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.
Each lead's local time
The hours you set apply in each lead's own local time. With a 9–5 window, a lead in Florida gets their text between 9 and 5 Florida time and a lead in California between 9 and 5 California time — the app holds each one until it's the right hour where that lead is. We work out where a lead is from their property's state, then their mailing state, then their phone's area code. If we can't tell, your own time zone (the one in the Send Window) is used. A state that spans two time zones (Texas, Florida) waits until it's inside the hours in both.
Prefer one clock for everyone? Set Whose time are these hours in? to My time zone. Calling hours are a real compliance topic for texts and calls — see TCPA + CAN-SPAM.
A campaign's own hours — a hard limit
Open a campaign's settings (Edit on All Campaigns) and find Send hours. There you can pick whose time zone that campaign follows, and tick Set this campaign's own hours to give it its own hours and days — say 10 AM–2 PM, Monday to Friday. That's a hard limit: nothing in that campaign goes out outside those hours, not even a follow-up you pinned to a specific hour. Anything that comes due outside them waits for the next opening.
It works on AI-call and voicemail-drop campaigns too. Those always follow the lead's local time and the legal calling hours there (8 AM–9 PM, 8 PM in Florida and Oklahoma); a campaign's own hours can only narrow that, never widen it.
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. They follow the window's hours in the lead's local time (on any day of the week) — 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 — in the lead's local time — overriding your account window. A campaign's own hours (above) still win: a pinned step outside them waits.
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.
Continuous sending — start new people automatically
Normally adding someone to a campaign only makes them a member: nothing goes out until you select them on the Email or Texting page and click Send to Selected. Turn on Continuous sending (in the Send time section, for the campaign picked in the editor) and every person added from then on gets message 1 queued the moment they join — then the rest of the sequence follows on its cadence.
- It covers every way people join: adding from the CRM, the contact card, CSV imports, the API and Zapier, Oliver, website forms and automations.
- It follows the same rules as Send to Selected: no email for people without an address or who opted out or bounced; no text for people who opted out or whose number is flagged as a litigator; nobody marked Replied, Qualified, Active or Not interested; and never message 1 twice.
- It paces itself: a big import trickles out with the usual random gaps and your daily caps instead of landing as one burst.
- People already in the campaign aren't started when you switch it on — select them and click Send to Selected once.
- Paused campaigns: new members still queue, and start when you resume it.
You need message 1 written before you can turn it on. On the All Campaigns page these campaigns carry a ⟳ Continuous tag.
Direct Mail campaigns have it too — the checkbox under the campaign filter on the Direct Mail page. See Direct mail 101.
Cold Call campaigns have it too — the Continuous checkbox under the Dialer's campaign picker. New leads are already in the Dialer queue; continuous gives your chosen caller a "Call <name>" task with a reminder for each one. See Cold-call workflow with the dialer.
AI Call and Voicemail Drop campaigns have the same switch — the ⟳ Continuous button on the campaign's card (Voice Outreach page or All Campaigns). New members are queued for a call or a drop, which then goes out during legal calling hours. See AI Call Agent and Ringless voicemail for what each needs switched on first.
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.