How to Track Real Estate Referrals in Follow Up Boss
Follow Up Boss has no referral object, so referral business is invisible by default. Reconstruct it in four passes: filter contacts whose lead source reads Referral or Sphere of Influence, parse names out of “referred by” tags, read notes for the rest, then join those people to closed deals. That sizes the channel; naming individual referrers starts at the second pass, and attaching dollars to them takes the fourth.
Open Follow Up Boss, filter your contacts by lead source, and count the ones marked Referral. That number is wrong, and it is wrong in a specific, fixable direction — far too low, and the people missing from it are the most valuable contacts you have.
The reason is not carelessness. A referral never had a field to live in, so it got recorded as whatever was closest: a source dropdown, a tag someone typed once, a note from 2023. The trail exists, scattered across four places never designed to hold it.
Here is how to reassemble it by hand with nothing but Follow Up Boss and a spreadsheet — plus what we shipped this week, what it still cannot do, and the one thing we refused to build.
Why the number matters more than it looks
NAR's 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers puts three figures next to each other that are hard to read in sequence. 91% of buyers said they would use their agent again or recommend them. 62% already had recommended them. 15% actually used an agent they had worked with before (reported from the NAR data by BAM). Sellers do better on the repeat number, at 29%.
Set 91% who would use their agent again or recommend them against 15% who actually did, and the gap is not a satisfaction problem. Your clients like you. They are not thinking about you during the twenty minutes that decide it — and the same report explains why those twenty minutes are the whole game: 67% of first-time buyers and 76% of repeat buyers hire the first agent they speak to, and 80% of sellers contact only one agent. There is rarely a second round.
Most agents will tell you referrals are the majority of their business. Few can name the six people who produced it. You cannot protect a channel you never counted, and this one goes quiet without telling you.
Why Follow Up Boss cannot answer this on its own
Follow Up Boss has no referral object. Nothing in the data model says this person came from that person — not an oversight, but a consequence of how CRMs work: they store contacts, not the edges between them.
The field that looks like it should work does not. The people-relationships feature renders on the contact card as household members — spouse, partner, family. Put a referrer there and you have told your CRM a past client lives in the new lead's household. We tested that path and rejected it.
Reconstruct your referral graph in four passes
Work them in order. Each pass finds a group the last one missed for more effort and a smaller return, so stopping after two is defensible.
| Pass | What you filter | What you get | What it cannot tell you |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Lead source | Source contains referral, referred, sphere, SOI, COI, past client, center of influence | The size of the channel. The biggest single jump you will get, in about four minutes. | Who referred them. "Referral" names a category, not a person. |
| 2. Tags and custom fields | Free text where somebody typed a name — "referred by Jane Doe", "referral from Bob" | Actual names. Individual referrers first appear here. | Whether that Jane Doe is the Jane Doe already in your database. A string is not a contact record. |
| 3. Notes | Keyword search for referred, sent me, introduced, friend of | The oldest and best relationships. Long-standing advocates rarely got tagged. | Nothing structured. This is a human reading, and it does not scale past a few hundred contacts. |
| 4. Join to deals | Everyone found in passes 1–3, matched against your closed deals | The money — referral-sourced volume beside portal-sourced volume, from your own numbers. | Anything past the first hop. A referral that referred a referral credits only the near end. |
Pass 1 is only as good as your source values, which is really a question of how the data got in — worth reading beside how to import data into Follow Up Boss and segmenting by lead type. If web leads land with no source at all, plug that first; the Pixel attribution guide covers it.
When pass 4 is done, sort by referrer and count closed deals against each name. On most books a handful of people account for most of the volume, and at least one of them has not heard from you in a year. That list is the most useful thing this exercise produces.
What the manual version cannot do
It is a snapshot, and it decays from the day you build it. It breaks in three predictable places: a name in a tag that never resolves to a real record, a referrer who introduced someone who never closed (invisible, still an advocate), and the fact that none of it makes the next referral likelier. You have measured a channel, not fed it. Feeding it is the older half of the problem, covered in building a referral pipeline in Follow Up Boss.
What we shipped this week
On 11 August 2026 a client referral graph and a homeowner page called the Ace Home Almanac went live in Follow Up Ace. Together they automate passes 1 and 2 and keep that result current. Pass 3, and the account-wide side-by-side in pass 4, are still manual.
The backfill runs itself. Passes 1 and 2 run over contact data we already hold — no Follow Up Boss API calls, no typing your sphere in from memory. Where a tag names a person, we match it against your own contacts; one confident match becomes a real link, and anything ambiguous is flagged for review rather than guessed. The first screen is populated on day one, which is the only way a tool like this survives a working agent.
