Building a Slack-First Operations Center for Real Estate

When a motivated seller fills out your form at 2 AM, they're not waiting until business hours. They're calling your competitors at 2:01 AM.

We needed a system that could alert us instantly, provide all deal context at a glance, and let us respond from anywhere. The answer wasn't a CRM dashboard—it was Slack.

Why Slack Over Traditional CRM

We tried Podio. We tried Follow Up Boss. We even built a custom React dashboard. Every solution had the same problem: you have to be looking at it to see new leads.

Slack is different:

Always on - Push notifications hit your phone instantly

Context-rich - Threads keep all deal discussion in one place

Searchable - Find any lead by name, address, or status

Integrable - Webhooks make it a universal inbox

The Architecture

Every lead that hits our system triggers a Cloudflare Worker that formats a Bloomberg Terminal-style notification:

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
🔔 NEW LEAD RECEIVED
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📍 123 Main St, Phoenix AZ 85001
👤 Sarah Johnson | (555) 123-4567
📧 sarah.j@email.com
💰 QUICK VALUATION
   ARV Estimate: $285,000
   Condition: Fair
   Max Offer: $195,000
📊 MARKET DATA
   Median DOM: 23 days
   Price Trend: +2.3% (90d)
   Inventory: Low
🏷️ MOTIVATION: Behind on payments, needs to sell fast
⏱️ Timeline: 2-3 weeks
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Building the Worker

Here's the core of our lead notification worker:

export default {
  async fetch(request, env) {
    const lead = await request.json();
    
    // Run instant valuation
    const valuation = await quickValue(lead.address);
    
    // Build Slack payload
    const message = formatBloombergStyle({
      lead,
      valuation,
      marketData: await getMarketData(lead.zip)
    });
    
    // Send to Slack
    await fetch(env.SLACK_WEBHOOK, {
      method: 'POST',
      body: JSON.stringify({ text: message })
    });
    
    return new Response('OK');
  }
}

Slash Commands for Instant Data

We added Slack slash commands so anyone on the team can pull data without leaving the conversation:

/value 123 Main St - Instant property valuation

/comps 85001 - Recent comparable sales

/lead Sarah Johnson - Pull up lead details

/status - Pipeline overview

Results After 6 Months

Before Slack-first:
• Average response time: 4.2 hours
• Leads worked per day: 8-10
• Close rate: 2.1%
After Slack-first:
• Average response time: 12 minutes
• Leads worked per day: 25+
• Close rate: 4.8%

The speed advantage compounds. When you're the first call back, you set the anchor. When you're fifth, you're negotiating against someone else's number.

Lessons Learned

Start simple. Our first version was just lead alerts. We added valuation data after a month, market data after two. Don't over-engineer day one. Mobile matters. 60% of our Slack interactions happen on mobile. Design your message formats for small screens first. Threading is everything. One thread per deal. All discussion, all updates, all documents—in one searchable place.

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Want us to build something similar for your operation? Let's talk.