Follow Up Boss High-Intent Buyer Smart List: What to Tag

Picture two buyers who each opened the same listing on your website six times this week.

One saved it, then asked whether Saturday’s showing was still on. The other has spent a year looking at houses on their lunch break and will happily spend another one doing it. A Smart List built on page views can’t tell those two apart. A list built on what each buyer actually did can, and that is the list worth opening before your first call of the day.

This guide covers which website actions deserve a tag, how to build the list in Follow Up Boss, how to keep it from filling up with stale names, and the buyer it will always miss.

How a tag moves a buyer into a Smart List

A Smart List is a saved filter, not a folder. Nobody drags a contact into it. Follow Up Boss describes its lists as dynamic filters and gives examples built on website visits, saved favorites, the price range a lead searched, last call, last email and tags (Follow Up Boss, Smart Lists). Whoever matches the filter right now is on the list.

Tags are the easiest of those to wire up, because most IDX and website tools that connect to Follow Up Boss can write them for you. RealScout’s guide for Follow Up Boss users spells out the mechanic in one line: “When a tag is applied, the contact enters the list. When a tag is removed, they drop off automatically” (RealScout, July 2026). The same guide splits its tags across two lists, Hand Raisers and High Intent Activity, which is the setup we recommend below whatever tool you use.

So if you came here from a training quiz asking which Smart List a tag can move a buyer into when their activity shows high intent: the answer is your high-intent list. The name on it matters far less than which actions earn the tag.

Which actions deserve a high-intent tag

Not every click is a signal. The research on online shopping is useful here, with one caveat up front: none of it studies home buyers.

Sismeiro and Bucklin modeled purchases on a website that sold cars. Visitors’ browsing and navigation predicted whether they completed each step toward buying, and the number of repeat visits on its own was not diagnostic of buying propensity (Journal of Marketing Research, 2004). Moe and Fader, working with retail clickstream data, found that people who visit more often have a greater propensity to buy, and that a change in how often someone visits carries further information about who is likely to convert (Journal of Interactive Marketing, 2004).

Read together, a raw view count is a weak tag. A step toward a decision is a strong one, and so is a buyer whose visits are speeding up. Here is how that sorts the actions most websites can report:

One honest limit before you build anything: Follow Up Boss can only filter on what arrives. If your website vendor doesn’t send saved homes or showing requests, no filter will conjure them. Open a few recent website leads, look at the tags and activity already on them, and build from that list.

Build it in Follow Up Boss, step by step

Menu labels move around between releases, so check these against your own account. In most accounts the path looks like this:

1. List your intent tags. Write down the exact tag names your website tool applies for saves, repeat views and showing requests. Spelling matters, because a filter on “Property Saved” will not match “Saved Property.”
2. Filter the people view. Go to People, open Filters, and add a Tags filter that matches any of your high-intent tags.
3. Add a last-contact condition. Filter on last communication so a buyer someone already called this morning doesn’t sit on top of the list all day.
4. Exclude what you never want here. Leave out closed, trash and do-not-contact stages. Our guide to tag exclusion rules covers the ones that quietly backfire.
5. Save it as a list. Use New List, give it a name your agents will recognize, and share it with whoever works these buyers.
6. Repeat for Hand Raisers. Same steps, using only the tags that mean someone asked for something.

If you want the same tag to start an action plan as well, read how automated follow-up sequences work in Follow Up Boss first. A list tells you who to call. A sequence decides what goes out when you don’t.

Keep the list from going stale

The most common way this list dies is that tags go on and never come off. A few weeks later it holds everyone who ever saved a home, including people who already bought with someone else, and agents stop opening it.

• Know who removes the tag. Some tools remove their own tags when activity stops. If yours doesn’t, make removing the tag part of working the lead: you called, you talked, the tag comes off and the buyer leaves the list.
• Watch the count weekly. A healthy high-intent list rises and falls. One that only grows has a tag that never comes off.
• Keep non-buyers out. Lenders, vendors and other agents browse listings too. Our post on why not everyone in your database is a lead shows how to fence them off.
• Split by lead type if the team is big. First-time buyers and investors respond to different openers; see segmenting your Follow Up Boss database by lead type.

The buyer this list will always miss

A tag-based list shows who is active now. That is its strength, and it is also the gap.

The buyer who saved four homes in the spring, went quiet over the summer and is still planning to move doesn’t trip any tag this week. Their old tags have been cleared, or were never applied. On an activity list they look identical to someone who gave up.

Two Ace Smart Lists are built for that buyer, and Ace deploys both straight into Follow Up Boss so they sit next to the list you just made (here is the full set of Ace Smart Lists):

• High-Value Going Cold is one of the nine free lists every connected account gets. It holds contacts in the top ~15% of your own book by Ace Win Score who have gone quiet for roughly two to six weeks.
• Likely Buyers comes with Ace Trove, our account-wide add-on. It holds contacts in the two highest bands of Ace Buyer Tier, a field Trove writes to Follow Up Boss that ranks how likely each contact is to buy in roughly the next six months, quiet buyers included. The list is sorted by Win Score.

Here is what Buyer Tier is not. It is a relative ranking, not a guarantee, and it stays blank when a contact doesn’t have enough activity to score. A lead who signed up an hour ago has no tier yet. That is exactly why your tag-based list keeps its spot at the top of the morning: it catches today’s hand-raiser before any model has a history to work with.

A five-minute morning routine

1. Open Hand Raisers first. Anyone who asked for something and hasn’t heard back gets a reply before anything else happens.
2. Work High Intent from the top. Open with what they did: “I saw you saved the place on Elm, want me to pull the HOA docs?” beats any check-in. Our cold lead re-engagement guide has more openers built the same way.
3. Clear the tags you worked, if your setup relies on you to remove them.
4. Once a week, open the quiet-buyer lists. Two or three thoughtful calls there are worth more than another pass through people you spoke to yesterday.

Frequently asked questions

Can contact tags automatically move a buyer into a Smart List in Follow Up Boss?

Yes. A Smart List is a live filter, so when your website or IDX tool applies a tag the list filters on, the buyer appears in it, and when the tag is removed they drop off. Nobody has to add or remove them by hand.

What is the difference between a hand-raiser and a high-intent buyer?

A hand-raiser asked for something, such as a showing or an answer to a question, and is waiting on you. A high-intent buyer hasn’t asked yet, but their activity, such as saving homes or returning to one listing more and more often, suggests they are getting close. Call hand-raisers first.

Do I need an IDX website for a high-intent list?

You need something that sends buyer activity or tags into Follow Up Boss. That is usually an IDX website or search portal. Follow Up Boss can only filter on the activity and tags it receives, so check what your vendor sends before building the list.

A question for the agents running a list like this today: which single action has been the best sign a buyer was close for you? The saved home, the third visit to one listing, or the showing request? We would like to hear the answer from someone who has watched it play out.