The working standard for speed to lead in wholesaling is two minutes from form submission to a live call. Remy Rheault, founder of 33 Home Buyers in Jacksonville, enforces it literally: a seller fills out his form, the lead drops into his CRM, his personal phone gets a text, and a clock starts that he has to beat.
That standard is useless on its own. It only converts if you already know the zip code before you dial, if you have a follow-up sequence catching the half of deals that don’t close on call one, and if your buyer side can absorb inventory as fast as acquisitions produces it.
This guide covers the routing setup, how to triage five leads in seconds, the 21-day sales cycle and 15-30 touches behind the deals that don’t close immediately, and how to build the disposition and buyer-vetting side so the speed on the front end isn’t wasted.
Key takeaways
- Two minutes is the callback target, enforced by an automated timer, not a habit — the CRM texts the phone and starts the clock the moment the form submits.
- Roughly half of contracts come from the first inbound call; the other half close within about a month across an estimated 15-30 touches, with a 21-day average sales cycle.
- Speed only pays if comp knowledge is already loaded — being able to rank five or ten leads by zip code and asking price in seconds is what makes a fast callback worth making.
- Your disposition system needs to be capable of moving 10+ deals at any given time, and the buyer list needs constant new data, because the most common place a deal dies is simply not having the right buyer on it.
- Vet buyers by asking for their first three purchases, verifying owner of record, and requesting proof of funds — experienced buyers close faster because they need less hand-holding.
From the Real Estate Pros Show
This article draws on an interview with Remy Rheault of 33 Home Buyers on the Real Estate Pros Show, hosted by Scott Bursey.
The Two-Minute Clock: How an Inbound Lead Actually Routes
Here is the sequence Rheault runs at 33 Home Buyers. A seller fills out a form. The form fires directly into his CRM. The CRM texts his personal phone and starts a timer. He has two minutes to be on the call.
The important detail is that the two minutes is enforced by the system, not by discipline. A notification that just says “new lead” gets triaged alongside everything else on the phone. A countdown with a deadline attached is a different object — it tells you whether you hit the standard or missed it, every single time.
The stack underneath is unglamorous. Roughly 90% of the business runs on a custom build-out on top of GoHighLevel, with Zillow and PropStream alongside for property and comp data. That’s it. There is no argument for waiting on a better tech stack before you enforce a callback standard.
A one- or two-person shop can hold this because the routing is point-to-point: form to one phone, one person responsible. Nothing is ambiguous. Where it breaks is the third and fourth hire, when the lead has to route to someone rather than to you. At that point you need round-robin assignment, an escalation rule if the first rep doesn’t pick up, and a dashboard that reports response time by person — otherwise the two-minute standard quietly becomes a twenty-minute average that nobody is accountable for.
Rheault is currently two people and hiring. He has said openly he has no SOPs yet and knows he needs them before the team grows. That is the right order of concern: document the routing rule before you add people to it.
Triage: Knowing Your Numbers Well Enough to Rank Five Leads in Seconds
When five or ten leads come in, Rheault says he knows which three he’s calling first — based on zip code and asking price alone, before any research. That ranking happens in seconds because the market knowledge is already in his head from working one metro, Jacksonville, exclusively.
This is the part of speed to lead that gets skipped. Calling in two minutes with no idea what the property is worth doesn’t produce a contract; it produces a call where you ask the seller to hold while you pull comps, and you lose the authority that a fast, confident conversation gives you.
Asked for the most expensive lesson in his business, Rheault named two things together, not separately: knowing his numbers, and speed to lead. He has lost good deals both by not being accurate on the numbers and by not getting there fast enough. Those failures compound. A fast call on a deal you mispriced is worse than a slow one, because you either walk away from a real spread or you contract something you can’t sell.
The practical build order:
- Pick a geography tight enough that you can hold its pricing in your head — a metro, not a state.
- Learn the zip-code-level ranges before you turn marketing on, so an address instantly places itself.
