Real Estate Follow Up Text Templates (2026): 20 Scripts and Who You Can Legally Send Them To

Every text template article has the same shape: here are the scripts, copy them, send them. This page had that shape too. It carried 21 templates, three of them written for texting homeowners on a street you are farming, and it never once used the word consent.

A text sent without the right consent carries statutory damages of $500, or $1,500 if the violation is wilful, per message. Not per campaign. Keller Williams settled a texting case for $40 million in 2023. Realogy settled one for $20 million.

So this version does the thing no template article does. Every script below is labelled with the consent it requires, the three cold ones are gone and I explain why, and there is a checker that tells you whether the person you are about to text is someone you may text at all. I sell houses and run real estate coaching, so read the next box first.

Before you send anything: can you text this person at all

There are two standards and the gap between them is the whole subject.

47 CFR 64.1200(a)(2) and (f)(9), read 28 August 2026. The written standard applies to marketing texts sent through an automated system, which includes essentially every CRM.

Two consequences agents miss.

The same person can be in both boxes. A buyer you are showing homes to has given you consent to text about the showing. That does not give you consent to text them next spring asking if they know anyone selling. The first is transactional. The second is marketing.

Wording your marketing text to sound informational does not work. The Ninth Circuit addressed this directly in Coffey v. Fast Easy Offer, decided 4 June 2026, holding that the sender's purpose rather than the script's wording determines whether a message is a solicitation. That is the end of the standard template trick of opening with a question so it reads like a chat. If you sent it to get business, it is marketing.

What counts as consent, and what does not

Prior express written consent is defined, not a matter of judgement. The writing must name you as the seller, contain the specific phone number, and carry two disclosures: that signing authorises autodialed or prerecorded telemarketing, and that signing is not a condition of purchasing anything.

Applying 47 CFR 64.1200(f)(9), read 28 August 2026. One honesty note: no FCC ruling or reported case applies the definition specifically to an open house sign-in sheet, so that row is a reading of the rule rather than settled authority. It is the reading I would want my broker to be able to defend.

Notice what is doing the work here. It is not the message, it is the record. If you cannot produce the form language, the timestamp and the number, you do not have consent in any way that survives a demand letter, however sure you are that they wanted to hear from you. The deeper version of this, including how to structure the record, is in the follow up system guide.

The rule everyone still cites was struck down in 2025

If you have read anything about texting compliance in the last two years you have been told about the FCC's one to one consent rule: that consent must name a single specific business, and that shared or partner consent no longer works. Agents were told to rebuild their forms before 27 January 2025.

It never took effect. Here is the sequence.

Eleventh Circuit opinion, FCC order and Federal Register, read 28 August 2026.

So there is no one to one requirement and no requirement that consent be logically and topically related to your message. The older, more permissive definition is back.

Do not read this as good news exactly. The vacatur removed one requirement. Everything else in this article, the written consent standard, the revocation rules, the hours, the state statutes and the carrier layer, is untouched and several parts of it got stricter in 2025.

Check the person you are about to text

Two questions: how you got the number, and what the message is for. It runs in your browser and nothing is sent anywhere.

The setting worth trying is the open house sign-in, because it is the one most agents assume is fine. Then switch the purpose to informational and watch the answer change, which is the distinction the rest of this page is built on.

Templates: someone who enquired through your site

This is the group you can market to, provided your form carries the disclosure language. Everything here assumes that. If your form does not, fix the form before you use any of it.

Speed matters, though not for the reason usually given. The famous claim that responding in five minutes makes you 100 times more likely to reach someone comes from a 2007 study by Elkington at InsideSales.com with Oldroyd, conducted in mortgage and insurance, vendor funded and never peer reviewed. It reports odds ratios rather than probabilities, so the plain English version of it is wrong. Fast is still better than slow. It is just not a hundred times better, and it is not from MIT, whatever you have read.

Cadence, reconciled with the rest of the site rather than invented here: roughly six attempts across the first 72 hours while the enquiry is hot, then one useful touch a day through the first week, then a monthly cadence sitting inside a ninety day frame. A buyer searching for ten weeks needs months, not days. The full sizing argument is in the speed to lead guide, and if enquiries are reaching you late in the first place, that is a routing problem rather than a scripting one, which I covered in lead routing and speed to lead.

Templates: open house sign-ins, and their consent problem

Open house sign-ins are the most common consent gap in real estate, because everybody treats a sheet of paper as permission and it almost never is. The sheet does not name you as a seller, does not carry the two disclosures, and is not signed against them.

