Enquiries from 99acres, MagicBricks and Housing.com can land in your CRM automatically, but only after a one-time setup on each portal: the CRM gives you a webhook URL and key, you pass them to the portal's account manager, and the portal switches on lead push from its side. Once that switch is on, every enquiry arrives within moments with the portal as its source, gets assigned by rule and can be measured against the other portals. Until then the portal sends nothing, which is why so many teams are still copying leads out of email.
Key takeaways
- Portals push leads only after their account manager enables it against your webhook. Nothing happens by default.
- Test with a real enquiry on your own listing before trusting the feed; check timestamp, phone format and project mapping.
- Lock source and sub-source at capture so attribution survives reassignment and status changes.
- Run a separate auto-assign rule per portal, with the same first-response clock on all of them.
- Listings still go out by CSV upload; the Indian portals do not offer a publish API.
- Review source effectiveness weekly by portal and project: leads, contact rate, site visits, bookings, cost per visit.
Why are teams still copying portal leads from emails?
Every paid plan on 99acres, MagicBricks and Housing.com sends enquiries to the email registered on the advertiser account and shows them in the portal's own dashboard or app. That works when one person handles ten enquiries a day. It fails the moment three telecallers share one inbox.
- Delay. The lead sits until someone checks the inbox. Buyers enquire on several listings at once and talk to whoever calls first.
- Double handling. Two telecallers copy the same email and the buyer gets two calls, or each assumes the other has it and the buyer gets none.
- Leakage. Emails get archived, deleted, or lost when the mailbox owner leaves.
- Broken attribution. The lead is typed in later as "Other" and the portal never gets credit, so you cannot tell which plan to renew.
- No response-time measurement. Without a capture timestamp you cannot tell whether the first call happened in ten minutes or two days.
The fix is not a better inbox. It is the push integration the portals already offer to paying advertisers, wired to a CRM that tags, assigns and times each lead. For the wider argument on bringing every channel into one queue, read why lead consolidation matters for real estate sales teams.
How does a portal-to-CRM lead push actually work?
Three pieces: an endpoint, a key and a portal-side switch
A webhook is a URL on your CRM that accepts data. The key is a secret attached to it so only the portal can post. The third piece, the one teams forget, is the switch on the portal's side: the portal maps its enquiry fields to your endpoint and turns on delivery for your advertiser account. Your CRM cannot flip that switch; only the portal's account or relationship manager can.
What a pushed lead contains
Field names differ by portal, but a pushed enquiry generally carries the buyer's name, phone, email where given, the listing or project enquired on, the message and a timestamp; some add city or stated budget. Expect quirks: phone numbers may arrive as ten digits or with a +91 prefix, and the project field is the portal's listing title, not your internal project name. Field mapping in the CRM should normalise both, which is what the first-lead test checks.
How do I set up the push for 99acres, MagicBricks and Housing.com?
The procedure is the same on all three. What differs is who you talk to and how the portal scopes the push, so treat each as its own small project.
The six steps that apply to every portal
- In your CRM's lead-source settings, pick the portal and copy its webhook URL and key.
- Write to the portal's account manager for your paid plan with the URL, the key, the advertiser account ID or registered email, the projects or listings to cover, and a contact for testing.
- Ask for written confirmation that push is enabled, and whether it is enabled at account level or per listing. This matters when you add a project later.
- Submit a live enquiry yourself from a phone number that is not already in the CRM.
- Verify the lead against the checklist in the next section.
- Record the date, the account manager's name and the covered projects in a shared sheet. Re-verify after every plan renewal or account manager change.
99acres
Push is tied to the paid advertiser account. If your firm runs separate 99acres accounts for different cities or projects, each needs its own enablement against the same webhook. Ask the account manager to confirm which listings are covered and to send a test push before you run your own enquiry.
MagicBricks
Work through the account manager on your plan and ask specifically whether listings added after enablement are included automatically or must be added to the push. Firms that launch a project mid-quarter and assume the feed covers it are the usual source of "we lost a month of leads" stories.
