Put your own numbers in rather than taking an industry figure. The arithmetic is simple and the inputs are yours.
Published September 10, 2026
Nobody can tell you this from the outside, and anybody who quotes you a figure for your business without seeing your numbers is quoting an average from an industry you may not be in.
The good news is the arithmetic is simple and you have all the inputs already.
Multiply the first two to get inquiries lost, then apply the third and fourth. That is your exposure, and it is defensible because every input came from your own records.
Inquiry volume is usually undercounted, because the count comes from the CRM and the inquiries that were never answered were often never entered. The phone log, the form submissions, the portal message queue and the unwatched inbox all need to be included, and the last two are where the surprises live.
The share that got no reply is usually higher than people expect for the same reason. It is worth checking a single month by hand rather than trusting a report built on records that only exist for the inquiries somebody worked.
The arithmetic above is the direct loss. There are second-order ones worth keeping in mind even if you do not try to price them.
Marketing spend that generated an inquiry nobody answered is spend with no chance of a return. A vacant unit costs every day it stays vacant, so slower leasing has a carrying cost of its own. And a prospect who was ignored is not neutral about it; they are a slightly worse reference than somebody who never contacted you at all.
Not every missed inquiry was going to convert. Some were never serious, some had already chosen elsewhere, some were not qualified.
So apply your normal conversion rate rather than assuming missed inquiries would have converted at a higher one, and resist the temptation to inflate the number to justify a decision. The honest figure is usually persuasive enough, and it holds up when somebody questions it.
The hardest part of this exercise is the counting, because inbound demand arrives in more places than most operators have a single view of.
Pulling one month from every one of those is tedious and it is the whole value of the exercise. A count that comes only from the CRM will be reassuringly low, because the inquiries you are trying to measure are precisely the ones that were never entered into it.
Look at when the missed inquiries arrived before deciding what to do about them, because the answer differs.
If most cluster outside office hours, you have a coverage problem and more staff during the day will not touch it. If they cluster in the middle of a busy weekday, you have a capacity problem at peak. If they are spread evenly across an unwatched channel, you have an ownership problem, and that one you can often fix this week for nothing.
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