What is a real estate dialer? The top 5 features to look for

In an industry that doesn’t sleep, the small-but-mighty mobile phone is every agent’s best friend. But as the line between work and life gets blurrier, the right real estate dialer can mean the difference between focused and frenzied follow up.

Today, we’re sharing the top five features to look for in an industry leading real estate dialer, plus practical insights on how the Follow Up Boss Dialer can help maximize your prospecting.

Note: You are responsible for ensuring your calling practices comply with applicable law. If you have any questions, please reach out to a local attorney.

What is a real estate dialer and what does it do?

A real estate dialer is an automated tool that calls, records, logs, and transcribes your phone conversations with real estate leads. 

Auto-dialers, also known as power dialers or sales dialers, make the real estate prospecting process faster and easier by taking real estate professionals directly from one conversation to the next, without having to stop to log the details.

With a real estate dialer that integrates directly with your real estate customer relationship management (CRM) system, you can centralize lead communication and reach more contacts in less time. The best real estate dialer will also use AI summaries and task automations to help keep agents in touch with current and future clients.

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5 power dialer features to save time and increase productivity

Instead of manually dialing each of your leads, an integrated dialer helps agents tap into mega-focus by knocking out calls back-to-back, without interruption.

But not all real estate dialers are the same. It goes without saying that each agent on your team should have their own phone number with a local area code — but beyond that, what other features should you be looking for? Here are the top five functionalities to consider in a real estate dialer.

1. Centralized calling and texting

However you choose to contact leads, a CRM-integrated dialer lets you simplify and streamline your process. With all call and text data brought straight back to your CRM, an integrated dialer helps save time by:

• Doing the manual dialing for you: Go straight from one call to the next for ultimate efficiency, whether you’re at your computer or on your mobile phone.
• Tracking call data: With an integrated dialer, it’s all kept for you, right there in your CRM for easy reporting and real estate coaching.
• Taking notes: No more jumping between your inbox and client database. With an integrated dialer, key details are automatically logged in your lead management system, ensuring easy access for your entire real estate team.

With the Follow Up Boss Dialer, it’s easy to select specific groups or calling lists and automatically go from one to the next call, using a dedicated local phone number for your real estate business. 

The right dialer will even let you customize ring time, voicemail, and add detailed information, such as your Zillow profile, referral URL, and more, straight to your contact card.

If you’re just getting started with an integrated dialer, you can make it easy for prospects to keep in touch by sending out a quick text message to your database with your contact card. Let leads know they can save it straight to your contact profile in their phone and call you any time they have a question about the real estate market.

“Using calling lists, I can make 40 phone calls in 15 minutes. It's a thing of beauty." — Ryan Fitzgerald, Raleigh Realty

2. AI-powered call summaries

With the rise of AI, some of the real estate industry’s best dialers are tapping into the power of machine learning to take notes on prospect conversations for you. 

The right AI will even be able to generate transcripts using real estate specific language models. Instead of searching through multiple files and notes, agents can easily review and edit transcripts after every call or power hour.

Here are some of the top AI features to look for in a real estate dialer:

• Effortless note-taking: Eliminate the need to scramble for notes during important conversations. AI will capture the essence of every call, while ensuring crucial details are never missed.
• Real-time takeaways: A powerful AI tool will be able to provide a detailed transcript of your entire conversation, including all the key specifics, and can even go as far as suggesting actionable next steps to guide your follow up.
• Tailored for real estate teams: If you’ve spent any amount of time with generative AI, like ChatGPT, you know its outputs aren’t always relevant. To keep your lead notes on point, make sure the AI in your real estate phone system is trained on relevant material for agents, team leaders, and brokerages.
• CRM integration: AI call summaries aren’t much help if you have to switch in and out of different systems just to access them. Make sure your dialer’s AI is seamlessly integrated into the dialer software itself to eliminate the potential for wasted time.

