“Hi, it’s [name] with [brokerage], I’m just following up on our conversation from a few weeks ago.” That is how most second calls to a seller lead begin, and it is why most of them go nowhere. “Just following up” is a sentence with no reason in it. Neither is “checking in,” or “touching base,” or “wanted to see where you’re at.” Each one tells the homeowner that the agent has a calendar reminder and nothing else, and the homeowner, who has had a dozen calls that opened the same way from people selling the same things, responds to the reminder rather than to the person: “we’re still not ready,” and the call is over in fifteen seconds.
The correction is that the second call already has a reason, and it is better than any reason a first call can have. The homeowner said something last time. They named a date, or a condition, or a plan, and the agent wrote it down, per the call record. The second call opens with that, in the homeowner’s own words, on the day the homeowner named, and it asks one question about what happened to it. Everything else on this site about follow-up rests on that sentence, and this piece is the script for it.
The opener
Hi, is this [name]? It’s [your name] with [brokerage]. When we spoke in April you said you’d rather wait until the school year was over before doing anything with the house, and asked me to check back in June. It’s June, so here I am. Where did that land?
Four parts. The name and the brokerage, again, briefly, because the homeowner does not remember you as clearly as you remember them. The homeowner’s own words, as close to verbatim as the record allows, because a person hearing their own sentence quoted back knows two things instantly: that you listened, and that this call is about them rather than about your pipeline. The date, theirs, which converts the call from an interruption into a promise kept. And the question, which is open and about the thing they said.
Notice what is missing. There is no market update, no “I’ve been thinking about your property,” no offer of a valuation, and no restatement of what an agent does. The first call earned this call by asking one question and recording the answer. The second call spends what was earned, and it spends it by being short.
The one question
Where did that land?
Or “how did that go,” or “what happened with that,” depending on what they said. The question refers to the thing the homeowner named and asks nothing about selling. A homeowner who said “after the school year” is asked about the school year, and the answer, whatever it is, tells you whether the plan they had in April is still the plan. Most will tell you in a sentence or two. Some will say the plan changed, which is the most useful answer of all, because the change is where the listing lives or dies. The question that fails is “are you still thinking of selling,” which is closed, presumes a state of mind, and is answered “no” by people who are.
Then the silence, held longer than the first call’s, because the homeowner is now remembering a conversation they had two months ago and deciding how honest to be about how it went.
What the last call left you
Every list on this site leaves the second call something different to open with, and the opener is built from it.
| List | What the last call left you | The opener it produces | The question |
|---|---|---|---|
| Expired | Their diagnosis and a reason for waiting | “You thought the price was the problem and you wanted to let it breathe until spring.” | “Has anything changed about that?” |
| FSBO | Their date and their number | “You gave yourself until the end of October and you wanted to net around 380.” | “Where are you against that?” |
| Landlord | The lease end and hold, lease or sell | “The lease on Maple ends in October and you said you’d see how this year went.” | “How did the year go?” |
| Circle | The note opt-in and any street fact | “You asked for the note on what sells around you; that last one on Alder closed Friday.” | “Did it match what you’d have guessed?” |
| Absentee owner | Who manages it and the undecided answer | “You said nobody had really decided what to do with the house, and I sent the two numbers.” | “Did they land the way you expected?” |
| Pre-foreclosure | The plan and the permission | “You were working it out with the bank and said I could check in in November.” | “Where are you with it now?” |
| Probate | The letters date and the two things you sent | “You’d just gotten the letters and I sent over the number and the timeline.” | “Was that useful, and where are things now?” |
Each opener is a sentence the homeowner recognizes as their own. None of them is a pitch. The follow-up plans for individual lists give the cadence; this is the sentence at the top of every call in them.
When the record has no words
Sometimes the record says “call back in June” and nothing else, because the first call was made by someone who did not write the sentence down, or by you on a bad day. The temptation is to fake it, and homeowners can hear a faked quote. The honest opener works better.
It’s [your name] with [brokerage]. We spoke in April, and my note says you asked me to call back around now, but I’ll be honest that I didn’t write down what you told me, which is my fault. Can I ask where things stand with the house?
That is a weaker call than the one with the quote, and it is a far stronger call than “just following up,” because it tells the truth and it still asks an open question. Record the answer this time. The reactivation piece covers the database full of records like this and the order to call them in.
The record that has nothing at all, no date and no words, is not a follow-up. It is a first call, and it should be made as one, with a current reason, per the stop-or-decay rules, rather than dressed up as a follow-up to a conversation nobody can remember.
The four ways it ends
A new date. The most common outcome and a good one. “The school year’s done but my husband’s job thing hasn’t settled, give it until August.” That is a new dated record, in their words, and the third call opens exactly the way this one did. The pipeline stages piece calls this stage three, and a record can sit in it through several dated calls without anything being wrong.
A decline. “We decided to stay.” Thank them, ask whether they would mind a call if something changes on the street, and move the record to event-based contact. A decline on a second call is a clean outcome, not a failure. The first call sorted them into maybe; the second sorted them into no; both calls did their job.
An appointment. “The job came through, we need to be gone by September.” Then the call is about a time and a place, and the appointment protocol applies. Do not celebrate on the phone. Set the time.
Nothing. No answer, no voicemail returned, on the date they named and the day after. The record does not stay dated forever. It decays back to declined with its history intact, after the grace period the stop-or-decay piece describes, and the next contact is a first call with an event behind it. A missed promise on your side, the call made a week late, is treated the same way it would be treated on theirs: with an apology in the opener and no assumption that the date still stands.
The rules that do not change
A callback the homeowner asked for is still a solicitation. The state frequency caps count it; the internal do-not-call list applies to it; a homeowner who says “don’t call again” on the second call is on the list before the third dial, per the do-not-call rules. Record the permission and its date on the first call, and the second call is made inside both.
The scripts hub says a script should prepare the agent to listen. The second call is the purest case, because the listening already happened, and the whole script is the act of proving it: their words, their date, one question, and the silence in which they tell you what happened.