- Use asking price against that range as your first-pass filter. A seller asking retail in a zip you know gets a later call than one asking under market.
- Pull real comps during or immediately after the call, not before — speed is the point.
This is also the strongest argument for working your own backyard. Local knowledge is what converts a fast dial into a priced conversation.
Once a lead comes in, they fill out a form, it goes directly into our CRM. Right then and there it sends a text to my phone, my personal phone. It starts a ticking time clock that I have to call it within two minutes.
— Remy Rheault, founder of 33 Home Buyers
What Happens to the Other Half: Follow-Up Over a 21-Day Cycle
About half of Rheault’s contracts come up front, on the inbound call itself. The other half come within roughly a month, across an estimated 15 to 30 touches. Average sales cycle start to finish: 21 days.
Read that split carefully. If you only measure speed to lead, you are measuring the half of the business that closes on call one and ignoring an equally large half that closes on touch nineteen. Follow-up is not a consolation activity for the leads that said no. It’s the second half of the same system.
Before he had a follow-up process built, Rheault says deals two, three, and four months down the line simply went to someone else. The seller didn’t disappear; they sold. They sold to whoever was still in the conversation when their situation changed — the tenant left, the probate closed, the repair estimate came back. Distressed sellers close on their own timeline, and the only way to be present for it is an automated sequence that keeps touching without requiring you to remember.
What that means operationally:
- Every no-contract call drops into a follow-up sequence automatically at the end of the call, not manually later.
- Plan for 15-30 touches across text, call, and email over roughly 30 days before you treat a lead as cold.
- Keep the 21-day average cycle as your benchmark — if your contracts are consistently taking 60 days, the problem is usually a gap in the first two weeks of follow-up.
The CRM does the remembering. Your job is to make sure nothing exits the pipeline without being assigned to a sequence.
The Disposition Side Has to Move as Fast as Acquisitions
Rheault’s standard is blunt: if the disposition system can’t sell 10 or more deals at any given time, the business can’t operate. That number is a capacity test, not a volume goal. It asks whether you could handle ten simultaneous contracts without any of them falling out for lack of a buyer.
When he was asked where deals die, the first answer wasn’t price or title. It was not having a particular investor or buyer on the list. New investors and buyers enter the market constantly. If you aren’t feeding new buyer data into the machine, you lose deals you could have sold — not because the deal was bad, but because the one person who wanted it never got the email.
So the buyer list is a marketing channel that needs its own budget and its own cadence, pulled and refreshed continuously the same way seller data is. A buyer list built eighteen months ago and not touched since is a list of people who already deployed their capital.
His actual disposition sequence once a contract is signed: submit to the new contract form, into inventory, out to investors by email and text, walk-throughs with interested buyers, collect offers, negotiate, sell, close.
On co-wholesaling, his terms are specific and worth copying. He asks for a three-business-day exclusive on a contract, and the deal must not already have been blasted out to other buyers. The exclusivity window gives him time to actually work his list. The not-already-sent condition prevents the situation where two wholesalers hit the same buyer with the same property at two different prices, which costs both of them credibility.
Vetting Buyers and Capital Partners Without Killing Momentum
Rheault’s vetting process is three steps and takes minutes, not days:
- Ask the buyer for the first three flips or properties they’ve purchased.
- Verify they were actually the owner of record on those properties.
- Request proof of funds.
Step two is the one most wholesalers skip. Anyone can name three addresses. Checking whether the name on the deed matches the person you’re talking to separates buyers who have closed from buyers who have watched someone else close. It’s a public records lookup and it ends the conversation fast when the answer is no.
He also states a preference for experienced buyers, with the reasoning attached: newer buyers need their hand held a little longer. That’s not a judgment about them — it’s a timing constraint. When you have a contract with a defined close date and a seller expecting performance, a buyer who needs education on how assignments work introduces risk you can’t price.