The output is names with numbers beside them. Who sent you business, how much closed, and which of them you have not contacted lately. A row turns into a drafted message that sits in your suggestions queue until you send it — nothing in the referral drafts path sends it for you. Worth knowing separately: Ace Automations rules an admin configures elsewhere can email a contact without asking first, so check what your own rules do with a fresh lead.
The Home Almanac is the presence half — a page for one home at its own link, carrying a maintenance checklist built from the property's type, its climate region and the season. Region and season are derived from NOAA's 1991–2020 climate normals for that address wherever we can pin it on the map, so "winter" means the months that actually freeze there rather than a date on a calendar. Where the address will not geocode, both fall back to a coarse table and the seasonal content stays generic for that home. The monthly weather note is a separate thing, and it comes from the National Weather Service forecast. There is no login, ever. The link is the login, and a past client should not need an account to read a checklist about their own house.
The email only goes when something changed. A month with nothing to report is skipped rather than padded, because a hollow monthly email is how a stay-in-touch programme turns into a complaint rate. Sends are consent-gated and ramped per account. And when a homeowner passes their Almanac on using the page's own share link, the new person arrives with the referrer already attached — the counting stays current without data entry. Same mechanic as hosted client packets, on a page the client keeps for years.
The thing we deliberately did not build
There is no reward. No points, no credits, no gift card, no drawing, no tier that comes with anything attached — and not as a policy we promise to keep. The data model has no field capable of holding a payment to a consumer, so the software cannot record one even if somebody tried.
The reason is 12 U.S.C. § 2607(a), RESPA Section 8: "No person shall give and no person shall accept any fee, kickback, or thing of value pursuant to any agreement or understanding, oral or otherwise, that business incident to or a part of a real estate settlement service involving a federally related mortgage loan shall be referred to any person." Whether a particular thank-you gift crosses that line is a question for your broker and your counsel, not for us. Our position was narrower: a tool that makes the violation easy to express will eventually express it.
The same instinct runs into the copy. Client-facing text produced through Ace is checked before it renders, and one thing it will not pass is the word "referral" in a message to a client — "introduction" reads like a relationship. It also blocks appraisal-grade language on a modelled home value, and any wording characterising a neighbourhood or the people in it.
The limits, stated plainly
- It is about a day and a half old. No adoption numbers, no lift figures, no case studies. This describes how it works, not how well.
- The side-by-side revenue report is not live. Referral-sourced revenue next to paid-lead revenue for a whole account is written but not deployed. Today you get the graph, the advocate list and per-referrer counts. We are not going to imply otherwise while the chart sits in a branch.
- Source-detected referrals name a class, not a person. Pass 1 proves the channel exists and sizes it. No amount of processing gets a name out of a dropdown that only ever said "Referral".
- Commission figures are estimates. Dollar values against a closed referral are modelled from your account's own deal data and labelled "(est.)". They are not read off a settlement statement.
- The Follow Up Boss fields are a lossy copy. We write Ace Referred By and Ace Referrals Sent onto contacts, plus cross-linked notes on both timelines. Those fields are a best-effort projection, never the authoritative record.
- Free accounts see a capped version. The graph and advocate list appear on every tier; on a free account they stop at 25 rows, with the one-time backfill capped at 500 contacts. Sending an Almanac needs a paid seat; account-wide scope needs Ace Trove. Numbers are on the pricing page.
If you do one thing
Run pass 1 and pass 4 this week, then look at the bottom of the list — the people who sent you business years ago and have heard nothing since. That is a memory problem, not a marketing one, and it is the part you can fix today without any software.
Common questions
Does Follow Up Boss have a referral field?
Not natively. There is no referral object linking one contact to another, and the people-relationships feature is for households — it renders as family members, the wrong shape for a referral chain. Teams build the tracking out of lead source values, tags and custom fields instead.
How do I find which past clients have sent me business?
Filter contacts whose lead source contains referral, sphere, SOI, COI or past client. Search tags and custom fields for names following "referred by", and keyword-search notes for older relationships nobody tagged. Then join everyone you found to your closed deals.
Can I pay a past client for a referral?
RESPA Section 8 prohibits giving or accepting a fee, kickback or thing of value under an agreement that settlement-service business will be referred (12 U.S.C. § 2607(a)). Whether a specific gift falls inside that is a question for your broker and your attorney. Follow Up Ace builds no consumer reward mechanism at all.
How is this different from a homeowner engagement tool?
Those tools report engagement. Homebot's own site advertises a 75% average open rate and a 52% monthly engagement rate (homebot.ai, checked 12 August 2026) — real numbers, fairly advertised, and a different question from which named person sourced which closed deal. If you already run a homeowner tool you like, the four-pass method still works: it reads your CRM, not our data.
Related reading: how Follow Up Boss works for the underlying data model, and Seller Radar for the other half of the past-client question — which of them is likely to list.
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