With the Follow Up Boss Dialer, you get automatic call summaries and transcripts for all calls over 15 seconds. From there, it’s easy to add follow up tasks with a set time and date.

3. Workflow integration

With a streamlined dialer for calling, texting, and reporting, you don’t just get the ability to dial through leads faster — you also get greater visibility into exactly what to do next to move potential clients forward in the real estate funnel.

Here are two ways the right real estate dialer can help you connect with more contacts in less time:

• Automatic action items: What are you promising your leads at the end of each call? Transcripts and call summaries are great, but the real productivity magic is using AI to suggest next steps based on the key takeaways from each call.
• Proven templates: Look for a system that lets you test your top phone scripts and create customizable SMS templates for each stage of the journey. For example, when your CRM systems are integrated with your dialer, you can schedule an automated text follow up for any missed calls that went to voicemail.

It’s one thing to use a real estate dialer to take over repetitive tasks like manually calling and logging leads, but using your dialer to guide your broader follow up strategy is a great way to systemize your prospecting processes and save time at scale. 

Ready for more power dialing power tips? Learn how to level up your outreach with the FUB Dialer in this hands-on masterclass for agents and teams.

4. All-in-one reporting

For growing teams, agent accountability is everything. A CRM-integrated dialer gives you a single source of truth for all things prospecting, including complete visibility into agent activity so you can celebrate wins and offer hands-on coaching with detailed insights to guide your feedback.

To keep an accurate record of call activity and performance, look for a real estate dialer that captures all inbound and outbound calls and text messages, as well as automatic call recordings with easy playback. 

The right dialer will help you understand what is and isn’t working with your real estate scripts and follow up strategies and by answering critical questions like:

• How many calls did each agent make?
• What’s our average speed to first call?
• What’s our average number of call attempts?
• What’s the average length of a call?
• What percentage of leads are responding?
• What percentage is responding by phone, email, and text?
• How many leads have we not called?
• What’s working?
• What’s not?

With a simple-to-use dashboard diving deep into all your call reporting metrics, you can see your most important numbers at a glance at both the team and individual agent level. 

Look for dialer software that gives you the ability to review calls made and missed, average talk time, and more — then use that information to close any gaps in your performance.

5. Send the right calls to the right real estate agent

You and your agents are busy. You not only need to stay on top of your contact list, you also have to make sure your valuable inbound leads get followed up with quickly and correctly.

An integrated dialer makes it easy to automatically route inbound leads to the right agent on your team. In Follow Up Boss, you can:

• Send inbound leads to an individual or ring group depending on your preferred lead routing process
• Make collaboration between agents, inside sales agents (ISAs), and virtual assistants (VAs) easy with a shared team inbox that includes emails, voice, and text data
• Make sure all missed calls go straight to your brokerage team inbox or ISA call center so you and your team never miss a beat

In today’s market, real estate sales isn’t just about your monthly conversion rates. It’s about the level of customer support you provide to new and existing clients. And  nothing’s more frustrating than watching a lead go from warm to cold as they get passed from team member to team member.

For minimal downtime between touchpoints, look for a dialer platform that lets you set up automated lead flow for inbound calls and gives you the ability to live-transfer the call to an individual or ring group. 

In Follow Up Boss, you can even dedicate single-line local numbers and email addresses for your ISA call centers, transaction coordinators, and support staff.

Find the best dialer for your real estate agents

With so many progressive dialers in the real estate market, it can be hard to know which ones deserve a place at the top of your shortlist. But no matter which types of dialers you test, trial, and ultimately choose — the real power is picking up the phone.

Consider your real needs and the most common use cases you’re likely to see in your team. Use these parameters to guide your functionality wish list. And don’t forget to take a close look at each tool’s pricing and level of customer support.

Whether your main goal is to save time, increase conversion rates, or streamline your processes — the right real estate dialer can be the catalyst for achieving all of these goals and more. 

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This article does not give legal advice and agents are responsible for ensuring their calling practices comply with applicable law.