Cold calling is the highest-conversion channel real estate offers — and also the most miserable to do without good tooling. The Direct REI dialer is built to keep you in flow.
1. Pick a campaign + load the queue
Go to Dialer. Select a campaign from the dropdown. The queue auto-loads with every contact in that campaign who has a phone number.
The queue is ordered by last-called timestamp ascending — never-called contacts at the top, oldest-called at the bottom. Stale contacts cycle back into rotation after their cooldown.
2. List mode vs Focus mode
Two views, toggle between them:
- List mode — Table of contacts, see ~10-20 at a time. Good for warming up, picking specific people, or working a short list.
- Focus mode — One contact on screen at a time. Distraction-free. Best for high-volume dialing.
Put the right details on the focus card
Focus mode's card is customizable — click the Fields button on the card and tick what you want under Fields on the focus card. Drag ⋮⋮ to reorder.
Fields come in two kinds, and the difference matters:
- Lead details show once at the top — company, mailing address, market, status, lead type, motivation, email, tags, source, last call.
- Property details repeat for each parcel the lead owns — address, county, state, city, ZIP, parcel ID, property type, acreage, asking price, estimated value, ARV, list price, zoning, legal description.
Out of the box you get owner name, property address, county, and state. Land callers usually add acreage and parcel ID; anyone negotiating live wants asking price and estimated value on screen so they're not tabbing away mid-sentence.
Give your callers a script (optional)
Each cold-call campaign can carry a call script — the talk track your rep or VA reads while dialing. It shows up right on the dialer's focus card (a "📋 Call script" panel above the outcome buttons), so there's nothing to alt-tab to. Add or edit it on the campaign's Edit screen (the "Call script" box — it only appears for cold-call campaigns), or, when you add a cold-call sequence to a group, fill in the "Call script" field in that dialog.
Scripts support the same placeholders as your email/SMS sequences — [First Name], [Last Name], [Full Name], [Company], [Market] — and the dialer fills them in for each lead (with [First Name] falling back to "there" for trusts/LLCs). Like a script? Hit 💾 Save as template and it shows up under "My templates" in the Start from a template dropdown for your next campaign. There's a ready-made "Cold call · wholesaler script" starter to build from.
3. Click Call
Each contact has a 📞 Call button. Where that call actually happens depends on what you picked in Settings → Phone → Calling integration:
- System default — hands the number to your computer's phone app (Mac FaceTime, Windows Phone, etc.).
- Quo — dials through the Quo desktop app.
- In-browser calling — the call happens right in the tab with your headset, and a call bar appears with mute, hold, keypad, and hang-up. This is the one that unlocks recording. See Call from your browser.
With in-browser calling on and more than one number connected, a Calling from picker appears in the dialer's control strip: Auto (uses the number the lead already texted, else your default), Rotate through all, or one specific number. Saved per device.
Calling a number that isn't in the queue
Click ⌨ Dial pad in the dialer header for a phone-style keypad. Type or paste any number and hit call — no campaign, no queue, no CRM entry required.
As you type a full number, the dialer checks your CRM: a match shows the contact's name with a link to open their card, and the call logs against them. No match is fine too — it says so plainly and the call still goes through.
Reaching a lead's other numbers
Skip-traced contacts often carry two or three numbers. The primary is what the queue dials, but the others are one click away:
- The focus card shows an Also: line with a 📞 and 💬 for each additional number.
- Contact cards in the CRM show every saved number with its own Call and Text links.
- List rows show a "+N more numbers" hint so you know there are others without cluttering the table.
To work through them automatically, turn on Auto-call backup numbers first under the dialer's toggles (a paid feature, like auto-advance). Then when you log a No answer or Voicemail, instead of moving to the next lead the dialer stays on this one and dials their next saved number. Once the numbers run out it moves on normally. It remembers where it got to, so if you dial number 2 by hand, the next backup is number 3.
It's deliberately not wired to 🚫 Bad # — that outcome flags the number as bad and drops the contact from the queue, so retrying them would defeat the point.
Multi-line dialing — ring 2 or 3 leads at once
Most of a cold-calling hour is silence: ringing, voicemail, no answer. Multi-line dialing attacks that directly — it rings multiple leads simultaneously and connects you to whoever picks up first.
Tick Multi-line dialing in the dialer's toggles and choose 2 or 3 lines. It needs Telnyx in-browser calling and is available on Pro and Scale.
