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A Pied Piper audit of 21 major brokerages found two-thirds of callers never spoke with an agent, and 68% of web inquiries went entirely unanswered — exposing a widespread lead-response failure as buyer demand thins.

A buyer calls a real estate office, gets connected, and then waits. No agent on the line. No follow-up. A voicemail that never gets returned.

That scenario plays out constantly across the country's largest brokerages, according to a new study by Pied Piper, a customer-experience research firm that has spent years exposing response gaps in the automotive and home services industries. In its first-ever look at residential real estate, published earlier this month and highlighted by Florida Realtors on October 13, Pied Piper found what many buyers have long suspected: inquiries routinely evaporate before a qualified agent ever sees them.

The study submitted 2,198 phone and website contacts to local offices representing 21 large real estate brands between June and July 2026, measuring each response for speed and quality during the following 24 hours. Results were scored as Lead Handling Effectiveness ratings on a 0-to-100 scale — Pied Piper's proprietary methodology, applied here for the first time to residential brokerage.

The phone numbers are sobering. While 97% of calls connected to the brokerage, just 53% quickly reached someone able to handle the inquiry — and only 33% of callers ended up speaking directly with an agent. Nearly three in four phone inquiries received no follow-up by phone, text, or email within 24 hours.

Web inquiries fared considerably worse. The industry-wide Lead Handling Effectiveness score for online contacts averaged 11 out of 100. About 68% of web submissions received no response within 24 hours; only 18% produced any agent communication at all during that period; a mere 10% heard from an agent within an hour. Close to one in 10 website inquiry forms didn't work at all — structurally broken, routing nothing to anyone.