Rory Ellis, Prosper Real Estate

Background

Twelve years in real estate. Realtor and team leader at Prosper Real Estate, running a small team alongside agent Chloe Tanner. Between 125 and 200 leads a month, primarily from open houses and website leads. Follow Up Boss user since 2021, with a detour to another CRM and a return.

By his own description, Rory is a numbers and operations person who would rather be in front of clients than building automations. For about a year he built his own campaigns, action plans, and automations by hand inside Follow Up Boss.

Before Kee Technology

Follow up ran on memory and handwritten notes. Easy leads from a day or two ago got worked. Anyone who said "not until after summer" drifted, and a year later the call was already too late.

"It was easy to follow up on leads from a day ago. As you got into the weeks, the months, the years, things started to slip through the cracks."

"When we made phone calls, it was just, I already bought, I already sold."

"I would write down people they were excited about and follow up week after week. Such a manual process."

A team-wide push to call everyone in the database would last about a week before momentum died.

"That's why I use the term shooting from the hip. Every Monday, that's exactly what we were doing."

The detour to another platform made it worse.

"Jack of all trades and master of none. The support from those guys was absolutely horrendous."

The decision to invest

Rory had followed Elena for a while and stalled on price more than once. The shift was a math problem he could no longer ignore. One morning he worked a list of a hundred contacts he considered hot, and three or four had already bought or sold without him.

"We're talking 30, 40, 50,000 dollars in commissions that I'm just letting float away."

"For me to spend money, I need to have ROI. I'm a numbers guy. It has to make sense."

When it clicked, his instruction to the team was blunt.

"Delete everything. Let's just start fresh. All the stuff in there is stuff I YouTubed and couldn't figure out."

Setup wrapped October 30, 2024. Implementation followed on November 17.

What changed first

The handbuilt mess came out and a structured daily workflow went in. Stages, smart lists, action plans, and a cheat sheet gave the team one order of operations.

"I literally haven't done anything besides what you guys do in there. It's right here, just follow steps one through ten. Once we start veering off, we're making up something that doesn't need to be made up. It's already there."

The structure he had been scared to build a team on top of became the reason he could.

"Before, I was so scared about building a team. How do I go from chaos to even more chaos and still run a business? Now there's so much more structure, so it was easy to replicate."

Results

The numbers moved across three consecutive measurement windows and never went backward.

Through summer 2025, compared to the prior quarter

• Conversion rate up 1,009%

• Average text attempts per lead up 1,074%

• Leads responding by email up 176%

• Leads responding by text up 50%

• Leads responding overall up 28%

• Average contact attempts up 27%

Fall 2025, compared to summer

• Deals closed up 133%

Winter into early 2026, compared to fall

• Calls up 37%

• Leads responding by phone up 63%

• Leads responding overall up 29%

• Average text attempts up 29%

  

The texting volume runs through StreetText in the background, with replies landing in the Follow Up Boss inbox, while the contact and call figures are the team's own activity. Same database, same agents, an upward trajectory every quarter measured.

"Last year was our best year, and this year is going to be no different. We don't allow the market to dictate what's happening in our business."

The five million dollar deal

A buyer came in through StreetText, wired to RealScout and Follow Up Boss. The automation started the conversation in the background before anyone picked up the phone. Two days later the team was showing a five million dollar property. It closed in 15 days, under 20 days from first contact, for roughly 120,000 dollars in commission.

The buyer told Rory she reached six to eight agents about that property and got no response, texted a few more and got nothing, then heard back from his team within minutes.

"She would have just been part of the masses. There's absolutely no way that happens if everything wasn't set up the way it was."

The lead most agents would have deleted

A contact sat in the database labeled never reached. A Back to Website email noted a property they had viewed. The reply came back, "No, not interested. Too dated." Chloe followed up anyway, had a phone call, and booked a showing on a different home. That contact is now a current client.

"It's hard to monetize that. You're like, I'd never call that person. But it takes 9 to 11 contacts before they respond. If we stop on the third or fourth, we're wasting our time."

What he tells other team leads

"There's always a better way. Your way may be working, but could you scale it?"

"It's not enough just to have the system. You have to know how to work it. If you have more than 150 or 200 clients in your CRM, you're losing things if you're not paying attention."

"It doesn't take away the hard parts of the job. It just makes things come together better."

His one regret is timing.

"I wish I'd have made that decision 10 years ago. Where would I be now?"

What this looked like from our side

Rory did the work. The infrastructure gave his team a place to put it. The growth held across every quarter we measured because he and Chloe adopted the workflow and stayed in it instead of reinventing it each Monday. He is still in production, still posting daily, still adding to the team, and the trajectory has stayed upward the entire time.

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