The 6-state cadence model: how a lead actually moves through a brokerage

Most CRMs treat "lead status" as a dropdown field. The producer picks New, Working, Qualified, Hot, Cold, Won, Lost. The dropdown is a fiction. Leads don't move neatly through those labels. They cycle. They reactivate. They look hot, go cold, come back warm, and close 14 months later. Modeling them as a linear funnel — the way most CRMs do — leaves the brokerage doing pattern-matching by gut.

There's a cleaner way to think about it. Six states, with explicit transitions, with clear cadence behavior for each. This is the model Closi is built around, and it's the one we think most accurately describes how leads actually move through a brokerage.

The six states

1. Cold. The lead has been captured but hasn't engaged. They filled a form, downloaded a guide, asked one question, then went silent. They are not currently leaning in. They are not ruled out.

2. Warm. The lead is engaged in active back-and-forth. They've replied to messages, asked follow-up questions, shown interest in specific properties. They're not yet asking to see something this week.

3. Hot. The lead is exhibiting buying intent now. They want to see a specific property. They've asked about offer prices. Their financing is in progress. The conversation has shifted from exploration to execution.

4. Dormant. The lead was once warm or hot, then stopped engaging. The cadence has been running for 30+ days without a reply. They haven't said no. They've just gone quiet.

5. Won. The lead closed on a property with the brokerage. They are now a past client. The relationship continues but the goal changes.

6. Lost. The lead explicitly disengaged, bought elsewhere, told you to stop contacting them, or was determined to not be a real lead.

That's the full vocabulary. Six states. Every lead in the brokerage is in exactly one of them at any moment.

The transitions matter as much as the states

The interesting work isn't the labels — it's the rules governing how leads move between them.

Cold → Warm. Trigger: the lead replies to two or more outreach messages, or initiates a question. The cadence shifts from low-frequency awareness messages to direct qualification.

Warm → Hot. Trigger: explicit intent signal. Asks to schedule a showing. Asks about offer price. Provides financing status. The cadence pauses; the producer is brought in within hours.

Hot → Dormant. Trigger: 7+ days without reply after a hot signal. The lead was about to act and then stopped. This is the most expensive state transition to ignore — these leads can be reactivated, but the window is short.

Warm → Dormant. Trigger: 30+ days without reply. The cadence shifts to long-cycle nurture — less frequent, more value-add (market updates, neighborhood news, not "are you still interested").

Dormant → Warm. Trigger: the lead replies to a nurture message after a long silence. The cadence resumes warm-state behavior. This transition is the entire reason brokerages keep dormant leads — they reactivate constantly.

Hot → Won. Trigger: the lead signs a contract on a brokerage-represented property.

Any state → Lost. Trigger: explicit "stop contacting me," "I went with someone else," or "I'm not looking anymore." Cadence stops entirely.

Won → Cold (past-client cycle). Trigger: 12 months post-close, or earlier on referral activity. The lead re-enters a low-frequency cadence focused on anniversary messages, market reports, and referral asks. This is the loop most brokerages skip.

Why six and not five or seven

We have spent time looking at the alternatives. The five-state model collapses Dormant into Cold, which destroys the most important distinction in nurture: a Dormant lead has demonstrated they engage; a Cold lead hasn't. Treating them with the same cadence wastes either the Dormant lead (under-nurtured) or the Cold lead (over-pursued).

The seven-state model usually adds something like "Qualified" between Warm and Hot. We tried this. It muddied the line. Qualified is not really a state — it's a property that a lead either has or doesn't, regardless of which state they're in. We moved it to a flag on the lead record (qualified: true | false | unknown) rather than a state.

Six states is the smallest number that captures behavior without flattening important distinctions.

What different cadences look like for each state

State	Cadence frequency	Channel preference	Content type
Cold	1× every 7–14 days	Email + SMS	Awareness, new listings, market reports
Warm	2–3× per week	WhatsApp/SMS	Direct questions, qualifying, specific listings
Hot	Same-day reply expected	WhatsApp + voice	Showing coordination, offer drafting
Dormant	1× every 21–30 days	Email primarily	Market shifts, "thinking of you" relevance
Won	1× every 60–90 days	Email + occasional WhatsApp	Anniversary, market value, referral asks
Lost	None	—	—

A brokerage running these cadences manually, across 500 leads, is doing the math wrong. Each state has different timing, different channel, different content. No producer can sustain six parallel cadences across hundreds of leads. This is the work an AI BDR is built for.

The reactivation loop is where the money is

Most brokerages focus their attention on the Hot column and the Warm column. They run weekly hot-lead reviews. They push Warm-to-Hot conversions. They don't think about Dormant.

Dormant is where 60–80% of the leads end up. It's the largest single bucket in any mature CRM. And the reactivation rate — Dormant → Warm — is non-trivial. Industry research suggests something like 10–20% of dormant leads will reactivate over a 12-month window if they receive consistent, low-frequency, value-add nurture.

A brokerage that ignores Dormant is leaving the largest pool of latent conversion on the table. A brokerage that runs a real Dormant cadence — and notices the reactivation signal when it comes — converts deals their competitors believe are dead.

What state machine logic adds beyond labels

Once you have explicit states and transitions, three things become possible.

Branching cadences. A Warm lead who asked about financing in week 2 gets a different week-3 message than a Warm lead who asked about school zones. The cadence branches on the signal, not on the label.

Pause-on-reply. When the lead replies, the cadence pauses automatically. It doesn't fire the next scheduled message on top of a real conversation. This is the single most-violated rule in CRM automation — and the one that frustrates leads the most.

Time-aware transitions. A Hot lead that goes silent for 5 days isn't dormant yet — they're a Hot lead with a delay. The system distinguishes "no reply for 5 days" from "no reply for 30 days" and routes accordingly.

Re-entry recognition. A Dormant lead who suddenly asks "is that condo still available?" should jump straight to Hot, not work back through Warm sequentially. The state machine handles the direct transition.

None of these are possible with a CRM where lead status is a dropdown the producer manually updates. They require the state machine being explicit and the automation being aware of it.

What this looks like in practice

A brokerage running this model with an AI BDR sees a different operational rhythm.

• The producer's morning briefing lists Hot leads only — 4 to 8 people — with the action they need to take today.
• The AI BDR handles the Warm cadence in the background, branching on what each lead said.
• The Dormant pool is being nurtured automatically. When one reactivates, it surfaces in the producer's afternoon notification.
• Won leads are dropping into the past-client cadence on autopilot. Referrals come back on their own rhythm.
• Lost leads are out of the system. No further messages.

The producer's attention budget — which is the bottleneck in any brokerage — is spent only where it adds value. Everything else runs on the state machine.

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The Closi cadence engine is built directly on this 6-state model — see how each transition is configured, including the branching rules, the pause-on-reply behavior, and the dormant reactivation logic that most CRMs miss.