Housing.com
Same process. Confirm which registered email or account the push is attached to, because many firms still have an older account, opened by a previous marketing manager, running a plan. Get the covered project list in writing.
The general design of a CRM that receives these feeds is covered in how a CRM captures leads from 99acres, MagicBricks and Housing.com automatically; this article is about getting each portal switched on and running well.
How do I test the first lead before trusting the feed?
An account manager saying "enabled" is not proof. Run this checklist on your own enquiry and on the portal's test push.
| Check | What good looks like | If it is wrong |
|---|---|---|
| Arrival time | Lead appears within a minute or two of the enquiry | Ask the portal whether delivery is batched |
| Phone format | Ten-digit mobile, consistent with manual leads | Fix the mapping or normalisation rule |
| Project mapping | Linked to the right project in the CRM | Align listing titles with CRM project names |
| Source and sub-source | Source = portal, sub-source = project or listing | Set the sub-source rule before go-live |
| Assignment | A named person, notified on their phone | Check the per-source assignment rule |
| Duplicates | Second enquiry from the same number is flagged and linked, not dropped or doubled | Review duplicate settings |
| Off-hours | A night or Sunday enquiry still arrives and is assigned | Decide the night-queue policy |
Run the off-hours test deliberately. Most teams find their Saturday-night gap only after a buyer complains.
How should source and sub-source tagging work?
Source is the portal. Sub-source is what lets you compare within the portal: the project, the listing, or the plan tier if you run a premium and a standard plan.
| Source | Sub-source | What it lets you compare |
|---|---|---|
| 99acres | Project name | Which project the portal performs for |
| MagicBricks | Listing ID or project | Which listing copy or photos pull enquiries |
| Housing.com | Project + plan tier | Whether the upgraded plan paid off |
Two rules keep this useful. Sources must be a fixed list, not free text; "99acres", "99 acres" and "99acres.com" become three lines in every report and nobody trusts the numbers. And source and sub-source should be locked once captured, so a reassignment or status change six weeks later cannot wipe out attribution. When you later work out cost per site visit per portal, that locked tag is what makes the number honest; the method is laid out in how builders can track ROI from Google Ads and portal leads.
How do I auto-assign leads per portal?
Give each portal its own assignment rule rather than one rule for all new leads. Portals differ in buyer profile and volume, and the people best suited to each can differ too.
- Round robin for an even spread across a pod of telecallers.
- Percentage split when senior closers should take a larger share of a high-intent portal.
- Capacity balance so a telecaller already holding sixty open leads is skipped.
- Daily cap so nobody receives more fresh leads than they can call that day.
- Parameter-based routing by city, budget or project, for firms selling across two cities from one portal account.
Illustrative example. A developer with two projects in Jaipur and one in Udaipur runs push from all three portals. 99acres enquiries for the Jaipur projects go round robin to four telecallers. Housing.com enquiries, which this firm finds skew to end-users ready for a visit, split 60:40 towards two senior closers. MagicBricks enquiries route by city so Udaipur leads land with the Udaipur team. All three rules sit under the same first-response clock: 30 minutes, a warning at 20, escalation to the sales head on breach.
The clock matters more than the routing choice; a lead that reaches the right person two hours late is still a lost lead. Decide the night policy explicitly too: either assign to an on-duty person with the clock running, or hold night leads in a morning queue with the clock starting at 9 am. Leaving it undecided means the clock runs against someone asleep. For the follow-up cadence after the first call, see how to build a real estate lead follow-up system, and for routing design in depth, real estate lead assignment software.
What about sending listings to the portals?
Leads come in by push; listings go out by upload. None of the three Indian portals gives advertisers a public API to publish or update listings, so inventory is entered through the portal's own tools or uploaded as a bulk CSV or XLSX. Keep one master property sheet in the CRM and export from it, so the title, project name, price and availability on each portal match what the CRM holds. Use identical project names on both sides so pushed leads map back cleanly, and keep a column for each portal's listing ID so a lead's sub-source can be traced to the exact listing.
What should a weekly source-effectiveness review look like?
