Open Homes Visitor Follow-Up Pipeline

Prototype developed around real-world property workflows

My role
  • Automation Developer
Team
  • Solo automation development with input from a property professional
Tools
  • Airtable
  • Make
  • Forms
  • Email automation
Timeline

2026 — Working Prototype

Description

An open-home workflow for capturing visitor information, organising leads, sending post-event summaries to agents, and automating consent-based buyer follow-up. Airtable acts as the operational database and interface, while Make handles the communication and workflow logic.

Context

The project was created around the administrative work that occurs before and after real-estate open homes. Visitor details are commonly collected manually, after which the agent still needs to review attendees, identify promising leads, record notes, follow up with buyers, and maintain a history of what has already been sent. The goal was to create a simple operational system that reduced that manual coordination without introducing a heavyweight CRM.

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Challenge

Open-home follow-up involves several related entities rather than a single spreadsheet row.

Properties can have multiple open homes. Each open home can have multiple visitors. Visitors may have different levels of interest, consent preferences, notes, and follow-up states.

The system needed to retain these relationships while still being simple enough for an agent to understand and operate without technical knowledge.

Constraints

The prototype was intentionally scoped around a single-agent workflow rather than attempting to reproduce an entire real-estate CRM.

Follow-up also had to respect whether a visitor had agreed to be contacted.

Another requirement was visibility: the agent needed to know what had happened, what still required attention, and which communications had already been sent.

Research

I mapped the process into three primary data groups: Properties, Open Homes, and Visitors.

This made it possible to separate persistent property information from individual events and the people attending them.

I then identified which repetitive actions could safely be automated and which decisions should remain with the agent.

Iterations

A public visitor form was connected to Airtable so attendee information could flow directly into the database.

The Airtable interface was then structured so the agent could create properties and open homes, review attendees, add context, and identify priority leads.

Make scenarios were added to generate agent summaries and send appropriate follow-up messages to visitors who had consented to contact.

Sent-status fields were updated automatically so the workflow retained an audit trail and avoided blindly repeating communication.

Key Features

  • Property database
  • Open-home event records
  • Visitor database
  • Public visitor capture form
  • Linked property, event, and visitor records
  • Consent-aware follow-up
  • Automated agent summaries
  • Automated visitor emails
  • Sent-status tracking
  • Priority-lead workflow
  • Airtable operational interface
  • Make workflow orchestration

Final Deliverable

The result was a demo-ready open-home management workflow covering visitor capture through to follow-up.

It provided a lightweight alternative to manually copying visitor forms into spreadsheets and individually tracking every post-open-home communication.

Takeaway

This project highlighted how valuable good data modelling is even in no-code and low-code automation.

Once Properties, Open Homes, and Visitors were represented as separate but related entities, the automation logic became far easier to reason about and expand.

The workflow also reinforced that business automation should make work visible, not just make it happen invisibly in the background.