Most brokerages treat the customer journey as the six to ten weeks between a buyer’s first showing and a signed contract, or the few weeks between a listing consultation and closing day. In fact, the real estate customer journey is much longer than that.
And interestingly, a real estate customer journey actually starts months, sometimes years, before anyone contacts an agent. In that time, they’ve usually been watching the market for months, tracking their own property value, reading suburb reports and comparing agents online.
To ensure you reach as many people as possible, you need a customer journey. However, the customer journey maps real estate agents are typically given are often too simplistic. People can’t be neatly filed as simply ‘in consideration’ or ‘an active buyer or seller’.
Your journey needs to focus on constantly engaging with those who cool and warm over time, whether they are researching, warming, inspection-ready, or dormant.
In this article, we’ll help you do just that with examples of a real estate customer journey map and guidance.
Jump to What You Need:
- What is a Customer Journey Map in Real Estate?
- Customer Journey Stages in Real Estate
- Examples of a Real Estate Customer Journey
- A Real Estate Customer Journey Map
- Create Multiple Real Estate Customer Journeys with ActivePipe
- FAQs
What Is a Customer Journey Map in Real Estate, and Why Do You Need One?
A real estate customer buying journey is not as simple or as fast as you might hope. REA Group’s latest Property Seeker survey of more than 15,000 Australian buyers and sellers puts the average journey at around 40 weeks, from the first bit of market-watching through to settlement.
Does your marketing cover this length of time? Most don’t. If yours can, that’s a serious point of difference — and a relief for the people going through it.
61% of buyers said the process left them stressed, overwhelmed or anxious. For first-home buyers, that jumps to 67%.
Yet most agent advice tells you to sort contacts into three buckets: buyer, seller, past client.
This doesn’t capture the nuance around what people want to hear, or how much the roles change. For comparison, in the US, the National Association of Realtors’ 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers found that repeat buyers — people who already own a home — now make up 79% of all home buyers, the highest share on record.
That means “buyer” and “seller” aren’t two different people. Most of the time, they’re the same person, a few months apart.
Communication in real estate needs to keep pace with the realities of a real estate customer buying journey.
REA found that only 65% of buyers who’d been to an open home in the past year got any kind of follow-up afterwards, and for first-home buyers, the ones who need the most reassurance, it was 59%.
This isn’t an issue with agents not caring. It’s an issue with customer communications.
If your journeys are just a few emails and a newsletter, are highly manual, and stop after a few weeks, you’re always going to fall short.
Customer Journey Stages In Real Estate
As prospects and customers move through your database, they don’t stay static. Someone in the early stages wants a suburb update. Someone mid-search wants floor plans and comparable sales. Someone who bought just last year is rewatching the same walkthrough video for the fifth time — for a completely different property on the other side of town
With the right tools, you can serve them with exactly what they need.
Your real estate customer journey needs to meet people at all these stages.
InfoTrack’s research asked what needed to be improved in the sector, and communication came first at 33%, followed by transparency at 27%.
Some agents are scared to implement a deep real estate customer journey for fear of sending too much content. On the contrary – you can’t say enough.
Trade Me found serious buyers spend close to half an hour at an open home, and nearly a quarter had been to more than twenty open homes before buying.
People aren’t casually browsing. They’re working through one of the biggest decisions of their life.
Read how Barfoot and Thompson Browns Bay sent over a million emails a year and generated ninety appraisals without lifting a finger — every contact received a personalised send, right down to the subject line and timing, even when audiences overlapped.
Examples Of A Real Estate Customer Journey
A real estate customer journey map is an essential addition to your marketing planning, and it all starts with a trigger. Something changes: a job, a baby, a rate cut, political changes. You won’t know what that is, but your content and outreach should always be answering evergreen questions:
- What’s this place actually worth?
- Are you a trusted agent?
- What open homes are available?
- Which is the best suburb?
- Finance and offer advice
- Ownership guidance: refinancing, renovating, watching the market.
Research and active search. Saved searches. Repeat visits to the same listings can all flag moving states.
Here are a few examples.
The First-Home Buyer
- Fills in a form asking about first-home buyer guides. Gets a welcome email.
- Starts browsing: two-bed units, then three-bed houses a suburb over, then back to units. ActivePipe adjusts what they’re shown in email sends.
- It goes quiet for three weeks. An email around pre-approval is sent.
- Views the same listing, multiple times. This is flagged as a priority contact.
- Buys. The automated sequence stops. A settlement-week check-in starts instead, then a market update a few months later.
The Move-Up Vendor
- Requests an online appraisal. Gets solid local results straight away.
- Gets a light monthly touch: what’s moved nearby, what it sold for.
- Starts browsing listings too: four-bed houses, a suburb up. ActivePipe adjusts their sends to include buyer content.
- Books an in-person appraisal. This is flagged as a priority contact.
- Sells. The buyer sequence, already running, keeps going.
The Investor
- Downloads a rental-yield guide. Gets a welcome email.
- Watches one type of listing. Content is adjusted for their interests.
- Cools off for a stretch. A monthly market snapshot keeps them warm.
- Clicks yield data and recent sales in one suburb, repeatedly. This is flagged as a priority contact.
- Makes an offer. The buyer sequence stops. Ownership nurture starts instead.
A Real Estate Customer Journey Map
Use a tool like ActivePipe to track client interactions and automate follow-ups. ActivePipe, which serves more than 35,000 user accounts and 4,400+ entities across ANZ, can flag behavioural signals, like renewed property research or repeat engagement from a long-dormant contact.
With these capabilities, you can then set up a handful of journeys. Start with your main targets for warm leads:
- First-time buyers
- Just moved
- Considering available property listings
- Looking at a particular suburb
This works because it’s grouped around what someone’s actually doing, not a label you assigned them on day one. Buyer, seller, past client — three static boxes, and most contacts don’t sit in any of them for long. Trigger-based groups move with the person instead.
A detailed customer journey
Here’s what that looks like in practice: if a contact is both watching a suburb and browsing listings in it, you get two different signals and two different sends.
You create your content and guides to set up and send, including welcome emails, new listings, sold reports, data updates, and monthly newsletters.
One thread keeps them updated on what’s moving locally: recent sales, price shifts, new listings nearby.
The other responds to what they’re actually clicking on — floor plans, comparable properties, inspection times.
- Welcome emails fire the moment someone requests them.
- New listings and sold reports go out as they happen, tied to the suburb or property type that contact’s already shown interest in.
- Data updates and the newsletter run on a steady monthly rhythm, the one constant that keeps dormant contacts warm without demanding anything from them.
You can ensure each group is segmented and tailored so clients receive messages with unique titles, looks, and delivery times, even when contacts overlap.
Barfoot and Thompson, Browns Bay called it “a no-brainer that works its magic in the background without any effort…the numbers speak for themselves.”
Create Multiple Real Estate Customer Journeys With ActivePipe
ActivePipe was built to solve a common problem: most of a brokerage’s database is invisible until someone finally raises their hand, and by then, they may already be talking to a competitor. Because it combines stated preferences with real behaviour (inspection or showing attendance, survey answers, property clicks), content — including emails, newsletters and listing alerts helps you stay relevant, forming a multi-step, highly engaging customer journey.