atHome.lu and Immotop.lu leads: how to stop losing them in the evening and at the weekend

For most Luxembourg agencies, the portals — atHome.lu, Immotop.lu, and for cross-border clientele Immoweb or the French and German portals — are the first source of leads. They are also the worst-handled source: enquiries arrive by e-mail, in a shared inbox, and wait to be opened.

The real journey of a portal lead

A prospect browses listings in the evening on their sofa. They click “contact the agency” on three or four comparable properties — not out of disloyalty, out of prudence. Each portal generates an e-mail to each agency. And then everything depends on the time: if it is Tuesday at 2 pm, someone may reply within the hour. If it is Friday at 9 pm, the reply goes out on Monday — after the very weekend during which the prospect was available to visit.

The problem is not the portal: it does its job, it delivers the contact. The problem is what happens after the e-mail.

Why e-mail is a bad place for a lead

• It belongs to no one. A contact@ inbox everyone can read is an inbox no one handles. Without clear ownership, every lead waits for someone to feel responsible.
• It doesn’t say what’s urgent. The same inbox receives a buyer with a bank agreement and a brochure request. Nothing distinguishes them until someone reads them — and asks the qualification questions.
• It ages badly. An unhandled e-mail sinks down the pile. After a few days, replying becomes awkward; after a week, pointless.
• It records nothing. Who replied what, when, to whom? Without a CRM, the lead’s history is scattered across personal mailboxes.

What a good handling circuit changes

The target circuit fits in one sentence: every portal e-mail becomes a conversation engaged within minutes, whatever the hour, and a qualified lead in the CRM.

Concretely:

1. Centralisation. All portal e-mails converge on a single entry point (not the personal inbox of the agent who published the listing).
2. Immediate first contact. A reply within minutes, with the requested information and a first qualification question. This is the critical window: the prospect is still in front of their screen.
3. Switch to a conversational channel. E-mail is a poor medium for dialogue. Offering to continue on WhatsApp (or by phone during opening hours) smooths the exchange — and it is often what the prospect prefers.
4. Qualification and CRM. Project, timeline, financing, criteria: the lead enters the CRM with a complete file and a score, not as a line reading “atHome enquiry”.
5. Viewing proposed. The goal of the first exchange is not to chat: it is to end up with a slot.

The part you can automate

Steps 2 to 5 are exactly what a conversational assistant does well: reading the incoming enquiry, replying immediately in the prospect’s language, asking the qualification questions over the conversation, proposing slots and pushing the file into the CRM. At night and at the weekend — when these e-mails arrive — it is the only thing that can do it.

The human agent keeps what carries value: the viewing, the advice, the negotiation. And they start their day with qualified leads instead of an inbox to sort.

The takeaway

Portals are expensive and deliver perishable contacts. The return on that investment is not decided by the choice of portal, but in the minutes following each e-mail. Measure one week of real delays between a portal enquiry arriving and the first genuine reply — evenings and weekends included. It is often the most convincing argument for rethinking the circuit.