Earlier this year, we ran a buyer simulation across ten Dubai real estate agencies. We didn't survey anyone or ask agencies to self-report. We posed as a genuine buyer, submitted real enquiries through Bayut and Property Finder, and documented exactly what happened next — the first message, whether budget or timeline came up, and what happened after we went quiet.
All ten agencies were selected on one criterion: active listing volume on both portals. Six of the ten operate at a scale most owners would recognize as competitive — high listing volume, multiple agents, steady portal spend. The other four were smaller operations, included in the study but set aside when we isolate the group most agency owners actually compete against.
Here's what the six at scale did.
They replied in six minutes on average. That's fast — faster than most owners would guess, and faster than the four smaller agencies in the sample. Speed wasn't the problem.
None of them asked what we could spend. None of them asked when we wanted to move. Every one of them opened with some version of "how can I help?" and went straight to sending listings.
At most one of the six followed up more than once after we went quiet. The rest sent a single message and stopped.
Put those three findings together and a pattern shows up that has nothing to do with effort. These are agencies that reply fast and follow the same script every time: reply, ask nothing, send listings, wait. When the buyer doesn't answer, most of them don't come back a second time.
That's not a discipline problem you fix by telling agents to try harder. It's a structure problem. Nobody told these agents to skip budget and timeline — the conversation simply isn't built to ask. And nobody told them to stop chasing a quiet lead — there's no system tracking who owns day two, or day five, or day twelve, so it doesn't happen.
The buyer doesn't experience any of this as "the agency didn't try." They experience it as silence. Then they book a viewing with whoever answers next.
This is happening in a market getting more crowded, not less. Dubai recorded 13,083 newly registered brokers in 2025, a 38% jump year over year (Dubai Land Department). More people are chasing the same portal leads. An agency that replies fast but loses buyers to silence after day one isn't just leaving deals on the table — it's handing them to whichever competitor happens to follow up.
If you run a Dubai or Abu Dhabi agency working portal leads, the useful question isn't "how fast do we reply." Based on what we found, you're probably already fast enough. The question is what happens in the two minutes after that first reply, and what happens on day five if the buyer hasn't said anything back.