What you can do is text about the house they visited, because they gave you the number in connection with that house. What you cannot do is roll them into a marketing sequence. So there are three templates here rather than the usual dozen, and the third one exists to solve the problem properly.

Templates: people you are already working with

The easiest group, legally. You are in a transaction, they gave you the number to run it, and texting about that transaction is informational. Keep it to the deal and you are on solid ground.

The one thing to watch is the drift from transactional to marketing inside the same thread. A message confirming Thursday at four is informational. A message confirming Thursday at four and adding that you have referral cards available is a marketing text wearing a transactional coat.

Templates: past clients and your sphere

Here is where agents get comfortable and where the rules quietly disagree with them.

An existing business relationship is a real thing and it helps you. It does not automatically convert into prior express written consent for marketing texts, and the exemption that assists with calls does not do the same work for texts. Someone who bought a house with you in 2021 gave you their number to buy a house, not to receive a monthly market update by SMS forever.

Which does not mean never text your past clients. It means the marketing ones should sit on written consent you actually collected, and the rest should be genuinely personal messages you would be comfortable reading aloud in a deposition.

Templates: aged leads, and the re-permission step

The old version of this page had a section called reviving cold and dead leads, with three templates that treated an eighteen month old form fill as a live contact. The consent may still exist. It may also have been revoked, or attached to a brand you no longer work under, and you almost certainly have not looked.

Two things are true about an aged lead. The written consent probably has not expired, because it does not expire on a schedule. And the person has forgotten you entirely, which is a deliverability and a decency problem even where it is not a legal one.

So the first message to an aged contact should re-establish who you are and offer the exit, every time.

One practical warning. Do not batch a thousand of these on a Monday morning. That is exactly the pattern that gets a number filtered by carriers, and it is also the pattern that produces the demand letters, because volume is how plaintiff firms find you.

The three templates I deleted, and what to do instead

The previous version of this page had a section headed Seller, Neighbor and Farming. Three templates, aimed at homeowners on a street the agent is farming. One of them opened: "Hey {{First}}, I'm updating prices on your street."

Those people never gave anyone their number. There is no consent of any kind, the numbers are likely on the Do Not Call registry, which applies to marketing texts, and in several states there is a separate state statute with its own damages. I have removed all three and I am not replacing them, because there is no compliant version of texting a stranger to ask for their listing.

What to do with a farm instead, none of which requires consent:

• Mail. Direct mail to a farm is unregulated by any of this. It is slower and it works, and it is why the agents who dominate a neighbourhood are usually the ones with a ten year mailing habit.
• Door knocking. Also outside the TCPA. Check your local solicitation ordinances and any posted no soliciting signs.
• Calling, with the registry scrubbed first and inside the hours. Different rules from texting, and a call to a scrubbed landline is a very different exposure from a text to a mobile.
• Geographic advertising, which reaches the same street without needing anyone's number at all.
• Earning the opt in, by giving the street something worth a phone number. Slower than a text blast and it compounds.

If cold outreach is the core of your plan, the phone and the door are the channels built for it. I set out the scripts for those in the script library, and the same consent thinking applies there in a different shape.

Hours, revocation and the carrier layer

Three constraints sit around every template above. None is optional and two of them changed recently.

When you may send

Federal quiet hours are 8am to 9pm in the called party's local time, not yours, under 47 CFR 64.1200(c)(1), and 64.1200(e) extends the restriction to texts to wireless numbers. Time zone therefore has to be a field in your CRM, not something you work out afterwards.

Several states are narrower, and a few are much narrower.

State statutes read 28 August 2026. This is six states of fifty one jurisdictions. Check your own, and check the recipient's, because the recipient's state is usually the one that matters.

A workable habit: hold to 9am to 7pm in the recipient's time zone and you clear every state window above without needing a lookup table.

How they stop it, and how fast you must

Since 11 April 2025 a consumer can revoke consent by any reasonable method. Seven words are automatically reasonable: stop, quit, end, revoke, opt out, cancel, unsubscribe. Spoken revocations count. You have a reasonable time not exceeding ten business days to honour it, and same day is the standard to actually operate to.

Two consequences worth stating plainly. You may not designate an exclusive method, so "Reply STOP is the only way to unsubscribe" is not a compliance policy, it is a sentence that gets read back to you. And your internal do not call record has to be kept for five years.