A push integration pays for itself only if someone reads the numbers. A twenty-minute Monday review between the marketing manager and the telecaller team lead is enough. Pull, per portal and per project, for last week and the trailing four weeks:
| Metric | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Leads received | Volume by portal and project |
| Contacted within SLA | Whether telecalling is holding up its end |
| Connected rate | Junk or unreachable numbers by portal |
| Duplicates across portals | Credit the first portal, do not double count |
| Site visits booked and done | The real intent signal |
| Bookings, spend, cost per site visit | The numbers that decide the renewal |
Then take three decisions: which project-portal pairs get more budget or a listing refresh; which pairs are producing junk and need the copy, price band or photos changed; and whether any dip is a telecalling problem (SLA misses) rather than a portal problem. Separate those two before blaming the portal. A plan that looks weak is often a team that was slow that week.
How Homelead handles portal leads
Homelead has ready webhooks for 99acres, MagicBricks, Housing.com, PropTiger, Square Yards and OLX under Settings → Lead Sources. You copy the webhook URL and key, the portal's account manager enables the push, and from then on leads arrive in real time. The same screen has a generic webhook with field mapping for Google Ads lead forms, landing pages and Zapier, and Meta Lead Ads connect through your Facebook Page with the form name saved as sub-source. Portal integrations are included in every plan.
Every lead carries a source and sub-source that can be locked. Duplicates are never silently dropped: a repeat enquiry is created, flagged as duplicate and linked to the original, and merging keeps the history. Each source can run its own auto-assign strategy (round robin, percentage split, capacity balance, fixed daily cap, or parameter-based on city, budget or custom fields) with rotation teams, shift windows and a preview of the next assignee, and the Rotation Log records every automatic pick with the reason it fired. A first-response SLA, default 60 minutes and settable from 1 to 1,440, warns before the deadline and on breach can notify the assignee, escalate to the manager, flag the lead red or auto-reassign, with alerts in-app, by push and on Telegram. Reports → lead-source effectiveness shows volume, conversion percentage and hot percentage per source, and the dashboard breaks leads down by source with branch and date filters. Properties, lands and projects export to CSV or XLSX for upload to the portals. You can see the setup on your own portal accounts in a 20-minute demo.
Which mistakes undo a portal integration?
- Trusting "enabled" without a test. Run your own enquiry, including one at night.
- Forgetting new projects. If push is scoped per listing, add each new project; put it on the launch checklist.
- Not re-verifying after renewal. Plan renewals, account changes and a new account manager on the portal side are the usual moments a push silently stops.
- Counting the same buyer three times. Link duplicates across portals and credit the first touch, or your cost-per-lead comparison will flatter whichever portal the buyer tried last.
Frequently asked questions
Can 99acres push leads directly into my CRM?
Yes, for paid advertiser accounts. Your CRM provides a webhook URL and key, and the 99acres account manager enables lead push against it. Until that is done, enquiries arrive only by email and in the portal dashboard.
How quickly does a pushed lead appear in the CRM?
Once push is enabled, an enquiry normally appears within moments of the buyer submitting it. If you see delays of hours, ask the portal whether delivery is batched and confirm that the account the buyer enquired on is the one mapped to your webhook.
What happens when the same buyer enquires on all three portals?
A well-configured CRM creates the later enquiries but flags them as duplicates and links them to the first lead instead of dropping them. Credit the first portal for attribution, keep one owner for the buyer and note the other portals on the record.
Do I need an IVR or a developer to set this up?
No. Portal push is a copy-the-URL-and-key task plus one email to the account manager. No telephony and no code. A developer is only needed for an unusual website form or ad platform connected through a generic webhook.
Can I publish listings to the portals from the CRM?
The Indian portals do not offer a public publish API, so listings go out through the portal's own tools or a bulk CSV or XLSX upload. Keep the CRM as the master inventory, export from it, and keep project names identical on both sides so pushed leads map back correctly.
How do I know which portal gives the best leads?
Compare per portal and per project on contacted-within-SLA, connected rate, site visits done, bookings and cost per site visit, not raw lead count. Locked source and sub-source tags make that report trustworthy, and a weekly review turns it into budget decisions.