Direct REI deliberately does not fire everything the instant you click send. Understanding the timing stops two support questions before they start: "why hasn't it gone yet?" and "why did that text land at 11pm?"
The send window
Settings → Schedule holds your Send Window: a timezone, the hours to send between, and which days. Presets cover the common ones — Business hours (9–5, M–F), Weekdays only, Every day.
The default is 24/7, so out of the box nothing is held back. That's a deliberate choice, not an oversight — but it means you decide the quiet hours.
What the window governs — and what it doesn't
- Queued campaign sends and follow-ups: yes. Anything outside the window is rescheduled to the next open slot, never dropped. Queue a batch at midnight with a 9–5 window and it goes out at 9am.
- AI auto-replies: yes. Same treatment — held and retried rather than sent at 2am.
- One-off messages you send by hand: no. Typing a reply on a contact card, a one-off email, a manual text — those go now. You're sitting there clicking; the app doesn't second-guess you.
- Calls: no. The dialer dials when you press call.
Per-step send hours beat the window
In the sequence editor's Sequence schedule, each follow-up has a day offset and an optional send hour. Pin an hour there and that step goes at that hour, overriding the window. The heading tells you which timezone the times are shown in.
Use it when a step's timing is the point — a Tuesday 8am "just following up" reads differently from the same message at 4:55pm on a Friday. Leave it unset and the step just respects your window.
The 15-minute heartbeat
Sends drain from a queue on a cycle that runs every 15 minutes. So a message you queue at 9:02 goes out somewhere in the next quarter hour, not at 9:02:30. The same cadence applies to checking for replies — an email reply can take up to ~15 minutes to appear in your Inbox.
That's normal and it isn't a fault. If something is still sitting there well past that, see Something isn't sending.
Jitter — small random gaps between sends
Messages in a batch are spaced out by a random amount rather than fired in a burst. Two reasons, both about not looking like a machine: bursts are a spam signal to carriers and mailbox providers, and a hundred identical timestamps is exactly what filtering looks for.
AI replies carry their own delay of a few minutes for the same reason — an instant reply to a prospect's text reads as a bot, because it is one.
So how long should a batch take?
Longer than you'd expect, and that's the system working. Sends are also throttled by your per-mailbox and per-number daily caps — a 500-contact email batch across mailboxes capped at 50/day each is several days of sending, not an afternoon. The queue holds the rest and keeps going.
What's next
For the legal side of timing, read TCPA + CAN-SPAM for real estate outreach. For when something genuinely is stuck, read Something isn't sending.