How a round plays out:
- You click Call on a lead. They anchor the batch, and the next dialable leads in the queue fill the other lines.
- All of them ring for up to 20 seconds.
- The first to answer is connected to you; the rest hang up immediately and the card expands to whoever won.
- If nobody answers, every lead gets a real No answer logged and the queue rotates — then the next batch starts if auto-advance is on.
Leads whose line you cut aren't re-rung for 10 minutes, so nobody gets hammered by consecutive ghost calls. Backup-number dialing is off while multi-line is on, and clicking one of a lead's alternate numbers always places a single, ordinary call — deliberate targeting shouldn't turn into a batch.
Recording your calls
If you're on in-browser calling, the dialer has an ⏺ Auto-record browser calls toggle. Turned on, every call you place or answer in the browser is recorded (both sides) and the recording lands on the contact's timeline and in the call log. A red ⏺ REC chip on the call bar shows it's live — click it to pause, click again to resume.
It's an account-wide setting only the owner can change, and it mirrors the one in Settings → Phone → Calling integration. Telling the other party is your responsibility — many states and countries require it. Full detail in Call from your browser.
4. After the call, hit a quick-action button
Four outcomes, one click each:
- 📵 No answer — logs the call, marks "no answer", cycles contact to bottom of queue. Auto-advances to next contact in focus mode.
- 🎙️ Voicemail — logs that you left a VM. Same cycling behavior.
- ❌ Not interested — contact reached, says no. Logs the outcome so you can filter them out later.
- ✅ Interested — contact reached, wants to talk further. Prompts for a quick note, flips the contact to
replied, and runs your Interested-call automation — which by default builds a deal with the note attached.
The "Interested → deal" promotion is the killer feature
You hit Interested, type "wants offer on 3 lots in Heights area, send by Friday", click OK. In one action:
- The cold call is logged to the contact's timeline
- The contact's status changes to
replied - A new deal is created in the first stage of your pipeline with that note pre-filled
No copy-paste from CRM to deal pipeline. No "I'll set up that deal record later" that never happens.
Step 3 is an automation, not a hardwired behavior. Every account starts with a rule called "Interested call → create a deal" in Tasks → Automations, and it's yours: change which stage the deal lands in, add a task or a tag alongside it, or delete it entirely if you'd rather create deals by hand. The button tells you which — it only promises a deal when a rule is actually set to build one.
Two things worth knowing about the default rule: it skips a lead who already has an open deal (so calling the same seller three times doesn't leave three duplicate cards — the call still lands on their timeline), and it re-arms once that deal is closed or dead.
5. Auto-advance for high-volume runs
In focus mode, toggle Auto-advance on. After every No Answer or Voicemail outcome, the dialer waits 2 seconds (for the toast to show) then jumps to the next contact automatically. You can dial through 50 contacts in 20 minutes without touching the queue.
6. Track which leads have already been called
Each row in list mode shows the last-called timestamp. After 30+ days, contacts cycle back to the top of the queue (configurable per campaign).
If you want to reset the whole queue (e.g., for a fresh push): the ↻ Restart queue… button clears every last-called timestamp on the current campaign. Touch history stays in the contact's activity thread — only the dashboard state resets.
Exporting your call history
Click ⬇ Export calls in the dialer header for your full call log as CSV or Excel — every call, not just the current campaign or the current view.
Columns: date, time, direction, status, duration, contact, contact phone, from, to, campaign, provider, recording link, transcript, and summary.
What people use it for:
- Paying a VA or rep by dials and connects, with the durations to back it up.
- Reviewing calls — sort by duration, open the recording links for the long ones, and coach from real conversations.
- Proving contact history — a dated record of every attempt on a lead, which matters when a dispute comes up.
- Your own analysis — pivot connect rates by hour, by market, by rep.
Inbound calls
Inbound callbacks auto-log to the contact's timeline and flag the lead red with attribution, so you know which mailer or email triggered the call. How the call reaches you depends on your setup:
- Quo — rings your Quo apps; the call, its recording, and its transcript flow here through the call webhook (see Set up SMS with Quo).
- In-browser calling — the call can ring right in your tab, with unanswered calls going to a voicemail greeting you record. See Call from your browser.
Getting hammered by spam callers? Block spam callers & texters covers the block list and the anonymous-caller switch.
What's next
To make sense of who's calling you back from which campaigns: Reading cross-channel attribution. To turn a good call into scheduled follow-up automatically: Automations.