The short answer
Calling an owned farm area list books an appraisal for about 12 dials, on Ray White's published phone day counts, and that is the only Australian prospecting rate anyone publishes. Door knocking, letterbox drops and SMS have no equivalent Australian figure, so comparing them to cold calling means modelling cost and time per appraisal.
What to take away
- Ray White's published phone days give roughly 11.5 to 12.7 dials per appraisal booked on a list the agents already owned. No Australian body publishes the door knocking equivalent.
- A letterbox drop costs about A$80 per thousand homes delivered at published Australian print and distribution rates, so it has to produce five appraisals per thousand to match calling.
- Door knocking loses to calling on modelled time per appraisal for one reason: the walking. A dial that rings out costs seconds, a door that stays shut costs a trip.
- Which channel wins is mostly a question of whether your scarce input is hours or dollars. The channels that cost money buy back time, and the reverse.
Which channel actually costs less per appraisal?
Calling an owned list, on the only numbers anybody publishes. The rest of this article is the working, and the parts of it that are guesswork are labelled as guesswork.
Only one of these channels has a published Australian rate. Ray White runs a network wide phone day twice a year and publishes the counts: 141,131 calls and 12,304 appraisals in February 2026, then 126,773 calls and 10,021 appraisals in June, which is 11.5 to 12.7 dials per appraisal booked on a list the agents already owned. Nobody publishes doors knocked per appraisal in Australia. Nobody publishes letterbox drop response rates for real estate here either. So the comparison below holds the published calling rate fixed, prices the other channels from their real costs, and models the rest from named inputs you can change. Every modelled row is labelled modelled in the table itself.
| Channel | Work per appraisal | Agent time per appraisal | Cost per appraisal | Source or modelled |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Calling an owned farm area list | 12 dials | 24 minutes | A$16 | Rate published, cost modelled |
| Calling a genuinely cold list | 330 dials | 11 hours | A$440 | Rate published, cost modelled |
| Owned list called by a voice agent | 12 dials, 3.4 connected | None | A$6.80 | Price published, rate assumed equal to a human |
| Door knocking the same farm area | 12 doors | 36 minutes | A$24 | Fully modelled |
| Letterbox drop, 1,000 homes | Not published | None | A$80 per 1,000 delivered | Cost published, rate unknown |
| SMS to a consented database | Not published | None | A$30 per 1,000 sent | Cost published, rate unknown |
Voice agent on an owned list
Rate assumed equal to a human
Calling an owned list
Rate published
Door knocking
Fully modelled
Letterbox drop
Break even at 5 per 1,000
Hatched means modelled, not measured
Australian dollars per appraisal booked. Solid bars rest on a published rate, hatched bars are modelled from the inputs in the next table. Sources: Elite Agent reports of Ray White phone days 2026, the Baylor University cold calling study, and published Australian print, distribution and SMS rate cards.
One channel is missing from that chart because it does not fit on it. Calling a genuinely cold list costs about A$440 an appraisal on Baylor's 330 calls per appointment, which is more than twenty seven times the same call made to a list you already own. That single ratio is the whole argument for spending money on data rather than on dials.
5 per 1,000
Appraisals a letterbox drop has to produce per thousand homes just to match calling an owned list at A$16 an appraisal. That is one appraisal for every 200 letterboxes.
Modelled from published Australian print and distribution rates and Ray White's published phone day counts
What do we actually know about door knocking?
Almost nothing, in Australia, with a number attached to it. No state institute, portal or franchise group publishes doors knocked per appraisal booked. The nearest thing that has been measured properly is political canvassing, where somebody counts because the outcome is a vote on a roll.
A United Kingdom field experiment across 6,525 voters at the 2017 English local elections recorded a successful canvass contact rate of 28 per cent. That is the share of doors that opened, not the share that became anything. Different country, different purpose, different script, and it is still the best measured door answer rate we could find.
Twenty eight per cent is also, as it happens, the share of real estate cold calls the Baylor University study found were answered at all. The objection that nobody is home during the day has weakened as well: 36 per cent of employed Australians usually worked from home in August 2025, on ABS figures.
