The short answer
Roughly 177 to 195 calls produce one listing for an agent in the Ray White network working a list they already own. That range comes from Ray White's published phone day results, which show about 12 dials per appraisal booked, combined with the 6.5 per cent appraisal to listing conversion its managing director reported for 2025.
What to take away
- About 12 dials produce one booked appraisal when the list is warm, and 177 to 195 dials produce one listing once conversion is applied.
- Cold lists are far worse. The only large published study of true real estate cold calling found 330 calls per appointment set, in the United States in 2011.
- At 40 dials a day, which is 200 a week, the arithmetic gives about one listing a week. At the 10 to 20 a day most agents actually manage it is one every two to four weeks.
- The dials are the only part of that chain a licensed agent does not personally have to make, and they are the part that consumes the week.
What is the actual number?
Between 177 and 195 dials for one listing, on a list the agent already owns. Here is the working.
Ray White runs a network wide phone day twice a year and publishes the raw counts. In February 2026, 3,549 people across 360 offices in Australia and New Zealand placed 141,131 calls and booked 12,304 appraisals, which is 11.5 dials per appraisal. In June 2026 the same event produced 126,773 calls and 10,021 appraisals, or 12.7 dials per appraisal. Separately, Ray White's managing director reported that the 36,000 appraisals its 2025 phone days produced became 2,337 listings, a conversion rate of 6.5 per cent. Dividing the dials per appraisal by that conversion rate gives 177 to 195 dials for one listing won.
12,304
Appraisals booked from 141,131 calls in a single 12 hour Ray White phone day, February 2026. That is 11.5 dials per appraisal.
Elite Agent, reporting Ray White Real Estate of Origin
| Event | Calls | Appraisals | Dials per appraisal | Dials per listing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| February 2026 | 141,131 | 12,304 | 11.5 | 177 |
| June 2026 | 126,773 | 10,021 | 12.7 | 195 |
Dials placed
Appraisals booked
One per 11.9 dials
Listings won
6.5 per cent of appraisals
One chain, at 11.9 dials per appraisal and a 6.5 per cent appraisal to listing conversion. Source: Elite Agent reports of Ray White phone days, February and June 2026, and Ray White's reported 2025 conversion. The multiplication is ours and is shown in the table above.
The second step is the one agents underestimate. Sixteen appraisals sounds like a good fortnight, and on these rates fifteen of them end with somebody else's board in the ground or no board at all.
How much worse is a genuinely cold list?
Considerably, and the only large published study of real estate cold calling puts a number on it. Baylor University's Keller Center had 50 agents place 6,264 genuinely cold calls over a fortnight. Only 28 per cent were answered at all. The calls produced 19 appointments with prospective clients, which is one appointment for every 330 calls.
| List | Dials per appointment | Answered |
|---|---|---|
| Cold, no relationship (Baylor, US, 2011) | 330 | 28% |
| Owned farm area list (Ray White, AU, 2026) | 11.5 to 12.7 | Not published |
The gap between 12 and 330 is the entire value of a list. It is also why the agents who are good at this spend their money on data and their time on the same 1,500 homes for years, rather than buying a bigger list every quarter.
Baylor found one more thing worth keeping. Calls placed between 10am and 2pm were 31 per cent of the dials but produced 53 per cent of all appointments and referrals, while calls after 5pm were 42 per cent of dials and produced 21 per cent of the outcomes. Most agents prospect at the wrong end of the day, because the wrong end of the day is when they have finished everything else.
What does that mean for one agent's week?
Take the midpoint of the range, 190 dials per listing, and an agent who genuinely makes 40 prospecting calls every working day. That is 200 dials a week, so roughly one listing a week from prospecting alone, which sounds excellent until you count what 40 dials a day costs.
| Dials a day | Dials a week | Weeks per listing | Listings a year |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 | 50 | 3.8 | 13 |
| 20 | 100 | 1.9 | 27 |
| 40 | 200 | 0.95 | 54 |
The third row is the one to look at, because almost nobody achieves it. Forty conversations attempted a day, every day, alongside appraisals, listing presentations, open homes, vendor calls, contract chasing and the buyers who ring during dinner. The published prospecting numbers are not describing what agents do. They are describing what agents would do if the rest of the job stopped.
The nearest thing to a measurement of where the week goes is cross industry rather than real estate. Salesforce's sixth State of Sales, fieldwork in 2024 across 5,500 sales professionals, found reps spend about 30 per cent of their time actually selling. No Australian time study of an agent's week exists that we could find.
In 2025, we booked 36,000 appraisals across three REOO events, 2,337 of those appraisals converted into listings.
What is one listing worth, and does the maths hold?