One part of the rule is deferred. The provision extending an opt-out on one subject to that sender's unrelated messages has been pushed to 31 January 2027. Build for it now, because it is coming.

The carrier layer, which is not law

Separate from all of the above, the mobile carriers run their own registration regime for application to person messaging, known as 10DLC. If you send from a CRM, a dialer or any platform, your brand and campaign must be registered. If you type on your own handset, you are outside it.

A solo agent with no EIN registers as a sole proprietor for roughly $4 to set up, about $15 for the campaign and around $2 a month, and gets one campaign, one number, one message per second and roughly a thousand message segments a day to one major carrier. Unregistered traffic attracts surcharges and gets filtered, which is usually why messages appear to send and never arrive.

Those limits are also a good argument against treating SMS as your main channel. A thousand segments a day is not a broadcast tool, and email carries none of this apparatus, which is why the sequences that do the heavy lifting usually run there instead. I set those out in the email and drip campaign templates. Getting the balance right between the two is one of the first things I work on with agents in real estate coaching, because most people have it backwards.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need consent to text a real estate lead?

For a marketing text to a mobile number sent through any automated system, yes: prior express written consent under 47 CFR 64.1200(a)(2). That means a signed writing naming you, containing that specific number, and carrying two disclosures. A purely informational text about something the person asked you about needs only that they knowingly gave you the number for that purpose, which is a much lower bar.

Is the FCC one to one consent rule still in effect?

No. It was vacated by the Eleventh Circuit in Insurance Marketing Coalition Ltd. v. FCC on 24 January 2025, three days before it would have applied. The FCC did not appeal and restored the previous definition effective 29 August 2025. There is no one to one requirement today. The National Association of Realtors' member page still states that the rule takes effect on 27 January 2025, which is the most repeated error in real estate texting advice.

Can I text an expired listing or an FSBO?

Not a marketing text. Publishing a phone number to sell a house is not consent to receive marketing, the number is likely on the National Do Not Call Registry which applies to marketing texts, and several states add their own statute on top. Wording the message to sound casual does not help: the Ninth Circuit held in Coffey v. Fast Easy Offer, 4 June 2026, that the sender's purpose rather than the script's wording decides whether a message is a solicitation.

Does an open house sign-in sheet count as consent?

Usually not for marketing. A paper sheet almost never contains the two required disclosures or a signature tied to them. You can text about the property they came to see, because that is what they gave you the number for. To market to them you need written consent, which is why a tablet sign-in with the consent language and a checkbox is worth setting up.

What time can I text a real estate lead?

Federal quiet hours are 8am to 9pm in the recipient's local time, not yours, under 47 CFR 64.1200(c)(1), which 64.1200(e) extends to texts. Several states are narrower: Florida, Maryland and Oregon end at 8pm, and Texas starts at 9am. Holding to 9am to 7pm in the recipient's time zone clears every one of them.

How quickly do I have to honour an opt out?

Within a reasonable time not exceeding ten business days, under the rules effective 11 April 2025. Consumers may revoke by any reasonable method, and stop, quit, end, revoke, opt out, cancel and unsubscribe are automatically reasonable. You cannot require a single specific method. Keep the internal do not call record for five years.

Do I need 10DLC registration to text clients?

If you send through a CRM, a dialer or any platform, yes. 10DLC is a carrier requirement rather than a law, and it applies to application to person messaging. Typing on your own handset falls outside it. A solo agent with no EIN can register as a sole proprietor for roughly $4 to set up, about $15 for the campaign and around $2 a month, with limits of one campaign, one number and about a thousand message segments a day.

Educational content only. Not legal advice. The Telephone Consumer Protection Act, its implementing regulations at 47 CFR 64.1200, state telephone solicitation statutes and carrier messaging rules are three separate and frequently changing bodies of requirement, and neither the author nor Jamil Academy is a law firm. Consult your principal broker and your own counsel before sending marketing messages at any volume. Jamil Academy is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the Federal Communications Commission, the National Association of Realtors, or any company named in this article. Company and product names are trademarks of their respective owners and are used here only to identify what is being discussed. This page carries no affiliate links, no commissions and no sponsored placements, and the author earns nothing whichever way you decide. Regulations, court decisions, state statutes and carrier requirements were read from the sources named on 28 August 2026 and change without notice. Settlements described are settlements, not findings of liability, and matters described as unresolved are unresolved. Views expressed are the author's own opinion. If you believe anything here is inaccurate, tell us and we will correct it.