What door knocking costs is the walking. A dial that rings out costs forty seconds. A door that does not open costs the walk to it, the knock, the wait, and the walk to the next one. That is the whole difference between the two channels, and it is why the modelled time per appraisal is half as much again on foot.
| Input | Value used | Source or modelled |
|---|---|---|
| Dials placed in an hour of focused calling | 30 | Modelled |
| Doors knocked in an hour | 20 | Modelled |
| Share of dials answered | 28 per cent | Baylor University, calls placed November 2011 |
| Share of doors answered | 28 per cent | United Kingdom canvassing field experiment, 2017 fieldwork |
| Conversations per appraisal booked | 3.4 | Derived: 12 dials per appraisal at 28 per cent answered |
| Value of an agent's hour | A$40 | Jobs and Skills Australia, earnings data May 2025 |
Run those inputs and an hour of knocking produces 5.6 conversations against 8.4 on the phone. At 3.4 conversations per appraisal booked, that is 36 minutes of knocking or 24 minutes of dialling for one appraisal. Change a single input and the ranking can flip, which is exactly why they are printed.
What does a letterbox drop cost per thousand?
About A$80 per thousand homes delivered, at the rates Australian distributors publish. Delivery is the cheap part. Printing a double sided DL flyer is the expensive part, and it falls sharply per unit as the run gets longer, which is why the drop that makes sense is 10,000 homes rather than 500.
| Line item | Published rate | Cost per 1,000 delivered |
|---|---|---|
| Distribution, 5,000 to 20,000 flyers | A$38 per 1,000 | A$38.00 |
| Distribution, 20,000 flyers, Sydney | A$740 for 20,000 | A$37.00 |
| Printing, DL double sided, 110gsm, 10,000 | A$425 for 10,000 | A$42.50 |
| Printing, DL double sided, 110gsm, 1,000 | A$160 for 1,000 | A$160.00 |
| All in at a 10,000 flyer run | Print plus distribution | A$80.50 |
Those are published rate card figures rather than quotes for a specific job, and they are metro rates. Regional postcodes cost more. Artwork, design and the hours an agent spends getting the piece right are not in them either, and on a first drop those hours are real.
Nobody publishes what a real estate letterbox drop returns in Australia, so here is the number that matters instead. At A$80 per thousand delivered, and A$16 an appraisal on the phone, a drop has to produce five appraisals per thousand homes to break even. One in two hundred letterboxes. Anyone who has run a drop already knows whether that is optimistic.
It is also the wrong comparison for a lot of agents, because the two channels are not paid for out of the same pocket. The drop costs money and no hours. The calling costs hours and, when the agent makes the calls themselves, no money at all.
Is the scarce thing your time or your money?
That question decides this, not the cost per appraisal table. An agent with a full listing book and no spare hours should buy the channels that cost money and no time. A new agent with an empty diary and no float should spend the hours, because hours are the only input they actually have.
The industry argues about door knocking and calling as though it were a question of character. It is a question of inventory. Look at what the dialling really costs in hours and the answer usually falls out of the diary rather than out of the debate.
There is a third option, which is to pay for the channel that normally costs time. 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.
On the model above, 12 dials at a 28 per cent answer rate is 3.4 connected calls, or A$6.80 of calling per appraisal. That figure assumes those conversations book appraisals at the rate a Ray White agent manages on a phone day. They may not. The assumption is the entire risk in that row, and it is why the table calls it assumed rather than measured.
Be careful with that row, because it is the one row on this page with no published measurement behind it. We went looking for a published Australian rate for AI calling and did not find one, ours included, which is the subject of does AI cold calling actually work. Until somebody publishes a sample, a period and a definition of a connected call, that row is a price with an assumption attached rather than a result.
How do you test this in your own farm area?
Four weeks, one thousand homes, four matched blocks of two hundred and fifty. Run one channel a week, count the same two things every time, and stop arguing about it over coffee.
The four week channel test
Week zero: split the farm area, not the suburb
Take 1,000 homes you already hold data for and split them into four blocks of 250 that match on price band, dwelling type and tenure. If the blocks do not match, the test measures the blocks rather than the channels, and you will spend a year acting on it.
