AI lead follow up for mortgage brokers: the enquiry chased until it replies.

In the evening and at weekends, because that is when people look at property and start worrying about what they can borrow. Almost none of it arrives during the hours a broker is free.

The days are appointments and the nights are paperwork, so an enquiry arriving at nine on a Sunday lands in a gap where nobody is going to see it until Monday.

The borrower, meanwhile, has just done something emotionally significant. They have decided to find out whether they can buy, and that decision comes with urgency that fades quickly.

By Monday morning that urgency has been captured by whoever replied on Sunday night, and it is usually a broker with something automated rather than one who is more diligent.

A settled loan is a significant commission plus trail for years, so a lost enquiry is not a small loss and there are not many of them in a month to begin with.

That changes the shape of the decision compared with a high-volume business. A broker does not need to recover many enquiries for this to be worth several times its cost; recovering one or two a year would do it.

The trail makes it worse. The enquiry that went to another broker is not one commission, it is a client relationship and the refinance in four years and the referrals in between.

What is specific to broking

• The enquiries are few and valuable.

  Losing one matters far more than in a business doing hundreds.

• They arrive at the worst hours.

  Evenings and weekends, when a broker is least available.

• The borrower is contacting several.

  First response frequently decides who takes the application.

A reply goes out within seconds acknowledging the enquiry and asking the handful of things you would ask anyway, then follows up on a schedule until the person replies or says stop.

The immediate reply is what keeps the borrower in your conversation rather than the next broker's. It does not have to advance anything, it only has to arrive.

The follow up after it is where the recovered work is. Borrowers go quiet constantly, for reasons that have nothing to do with you, and a second message a few days later brings a real proportion of them back.

What it does not do

• It does not give advice.

  Nothing about rates, borrowing capacity or products. Those are yours and they are regulated.

• It does not pretend to be you.

  It says what it is, which matters more in a regulated conversation than anywhere else.

• It does not keep going.

  It stops when somebody replies or asks it to.

It suits a broker whose enquiries arrive out of hours and who cannot realistically answer them then, which is most brokers who are not already doing something about it.

It does least for a broker working purely on referral from a small number of agents and accountants, where the enquiry is warm, expected, and will wait for a callback.

It does most where enquiries come from a website, a comparison page or an advertisement, because those people are contacting several brokers in the same sitting.

The measurement settles it. If your average first response outside business hours is already minutes, there is nothing here to buy.