Blog / / 7 min read
After-hours calls to a sales office. Where leads go missing
A Polish developer's sales office is usually open 40-49 hours a week, out of 168. Listings, property portals and site banners never close, so some calls reach an empty office. Nobody has published how many, but you can count them in your own office and then decide who should answer them.
How many hours a week the sales office is closed
Roughly three quarters of the week. A typical developer sales office in Poland answers Monday to Friday, 9 am to 5 pm or 9 am to 6 pm, and sometimes on Saturday morning.
Two examples listed by royal-space.pl:
| Sales office | Opening hours | Open per week | Closed per week |
|---|---|---|---|
| Marvipol | Mon-Fri 9 am-5 pm | 40 h | 128 h (76%) |
| Alpha Park | Mon-Fri 9 am-6 pm, Sat 10 am-2 pm | 49 h | 119 h (71%) |
The table counts hours rather than calls. Hardly anyone rings at 3 am, so calls are not spread evenly across the day.
Evenings and weekends, though, are often the only time a buyer can call in peace. Many of them work the same hours as your office.
Do buyers really call after hours?
Nobody knows exactly, because no one has published this data for Polish developers. Three sources suggest, though, that the phone matters in selling flats and that after-hours cover pays.
- Phone calls are a large share of leads. In a 2018 Calltracker case study, a developer had about 400 leads a month, and 37.5% of them were phone calls. On Google Ads, more people called than filled in the form.
- Buyers prefer to talk. In a developer case described by Ringostat (Utlandia), buyers preferred to discuss details by phone.
- Large developers already pay for after-hours cover. ROBYG's consultants are on chat from 9 am to midnight on weekdays and from 11 am to 9 pm at weekends. That is chat rather than phone, but it means one of Poland's largest developers serves buyers until midnight.
What an unanswered call costs
At least the price of a lead you have already paid for. According to Seesell, a lead in Polish residential development costs 40-90 złoty in the mass market in 2026, typically 60-70 złoty. In the premium segment it is 90-140 złoty.
A portal listing and a site banner have no opening hours. A buyer who calls at 8 pm came from the same paid campaign as one who calls at 11 am.
Timing matters too. In research reported in Harvard Business Review in 2011, firms that contacted a lead within an hour were about seven times more likely to qualify it than firms that waited longer.
That study covered US companies, not developers. Even so, a voicemail left on Friday evening and returned on Monday morning has waited more than 60 hours.
How developers handle after-hours calls today
There are four common approaches, and each fits a different volume: voicemail, salespeople's mobiles, a call centre and an AI assistant. Chat, as at ROBYG, covers the website but doesn't answer the phone.
| Approach | What the caller gets | Cost and limits |
|---|---|---|
| Voicemail | A recorded message and a callback on the next working day | The cheapest option. Not everyone leaves a message, and then all you have in the morning is a number. |
| Salespeople's mobiles | A conversation with someone who knows the development | No outside cost, but your salespeople are working in the evening too. At Utlandia, calls from 7 pm to 9 pm went to staff mobiles and calls from 9 pm to 8 am went to voicemail. |
| Call centre | A conversation with an agent | According to hotlead and consider.pl, 25-60 złoty per agent-hour, most often 30-40 złoty. The agent knows the development from a briefing, not from the sales office. |
| AI assistant | Answers from the live price list and a viewing in the calendar | A monthly subscription. It says it is AI. It doesn't negotiate and won't replace a salesperson in a difficult conversation. |
For scale, our own arithmetic: with the office open 9 am to 5 pm, the line is closed 128 hours a week, or about 550 hours a month. One dedicated agent covering all of that at 30-40 złoty an hour comes to roughly 16,500-22,000 złoty a month.
Voicemail is enough when a handful of people call after hours each week. Salespeople's mobiles work in a small team that wants to keep every buyer in-house. A call centre or an assistant makes sense once there are too many calls to return quickly the next morning. We describe how the assistant handles these calls in AI voice assistant for property developers.
How to measure after-hours calls in your office
You need one week and data you already have. There are three ways to do it, simplest first.
- Your phone operator's call log. Download the list of incoming calls to the sales line for the last four weeks. Mark the ones that arrived outside office hours. If the log also shows calls missed during office hours, count those separately.
- Call tracking. If you already use it, the report shows the time and source of every call: portal, Google Ads, site banner. You will see how many people call after 5 pm and which ad they came from.
- A week of counting. No call log, no tools: for one week your salespeople note every missed call and every voicemail, with the time.
This gives you three numbers: how many calls arrived after hours, what share of all calls that is, and how many of those callers someone called back the same or the next day.
Not every call is a new lead, so drop repeat calls from the same number. Multiply the rest by your cost per lead. The result is what you pay each week for calls that reach a closed office.
Frequently asked questions
Is there data on how many calls to developers come after hours?
Not for Poland. We found no public figures for Polish developers or their sales offices. The closest pointer comes from the US and another industry: in home services, 35-40% of inbound calls arrive after hours, according to a hicira roundup citing ServiceTitan data. For a developer's sales line, you have to measure it yourself.
Isn't voicemail enough?
It is if a handful of people call after hours each week and your team calls them back in the morning. With more calls, the problem is time. A buyer who left a message on Friday evening can call another developer over the weekend.
Does an AI assistant replace salespeople at weekends?
No. It answers the phone, quotes from the price list, asks what the buyer needs and books a viewing at the sales office. Negotiation, discounts and unit reservations stay with your salespeople.
When does call tracking pay off?
Ringostat gives a simple rule of thumb: once 25-30% or more of your leads come by phone. In the Calltracker case study it was 37.5%. If you don't know how many leads call, start with the call log.
Where to start
Download the last four weeks of the sales line's call log and count the calls that came in after closing time and at weekends. If there are more than your team can return quickly, listen to the demo with Zosia to hear how the assistant handles such a call. Or book a 30-minute call and we will go through your numbers together.
Sources
- Czy deweloper potrzebuje własnego biura sprzedaży, royal-space.pl (opening hours of the Marvipol and Alpha Park offices, in Polish)
- ROBYG, chat consultants' hours
- Ile kosztuje lead w branży deweloperskiej, Seesell (cost per lead, in Polish)
- Calltracker w branży nieruchomości: case study, Calltracker and Media Strateg, 2018 (in Polish)
- Developer case studies, Ringostat (Utlandia, in Polish)
- Developer case study, Ringostat (in Polish)
- Outsourced call centre vs in-house team: cost analysis, hotlead (in Polish)
- What it costs to hire a call centre, consider.pl (in Polish)
- How fast do marketing leads turn cold, Venture Harbour (summary of the 2011 Harvard Business Review research)
- Oldroyd et al., original publication, BYU ScholarsArchive
- Missed call statistics, hicira (ServiceTitan data)