Automations are the difference between a CRM that records what happened and one that makes the next thing happen. A rule watches for an event, optionally checks some conditions, and runs one or more actions — with no one remembering to do it.
They live at Tasks → Automations.
You already have one
Every account starts with a rule called "Interested call → create a deal": when you mark a cold-call lead ✅ Interested in the Dialer, it builds a deal in the first stage of your pipeline with your call note attached. That used to be a hidden, hardwired behavior; it's a normal rule now, so you can change the stage it lands in, add a task or tag alongside it, or delete it if you'd rather create deals by hand.
Flowchart or list
Top-right of the Automations tab is a Flowchart | List toggle. Flowchart (the default) draws every rule as a diagram: a green WHEN node for the trigger, an amber ONLY IF node when the rule is gated by conditions, and one colour-coded THEN node per action. It is the fastest way to audit a rule you wrote three months ago. List view is the compact table if you prefer it.
1. Pick the trigger — "When…"
- A contact's stage changes to… — optionally only from a specific stage.
- A deal's stage changes to… — same, on your deal pipeline.
- A new contact is added — including CSV imports and property-record imports.
- A contact replies
- A cold-call lead says they're interested — the Dialer's ✅ Interested button, every time you tap it. Unlike the stage triggers it fires even on a lead already marked Replied, and again on a second call.
- A piece of mail is delivered — fires once per recipient, per mailer, when your mail provider reports the piece delivered. Never twice for the same piece.
- A piece of mail is returned to sender — the address was bad or stale and the piece came back. The cleanup trigger: tag it, and put a task on someone to re-find the owner.
- Both mail triggers can be narrowed to one campaign or one mailer — see the note below.
- A tag is added to a contact — a specific tag, or any tag.
- A new deal is created
- A task is completed
- No reply for N days — checked once a day, for leads sitting in Contacted.
- A property's inventory status changes to… — Under Contract, Owned, Listed / For Sale, or Sold. Optionally only from a specific status. Fires wherever the change comes from: the Inventory tab, a deal card's To Inventory button, or another automation.
- A contract is signed — the moment every signer has finished an e-sign document. Never on a partial signature, and never twice for the same contract.
- An AI call is classified — when an AI call gets its outcome: Converted, Conversation, Not interested, Wrong person, or No answer. Narrow it to one outcome (and optionally one campaign); the common shape is AI call converted → create a deal. Fires once when the outcome lands, and again only if that outcome is later refined.
2. Gate it — "Only if…" (optional)
Conditions are the newest and most useful part. A trigger alone fires for everyone; conditions narrow it to the ones you actually want.
How AND and OR work: conditions live in groups. Everything inside a group must be true (and). Any single group being true is enough (or). So:
(Tag has "hot" AND Market is Houston) OR (Source is Property Records)
Click Add condition to add a row to the current group; once you have one, the button becomes Add "or" group to start an alternative.
What you can check:
- Tag — has / does not have
- Contact stage, Lead type, Source — is / is not
- Market, Contact type — is / contains
- Email / Phone — is present / is missing
- Needs attention, Skip traced — yes / no
- Mailing state, Mailing ZIP
- Deal stage, Deal value — is at least / is at most (only on triggers that carry a deal)
Use the suggestion list. The value boxes for Tag, Source, Contact type, and Market autocomplete from what your account actually stores. That matters more than it sounds: some values are stored as codes that display differently (property-record imports store
landportal but show as "Property Records"), so a value typed from memory can silently never match.Other things worth knowing:
- Text matching ignores capitalization — "Hot" matches "hot".
- A blank field counts as "is not" anything, so "Source is not Zillow" passes for a contact with no source at all.
- A deal with no price never passes a value check, either direction.
- Conditions the current trigger can never supply aren't offered — a deal condition won't appear on a contact-only trigger.
3. Choose the actions — "Then do…"
A rule can run several actions in order. Click Add action for each.
- Create a task — title, priority, due-in-days, and an assignment strategy. Titles support
{{contact_name}}and{{deal_name}}. - Assign to a teammate — a task aimed at one specific person, defaulting to High priority.
- Add a tag
- Create a deal — names it after the contact's property address (or the contact), links them as seller or buyer by lead type, and attaches that property. Pick the stage, or leave it on the first stage of your pipeline. Skipped if the contact already has an open deal, so repeat calls never stack duplicate cards; it re-arms once that deal is closed or dead.
- Change contact stage
- Change deal stage
- Enroll in a campaign — sends message 1 now, then the campaign's cadence. Opt-outs, texting consent, and your send settings are all still enforced.
- Create a contract draft (e-sign) — builds a prefilled draft from one of your templates, auto-filled from the deal, property, and seller. It appears in Documents for you to review and send. Free until you actually send it.
- List the property on a website — adds it to one of your hosted sites' listings. On a published site it appears within about five minutes with no re-publish; on a draft it waits there until you publish. A property that's already listed is skipped, so a rule that fires twice never duplicates a listing.
- Set inventory status — moves the property to Under Contract, Owned, Listed / For Sale, Sold, or out of Inventory entirely.
