The Gulf Buyer Response Benchmark 2026
We sent 144 anonymous buyer enquiries to real estate brokerages across the GCC, 94 % of them outside office hours, and recorded what happened next. The data comes from real estate. The lesson applies to every business that lives on enquiries.
63 %
of the enquiries never received a reply within the measurement window
9.4 h
median time to the first reply, when there was one
5 %
were answered within 5 minutes, 9 % within one hour
61 %
replied on WhatsApp, against 22 % by email
What a buyer experienced
How fast the first reply came
All 144 enquiries, share answered within each time
Where the customer writes matters
Share of enquiries that got any reply, by channel
Median first reply: 8.7 hours on WhatsApp, 11.3 hours by email.
The same gap in every market we could measure
Share of enquiries that got any reply, countries with at least 20 enquiries
In both, the median first reply took more than 9 hours.
After closing time
133 enquiries sent in the evening or at night
94 % of the test enquiries went out at that time, because that is when buyers browse and ask.
What it means for any business
- Customers do not wait for office hours. The first business that answers with a clear next step usually gets the appointment.
- The channel matters, but speed decides. Even on WhatsApp the typical answer arrived many hours later.
- Silence is the most common answer. More than half of the enquiries in this test never got one.
Test your own business in ten minutes
- Ask someone outside your team to send one enquiry by WhatsApp and one by email after 6 PM, from a number you do not know.
- Write down the exact time of the first reply on each channel, or note that none came.
- Check whether the reply answered the question and asked one question back, such as budget or timing.
- Compare your times with this benchmark: 5 minutes, one hour and the 9.4 hour median.
How the test worked
- HYBOTE sent anonymous buyer enquiries to real estate brokerages in the GCC between 13 July and 10 September 2026, by WhatsApp (57) and email (87).
- Only the first valid test per brokerage and channel counts, so no company is counted twice.
- We measured the time to the first reply within the measurement window. No reply within the window counts as no reply.
- All results are aggregated. No brokerage, agent or person is named or described, and any group below 20 enquiries is left out.
- Percentages are rounded to whole numbers.
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