It depends where you work, and the spread is wider than agents outside the state expect. Cotality's July 2026 Home Value Index puts the national median dwelling value at A$928,421. On fees, bRight Agent's 2026 commission survey across more than 200 postcodes puts the national median at 2.65 per cent, from 2.23 per cent in the ACT to 3.25 per cent in Tasmania. That is an industry survey with no published methodology, not official data.
| Capital | Median dwelling value | State median commission | Gross commission |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sydney | A$1,244,617 | 2.35% | A$29,249 |
| Melbourne | A$797,354 | 2.35% | A$18,738 |
| Brisbane | A$1,104,094 | 2.80% | A$30,915 |
| Adelaide | A$944,909 | 2.90% | A$27,402 |
| Perth | A$1,029,797 | 2.75% | A$28,319 |
Set that against the dials. If one listing in Brisbane is worth about A$30,915 to the agency and takes 190 dials, then a dial is worth roughly A$163 of gross commission. That reframes the question. It is not whether prospecting is worth doing. It is who should be doing it, given that the person currently doing it is also the only person in the business who can run an appraisal.
Where does this leave the agent?
With a fixed cost per listing, denominated in dials, and a hard limit on how many of them fit in a week alongside the work only they can do. Every serious answer the industry has produced to that is a way of buying dials from somebody else: a junior on the phones, an offshore assistant, a call centre, a portal lead that is really the same dial made by a marketing budget.
ListingLine is an AI voice agent that calls an Australian real estate agent's farm area in the agent's name, at A$2.00 per connected call. A dial and a connected call are not the same unit, which matters here: on the arithmetic above one listing is around 190 dials, and at Baylor's 28 per cent answer rate that is nearer 50 connected calls, so on the order of A$100 of calling against a gross commission in the tens of thousands. Your own connect rate is the variable that moves it.
We publish the ratio rather than hiding it because it is the only honest way to sell this. The numbers are either good enough to be worth it or they are not, and an agent can now check.
The dials are not the interesting part of the job. They are the part that has to happen before the interesting part can. If you want the words that make those dials work, they are in the appraisal call script, and the rules the dialling has to stay inside are in is cold calling legal in Australia.
Common questions
- Why use Ray White's numbers rather than an industry average?
- Because there is no Australian industry average that anyone publishes with its working. Ray White releases the raw call and appraisal counts from its network phone days and its managing director has stated the appraisal to listing conversion, which is two sourced figures and one division. Every other number circulating on this subject in Australia is either an American study or an assertion with no origin.
- Is a 6.5 per cent appraisal to listing conversion rate good?
- It is a network wide figure from phone sourced appraisals, which is the hardest kind, so it is a reasonable floor rather than a target. Appraisals that come from a referral or a past client convert far higher. If your own phone sourced appraisals convert well above 6.5 per cent, the likely explanation is that you are booking fewer and better ones, which is a real strategy with a real cost.
- How many prospecting calls a day is realistic for a working agent?
- Ten to twenty attempted conversations a day is what most agents manage in practice once appraisals, opens and vendor management are counted, which puts them two to four weeks from a listing on the arithmetic above. The forty a day figure is a phone day number, achieved when the rest of the job has been cleared out of the way for a day.
- Does the time of day really change the result?
- In the Baylor data it changed it substantially. Calls between 10am and 2pm were 31 per cent of dials but produced 53 per cent of the appointments and referrals, and calls after 5pm produced only 21 per cent of outcomes from 42 per cent of dials. The practical reading is that an evening dial is worth about half an average dial and under a third of a late morning one.
- What does one dial cost an agency?
- That depends on who makes it. A salaried junior making 40 dials a day is the usual comparison, and the honest way to run it is to divide their fully loaded cost, including superannuation, desk, licensing and management time, by the dials they actually place rather than the ones planned. We price a different unit, A$2.00 per connected call, so compare that to a junior's cost per conversation rather than per dial.
Sources
- 1Ray White network books 12,000 appraisals in 12 hour phone blitz. Elite Agent, Event 26 February 2026.
- 2Ray White members hit the phones for fast paced appraisal drive. Elite Agent, Event June 2026.
- 3Has Cold Calling Gone Cold?. Keller Center for Research, Baylor University, Calls placed November 2011, published September 2012.
- 4State of Sales, sixth edition. Salesforce, Fieldwork March to April 2024.
- 5Home Value Index, July 2026, capital city median dwelling values. Cotality, reported by Property Investment Professionals of Australia, Data to 31 July 2026.
- 6Monthly Housing Chart Pack, July 2026. Cotality, Published 16 July 2026.
- 7Agent fees: who charges the most. Real Estate Business, reporting bRight Agent commission data, Published 16 February 2026.
Written by
Jason
Founder, ListingLine
Builds the AI voice agent that ListingLine customers point at their farm area. Spends most of his week reading call transcripts, which is an unusual and fairly grim way to learn what Australian homeowners will and will not talk about on the phone.