- Email a teammate — an internal email to a team member's login email (yourself included, on a solo account) when the rule fires. Write a subject and message —
{{contact_name}}and{{deal_name}}work, and the contact/deal names are appended automatically. Sent from one of your connected mailboxes within about 15 minutes. Several triggers in the same window arrive as one digest email, so a 500-row import with an "email me" rule produces one message listing the events — never 500 emails. - Post in a team chat channel — writes a message into one of your Team Chat channels when the rule fires. Left blank, the built-in line reads like "🤝 New deal: 12 Oak Ln — Seller: Jane Doe · Athens, Henderson County TX · PID 1234-56" with clickable chips for the deal, the contact and the property (the county and PID come from the property record — the one the event is about, else the deal's, else the contact's). Or write your own with
{{contact_name}},{{deal_name}},{{property_address}},{{city}},{{county}},{{state}},{{pid}},{{rule_name}}and{{note}}. The post shows as Automation · rule name; only the account owner can delete it. Bursts collapse: everything one rule posts to a channel within two minutes lands as extra lines on a single message, so an import of 500 leads is one message listing them, never 500 posts. Team Chat is Pro/Scale.
The task actions have an email checkbox too. On Create a task and Assign to a teammate, tick "Also email them when this task is created" and the assignee gets an email about the new task (title, due date, contact). It only fires when a task is actually created and assigned — a duplicate-suppressed task or an unassigned one emails no one.
How the two property actions find a property. They use the one the event is about; if the trigger doesn't carry a property, they fall back to the deal's linked property, then to a property the contact owns (preferring one with a real street address). So "a deal reaches Under Contract → list its property" works, and so does "a contract is signed → mark the property Owned". The flowchart node spells out which fallback applies on the trigger you picked, and warns you if it can't reach a property at all.
4. Watch the live preview
As you build, the diagram at the top of the dialog redraws with every change — so you can see the finished rule before you save it. If an action can't work with the trigger you picked (setting a deal stage from a contact trigger, for instance), the preview says so instead of letting you save something that silently never runs.
Rules that keep automations safe
- They don't cascade. If a rule changes a stage or adds a tag, that change does not set off your other rules. This is deliberate — it makes infinite loops impossible. The flowchart marks those spots with a muted ⊘ chip so you can see where a chain stops.
- One exception, on purpose: Enroll in a campaign can lead somewhere — if that outreach gets a reply, the reply flips the contact to Replied, which will fire your "A contact replies" rules.
- Completing an automation-created task never fires a "task is completed" rule — otherwise every rule would feed itself.
- A deal built by Create a deal doesn't fire your "A new deal is created" rules, for the same reason. Put both actions on the one rule instead of chaining them.
- One open task per rule per contact. A rule won't stack duplicate open tasks on the same contact for the same event.
- Setting an inventory status doesn't fire your inventory rules, same protection as every other status write. If you want "signed → mark it Owned → put it on the site", put all three on the one rule rather than chaining two.
Bulk actions fire per contact. Importing 500 contacts with an active "A new contact is added" rule creates 500 tasks — one each — and the same goes for bulk stage changes. That is the correct behaviour, but check your rules before a big import, or you'll bury My Day.
"No reply for N days" repeats. It fires once per contact per quiet spell, and can fire again after you reach out and hear nothing back. A rule matching a lot of stale leads generates volume every day until those leads reply or move stage — start it narrow.
Inventory rules fire on every move, in both directions. Unlike "a contract is signed" — which fires once per document, ever — an inventory rule fires each time a property lands on that status. Listing something, taking it back to Under Contract, then re-listing it fires a "becomes Listed" rule twice. That's deliberate: a contract falling through and the property going back on the market is a real event you probably want to act on. Use the optional From filter if you only care about one particular move.
Mail delivery is one event per recipient. A 300-piece mailer with an active "A piece of mail is delivered" rule fires 300 times as the pieces land — same shape as the import warning above. It also depends on what your mail provider reports: some confirm each piece individually, others only mark the whole batch delivered, and then every recipient in that batch fires at once rather than as each mailbox is hit.
Narrowing a mail rule: pick the mailer, not the campaign. Both mail triggers let you limit the rule to one campaign or one mailer template. Mailer always works — every send picks one. Campaign only matches mail you sent while that campaign was chosen in the Direct Mail page's campaign filter; if it read "All Campaigns", those pieces carry no campaign and a campaign-filtered rule will never fire for them. If you delete the campaign or mailer a rule points at, the rule keeps filtering on it and stops matching — the dialog labels it so you can see that.
Seven rules worth stealing
- Never drop a hot reply. When a contact replies → only if Tag has "hot" → create a task "Call {{contact_name}} today", Urgent, due in 0 days.
- Work new county imports. When a new contact is added → only if Source is your import source AND Phone is present → enroll in your SMS campaign.
- Paper the win. When a deal's stage changes to Under Contract → create a contract draft from your purchase-agreement template, and assign a task to whoever handles closings.
- Call the mailer while it's on the counter. When a piece of mail is delivered → only if Phone is present → create a task "Call {{contact_name}} — mailer just landed", due in 0 days. This is the whole point of tracked delivery: reach them the day the postcard shows up, not two weeks later.
- Put it on the website the moment it's yours. When a property's inventory status changes to Listed / For Sale → list the property on your listing site. Your public site stops being something you remember to update.
- Paper trail to storefront. When a contract is signed → set inventory status to Under Contract, list the property on your site, and create a task "Order photos for {{contact_name}}". One rule takes a signed deal all the way to a live listing.
- Quarantine bad addresses. When a piece of mail is returned to sender → add tag "bad address", and create a task "Re-find a mailing address for {{contact_name}}". Then filter the CRM by that tag before your next mailer so you stop paying postage on addresses you already know are dead.
Turning a rule off
Each rule has an Active toggle — flip it off rather than deleting, so you keep the definition and can turn it back on. Deleting a rule never touches the tasks it already created.
What's next
To see the work these rules produce: Tasks. To have an AI build and run multi-step plans instead of fixed rules: Oliver, your AI acquisition manager.