyer has done something that suggests their interest has moved a little further along.

They’ve got the report. They may have the contract.

They’re getting closer to being in a position to make an offer.

That’s worth knowing before you pick up the phone.

Follow up doesn’t always need to start with a phone call

Another interesting part of the conversation was how Hudson McHugh follows up buyers.

James is a big fan of SMS.

After an open home, the team can send buyers a simple message asking where they stand.

Are they interested? Are they out? Would they consider the property at a different price?

That gives the agent another piece of information to work with.

It also reflects how people communicate now.

Calls still matter, particularly when someone is showing strong interest, but plenty of buyers are more likely to reply to a text than answer an unknown number on a Saturday arvo.

As James put it during the session: "I never rule the buyerout until they tell me they’re out.”

That matters in a slow market.

Someone who doesn’t answer your first call isn’t automatically a dead lead.

Someone who says the price is too high isn’t necessarily a C buyer either.

Maybe they’re a B buyer waiting for the right conversation.

A buyer signal can lead somewhere completely different

This is where the conversation got particularly interesting.

Rhys shared some of Hudson McHugh’s Before You Buy activity from the past 12 months.

During that period, they had sent 10k text messages and 883 sales contracts.

Buyer activity also helped identify 26 appraisal requests.

Then there was the CRM data.

Before You Buy had helped updated 385 email addresses, 520 property addresses and 80 phone numbers that weren’t already sitting in Hudson McHugh’s CRM.

Why does that matter?

Because the person inspecting 10 Smith Street today might own 25 Jones Street.

They might be an investor.

They might need a property manager.

They might not buy from you this weekend at all, but could become a vendor six months from now.

Rhys shared that around 6% of report downloads identify a potential seller, while around 19% of people downloading reporting identify themselves as investors.

There’s a much bigger picture sitting behind that buyer enquiry.

Buyers are doing their homework earlier

The way people research property is changing too.

Rhys shared an interesting Before You Buy trend during the webinar.

The percentage of buyers downloading reports through its partners before attending an inspection has grown from 13% to 37%, and is continuing to climb.

Think about what that means for an agent.

You could know someone has downloaded a strata report before they’re even walked through the front door.

That’s a pretty useful breadcrumb.

James is seeing another change too…

Buyers are uploading lengthy strata reporting into tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude and asking AI to help them understand what’s inside.

James admitted he does it himself.

Faced with a 250-page strata report, fair enough.

Buyers can now arrive at an inspection having already researched the property, looked through the report and formed questions about potential issues.

For agents, that makes context even more useful.

If you know what information the buyer has already accessed, you can be better prepared for the conversation that follows.

Buyer signals can help with your vendor conversations too

Here’s something we didn’t really expect to spend as much time talking about.

The same signals that help an agent understand buyers can also help them talk to vendors.

Hudson McHugh sends vendor reports twice a week and looks at things like total enquiries, groups through open homes, private inspection requests, contracts issued and reports purchased.

James also compares that activity against similar properties.

Say a home last been listed for three weeks.

Buyers are coming through, but nobody is requesting a contract or purchasing the report.

That tells you something.

Rhys shared another example from an agent who uses report downloads as one of his signals when talking to vendors about price.

If he would normally expect report downloads by a certain point in the campaign and there have been zero, it gives him something concrete to discuss with the owner.

That’s a much better conversation than simply saying, “The market isn’t responding.”

You can show them how buyers are behaving.

So, who should you call first?

James made an important point during the webinar: every buyer should still be followed up.

Buyer signals aren’t an excuse to ignore everyone else.

They help you decide where to put your attention first, particularly when you’re dealing with volume.

When Hudson McHugh is busy, James may focus personally on contract holders and warmer buyers while his team work through the colder buyers.

If someone starts showing stronger intent, they can move back up the list.

When volumes are lower, he can speak to more of those buyers himself.

That’s a very real estate way of looking at it.

There’s no perfect scoring system that replaces knowing your buyers and having good conversations.

But there are clues that can help.

Put the breadcrumbs together

One report download doesn’t guarantee an offer.

Neither does requesting a contract or attending a second open home.

But put those actions together and you can start getting a much better idea of where that buyer is heading.

That’s where Before You Buy and Reapit Sales work together.

Before You Buy helps capture buyer activity and information.

Bringing those signals into Reapit Sales gives agents more context inside the CRM they’re already using.

So when you finish your next open home and look at the list of people you need to follow up, you’ve got more to go on than a list of names.

You might know who downloaded the report.

Who requested the contract.

Who could be a future seller.

Who’s an investor.

And, importantly, who might be worth calling first.

Want to hear the full conversation

Watch Before You Buy x Reapit Sales: The Buyer Signals You’re Missing to hear James Price, Rhys Rogers and David Bliss unpack buyer behaviour, follow up and the signals you can use to make more informed calls.

Already using Reapit Sales? Speak to your Account Manager about connecting Before You Buy.

Thinking about switching? Check out this comparison.

All Hudson McHugh and Before You Buy figures references in this article were shared by James Price and Rhys Rogers during the webinar.