Recipe 3 of 5 · lead routing
The window between a buyer submitting an offer and someone making contact is one of the most commercially consequential gaps in a portfolio sale. Here's how to close it with n8n.
Buyers who submit offers on a Friday afternoon and hear nothing until Monday have already started looking at other assets. The automation case is straightforward: get the right information to the right person within minutes of a buyer action, not hours or days. The challenge is that inbound requests typically arrive across multiple channels and need routing to different people depending on the asset, the request type, and the stage of the sale process.
Set up a single Google Sheet as the collection point. Use n8n, Zapier or Make to pull new submissions from each source automatically. Every row should have: Timestamp, Buyer Name, Email, Phone, Asset ID, Request Type, Status (New / Contacted / In Progress).
Set rules for routing inbound requests based on Request Type, Asset ID, or both. For example: Request Type "Electrical Maintenance" routes to the partner in charge of that job type; Request Type "Offer" routes to a broker who can pick it up, with specific contacts by Asset ID if the broker differs by property.
In n8n, create a trigger on new rows in your collection sheet. Add routing logic based on the routing rules — offers, mortgage enquiries, plumbing, cleaning and concierge requests are each sent to the relevant contact, internal or external, as specified.
Add a second workflow that runs two hours after each new row is created. It checks whether Status has been updated from "New" to "Contacted" or "In Progress." If not, it sends an escalation to the portfolio manager: "[Buyer name] submitted an offer on [Asset] two hours ago. No contact recorded yet."
Within minutes, not hours — the recipe above targets a two-hour maximum with an automated escalation if that's missed. Reference points from institutional deployments show a broker calling a buyer within minutes of a weekend offer submission is achievable and becomes the standard once routing is automated.
Yes — a trigger on new rows plus conditional routing against a rules sheet handles this well for a single portfolio with a stable partner/broker list. It becomes harder to maintain as the number of request types and asset-specific contacts grows.