There’s a second use for the same vetting. Rheault has started lending on deals he wholesales, deploying cash that was otherwise sitting in the business account. He describes it as a testing phase, with the wholesale operation as the cash cow and lending as the passive bucket. The appeal is that you already know the asset, the buyer, and the numbers better than any outside lender does. The risk is concentration — you’re now exposed on both the assignment and the loan to the same deal. He’s treating it as a test rather than a strategy, which is the right posture while you learn how the paper performs.
Market Conditions and Channel Discipline in a Buyer-Scarce Market
Rheault’s read on Jacksonville: roughly seven sellers for every buyer, one of the widest gaps he’s seen. Fix-and-flip buyers — his core customer — are sitting on inventory longer, so the interval between one purchase and the next has stretched. Deals are harder to sell than they were. On top of that, Opendoor and large funds have come back aggressively.
His response is not to get more clever with marketing. It’s to get more personal. Work your own backyard, go out and shake hands, show up at the local REIA and the monthly meetups. His stated core value is names before numbers — treating a seller as a person with a situation rather than a KPI. Against an institutional buyer that can only make an algorithmic offer, being the person who drove to the house is the differentiator you actually control.
On channels, he’s currently spending around $5,000 a month on pay-per-lead and is moving into PPC. The logic is deliberate: higher cost per lead and higher cost per acquisition, but higher-intent sellers, more genuine distress in the situations, and better margin per deal. In a market where buyers are scarce, you want fewer and better contracts, not more marginal ones you can’t dispo.
His advice for anyone building a pipeline is to pick one market and one marketing channel and commit for 90 days to six months. Cold calling or pay-per-lead or PPC — one. He’s direct about why people fail at this: they hear someone crushing it on a different channel, switch, spend money across three channels, get nothing from any of them, and conclude the business doesn’t work.
Frequently asked questions
How fast do you actually have to call an inbound seller lead?
Two minutes is the working standard among operators running inbound campaigns. Remy Rheault’s CRM texts his personal phone the instant a seller form submits and starts a timer he has to beat.
The reason it has to be that tight is that a seller filling out a form online is rarely filling out just one. Whoever gets a live person on the phone first frames the conversation. Build the timer into the system rather than relying on checking your phone.
How many follow-up touches does a wholesale deal take before you get a yes or no?
Roughly 15 to 30 touches for the deals that don’t close on the first call, spread over about a month. Rheault estimates about half his contracts come up front on the inbound call and the other half come through follow-up within roughly 30 days, with a 21-day average sales cycle start to finish.
Before he had an automated sequence, deals that matured two to four months later went to competitors. The sequence has to start automatically when a call ends without a contract.
How do you verify a cash buyer is real before sending them a contract?
Ask for the first three flips or properties they’ve purchased, then check public records to confirm they were the owner of record on those deals. Follow that with proof of funds.
The owner-of-record check is the step that matters, because addresses are easy to name and a deed is not. It takes a few minutes and it filters out buyers who have been near deals without ever closing one.
What terms should you set when selling another wholesaler’s contract?
Rheault asks for a three-business-day exclusive to sell the property, and requires that the contract has not already been blasted out to other buyer lists.
The exclusive window gives you enough time to actually work your buyers, show the property, and collect offers. The not-already-sent condition prevents the same buyer receiving the same deal from two wholesalers at two different prices, which damages both parties’ credibility with that buyer.
Is local wholesaling better than virtual wholesaling right now?
For most operators, yes — because the barrier to entry on virtual is so low that you are competing with everyone, from anywhere, on the same data. Working your own backyard lets you show up in person, and it’s what makes instant lead triage possible, since you already know what a given zip code supports.
Rheault works Jacksonville exclusively and credits local knowledge plus speed as the two things driving his pipeline. His view is that if you select your local market and actually go meet people, you’re above most of the competition by default.
The bottom line
Start by instrumenting the clock. Wire your lead form so it fires a notification with a two-minute deadline attached and an automatic follow-up sequence on the back end, then spend the next 90 days learning your zip codes well enough that the call is priced before it starts — because a fast call on a number you can’t defend costs you more than a slow one.
