Lead Routing and SLA in Real Estate CRM: A Methodology Note on Round-Robin, Skill-Based Assignment, Escalation and First-Touch Contracts

Real estate teams receive leads from portals, advertising forms, websites and messaging apps, and a CRM must decide who owns each lead and how quickly that owner must act. Vendors document individual features (rotation, assignment rules, escalation), but teams rarely write down the decision logic as one operational contract. This methodology note proposes such a contract. It covers assignment rules (round-robin, load-balanced and criteria-based by project, language or skill), service-level time windows by hour band, breach triggers, escalation and requeue (redistribution), a night and weekend policy, a first-touch contract, and a set of measurable event fields, and it presents a text decision flow. The note deliberately excludes metric definitions and denominators, which belong to a companion funnel-metrics note, and excludes the evaluation of CRM products, which belongs to the RE-CRM-ER rubric. It contains no empirical data. Every numeric threshold in the examples is a hypothetical, uncalibrated default that a team must replace with its own values.