Week one: call block A and time yourself
Log dials placed, conversations had, appraisals booked, and minutes on the phone taken from a timer rather than from memory. Memory inflates prospecting time and deflates dial counts, in that order, every time.
Week two: knock block B on the same days and hours
Same script, same intent, same window of the week. Log doors knocked, doors answered, appraisals booked and total minutes including the walking. The walking is the variable being tested, so it counts.
Week three: drop block C and record the invoice
Print and deliver to all 250, and record the actual invoice rather than the quote. Attribute for six weeks, not one: a drop that produces nothing in week one and two appraisals in week five is still a drop that worked.
Week four: SMS block D, only where you hold consent
Send only to contacts who have consented, with a working unsubscribe, and read our compliance notes before you send anything at all. Where consent is missing for a block, run the block as a second calling week instead and say so in the result.
Count all four the same way, or do not count them
Two numbers per channel: dollars spent divided by appraisals booked, and your own hours divided by appraisals booked. A channel that wins on one and loses badly on the other is telling you which input you are short of.
Two warnings on the count. Appraisals booked is not appraisals attended, and attended is not signed, so track all three or the winner will be whichever channel books the most no shows. And treat the SMS block as the one with the compliance load, because it is.
The words that make the calls work are in the appraisal call script. The arithmetic underneath the calling column is in how many calls it takes to win one listing. Neither of them tells you which morning to spend where. Your diary does that.
Common questions
- Is there any published Australian door knocking data at all?
- None that we could find with a stated method. State institutes, franchise groups and the portals publish nothing on doors knocked per appraisal booked, and the figures circulating on coaching sites are single agent anecdotes without a sample or a period. That is why every door knocking row in this article is modelled from named inputs rather than quoted as a finding.
- How big does a farm area need to be for this test to mean anything?
- A thousand homes split four ways is the practical floor, and it is still small. At five appraisals per thousand, a block of 250 homes might produce one appraisal or none, and the difference is noise rather than signal. Treat a single four week run as a direction to investigate, then repeat the two strongest channels over a full quarter before you rebuild your week around the answer.
- Why value an agent's hour at A$40?
- Because it is the only Australian figure with a survey behind it. Jobs and Skills Australia puts median weekly earnings for real estate sales agents at $1,504, or about $40 an hour, from the ABS Survey of Employee Earnings and Hours for May 2025. A top lister's hour is worth several times that, which makes every time cost in this article an understatement for them.
- Does a letterbox drop do anything a call cannot?
- It reaches the whole street regardless of whether you hold a phone number, and it costs no hours once the artwork is signed off. Those two properties are the real argument for it. What it cannot do is have a conversation, so it produces awareness and inbound enquiry on someone else's timing rather than appraisals on yours.
- Can I text homeowners in my farm area instead of calling them?
- Marketing messages carry consent, identification and unsubscribe obligations under the Spam Act, and a number you scraped from a portal is not a number that consented. The practical read is that SMS is a database channel rather than a prospecting channel. Our compliance notes set out the obligations, and nothing on this site is legal advice.
- What should a brand new agent with no database do first?
- Spend hours, because hours are the input a new agent has and dollars are not. Knocking and calling both build the list that makes every later channel cheaper, and knocking has the advantage that it needs no phone data at all. The drop and the SMS only start paying once there is a database and a name people recognise.
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.
- 4Is it worth door knocking? A United Kingdom Get Out The Vote field experiment on party leaflets and canvass visits. Political Science Research and Methods, Cambridge University Press, Fieldwork English local elections 2017, published online October 2018.
- 5Leaflet distribution rates and offset print price list. Bell Print, an Australian print and distribution business, Published rate card, retrieved 13 August 2026.
- 6Flyer distribution Sydney published pricing. Australia Print, Published rate, retrieved 13 August 2026.
- 7Bulk SMS pricing, published per message rates by volume. Mobile Message, an Australian SMS provider, Pricing page dated August 2026.
- 8Working arrangements. Australian Bureau of Statistics, Reference period August 2025, released 12 December 2025.
- 9Real Estate Sales Agents, earnings and hours. Jobs and Skills Australia, from ABS Survey of Employee Earnings and Hours, Earnings data May 2025.
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.