The Closest Controlled Study on Pre-Call Texting
Most claims about warm-up texting circulating in sales content cite no real study at all. A randomized academic study does exist, just not in a real estate or sales context: a controlled trial of 9,000 Australian mobile phone numbers, fieldwork run October 2014 through February 2015, with 526 people completing the study.
Participants were split between receiving a pre-notification SMS before a phone call and not receiving one, a real controlled comparison rather than a before-and-after anecdote from a single sales team.
What Improved, and By How Much
The results were measurable across three separate outcomes. The response rate rose 60%, from 7.7% to 12.4%. The cooperation rate, whether someone who answered agreed to participate, rose 79%, from 16.0% to 28.6%. The refusal rate fell 24%, from 35.9% to 27.3%. And 85.8% of people who received the text recalled getting it, confirming the message itself was landing and being noticed before the call came in.
Three independent metrics moving in the same direction, response up, cooperation up, refusal down, is a stronger signal than any single number would be on its own.
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Book a Real Estate Fit CallWhy an Australian Phone Survey Is Not a Real Estate Sales Study
The honest limitation here matters as much as the result. This study measured participation in a phone survey, a different ask than a wholesaler’s cash offer conversation, conducted with a general Australian mobile population a decade before today’s spam-flagging and caller ID environment. No disclosed-methodology study has run the same warm-up-text design specifically against real estate cold calling.
The mechanism the study demonstrates, a pre-notification changing whether and how someone responds to a subsequent call, is directionally useful evidence. It is not the same as a real estate-specific performance guarantee, and any sales-blog claim of a specific answer-rate lift for cold calling that does not cite a comparable disclosed study should be read skeptically.
The Compliance Catch Behind a Warm-Up Text
Sending a promotional text to a cold list is regulated as its own consent system under the TCPA, running parallel to the rules that already govern the call itself, with carrier delivery and registration requirements layered on top of that. A warm-up text is not a workaround to calling-consent rules. It is a separate message type that needs its own compliant consent basis before it goes out.
That distinction matters operationally: a wholesaler cannot treat a pre-call text as a loophole around TCPA calling rules, since the text carries its own exposure under the same statute.
Testing the Tactic Without Overselling the Evidence
The available evidence supports treating a warm-up text as a plausible, low-cost tactic worth testing on your own list, not as a proven sales technique with a guaranteed lift. The Australian study’s three-metric improvement is real, controlled evidence of the underlying mechanism. It is simply evidence from a different context than a wholesale seller call.
A wholesaler running this tactic still needs a compliant consent basis for the text itself, and still needs a trained caller ready the moment that pre-notified seller picks up. VA Horizon’s trained callers and follow-up system build both pieces into a single compliant sequence rather than treating the text as a separate, unmanaged step.
Sources
The external data in this article draws on the sources below. Figures described in the text as estimates or industry triangulations are directional and are not attributed to a single dataset.
- "Pre-Survey Text Messages (SMS) Improve Participation Rate in an Australian Mobile Telephone Survey"
- SubscriberVerify, "TCPA and SMS Compliance in 2026"