HF Marbella and Fondaro: 400 sleeping leads woken up, and Heidi four times more productive

Every agency has them: leads that were once warm and then went quiet. A buyer whose timing was wrong, an enquiry that was archived, a contact nobody has called in a year. Sebastian Nieblas, CEO and partner at HF Marbella, calls them sleeping leads, not dead ones, and he thinks most agencies leave money in them. So HF Marbella took close to 400 of its own and started calling them again, with a plan for every call. Here is how they do it, in Sebastian's words, and what it did for the agency's founder, Heidi Fischer.

HF Marbella and Fondaro
On the Costa del Sol since	1990, a boutique agency for luxury homes
Where they sell	The Golden Mile and Marbella, from Marbella West to Marbella East
Their clients	German, Swiss and Austrian buyers and sellers
Sleeping leads called again	Close to 400, from their own database
Active clients again, by Sebastian's count	14 of the first 100 called
Heidi Fischer, founder	Four times more productive, in Sebastian's words
With Fondaro since	September 2026

HF Marbella's rule for a brand new lead, a call within ten minutes, is in our first story about the agency. This one is about the leads they already had.

What is a sleeping lead, and why does HF Marbella call them?

Sleeping leads is a very high potential, and I believe that many agencies don't give it the value that it really has.

Sebastian Nieblas

Somebody paid for every one of those leads once, Sebastian points out, in advertising, in time or in a recommendation. So HF Marbella picked out the leads in its own database that were archived, inactive, or had bad timing the last time they spoke, close to 400 of them, and started calling them again from Fondaro.

How does HF Marbella wake up a sleeping lead?

Not by handing out piles of names. "We just don't assign lots of 25 and call them and let's see what happens," Sebastian says. "No, there is a very specific and clear guide." Step by step, as he tells it:

1. The right person calls. The leads are split by language and region. German buyers from the south of Germany go to Dorian Völcker, the youngest on the team, because he is from the south himself: "everybody that is from Munich, a guy from Munich is going to call him."
2. A few calls a day. The leads sit in a reactivation list the team shares in Fondaro, with what is due today on top. In Sebastian's words, it tells Dorian: "Hey, Dorian, today you need to call these five guys."
3. Twice, then Wednesday, then Friday. Every lead gets two calls. With no answer, the next try is on Wednesday, then on Friday. If there is still no answer, it is not dead yet: the next step is a written message on WhatsApp.
4. Dorian just makes the calls. He doesn't write those follow-ups himself. In Fondaro, a list can offer the next step after a call, like a follow-up a few days on, and it is set with one tap. "You just make the calls."
5. An answer moves the lead on. A sleeping lead that answers moves to Potential, "where we give absolute attention on a daily basis."

From the 100 we called, 14 are alive.

Sebastian Nieblas

By the time of the podcast, Sebastian counted 14 active clients from the first hundred they called. His point is the arithmetic: compare that with what it costs to generate a hundred new leads, and if even one of them buys, it was worth it.

What happens when a sleeping lead answers?

The call is where the next steps start. When it ends, Fondaro has recorded, transcribed and summarised it on the lead, so nobody types it up afterwards. From what the buyer said, Find homes in Fondaro proposes a search for homes that fit, and the agent checks it and picks the homes to send.

They go to the buyer as a brochure link, never a PDF any more. Sebastian calls it a live link: the buyer marks the homes they like and the ones they want to view, and HF Marbella sees it on the lead. Before, the team put a separate viewing link together by hand. Now, as Sebastian puts it, they have "eliminated two, three working steps".

There are so many steps that before, you needed for each lead four times more time than what you need now.

Sebastian Nieblas

The time saved goes back into the calls: "we use that time to call more sleeping leads, or use our time to call immediately leads when they come in."

How did Heidi become four times more productive?

Heidi Fischer founded the agency on the coast in 1990. Dorian is the youngest on the team and lives in the tech world. You might expect the two of them to use Fondaro very differently. They don't: they use the phone app the same way, and they learned it the same way.

It's so manageable, so easy to handle. It's so user-friendly that Heidi is now like four times more productive than she was before.

Sebastian Nieblas

Heidi has always put her time into the clients. So every property search for a client, and every activity or viewing to register, used to go through headquarters for someone else to put in the system. Now, Sebastian says, "she doesn't need to forward any information anymore, she does it herself."

Alexander from Fondaro saw what that looks like at HF Marbella's open house in Mansion Club. Heidi was walking around with her phone in her hand at her own open house. A lead had just come in. She looked at it, said "I'm going to call now", and left to call.

The end of the day has changed too. An agent on the road used to sit down at the computer in the evening and type in what every client had said, "everything you remember". In Sebastian's words: "That disappeared in our company."

What does Sebastian think of Fondaro?

He puts it in one sentence, the one this story ends with: Fondaro lets a boutique company act like a multinational. What brought HF Marbella and Fondaro together, he says, is that Fondaro is built around taking care of clients, not around the listings. HF Marbella had already spent two years learning what AI could do for the agency: "We knew the things we wanted to do, but we didn't have the tool to do it. And that is where we started to work together."

Questions agencies ask about Fondaro

What is a sleeping lead? A lead an agency already has that has gone quiet: archived, inactive, or with bad timing the last time they spoke. HF Marbella calls them again with a plan for every call, and counts 14 active clients from the first 100 called.

Can Fondaro set a follow-up after an unanswered call? Yes. A list in Fondaro can offer the next step after a call, like a follow-up a few days later or a new status, and the agent sets it with one tap.

Does Fondaro find homes for a lead after a call? Yes. Find homes reads what the lead asked for and what was said on the calls, and proposes the search. The agent checks it before it runs, then sends the homes as a brochure link.

Can a buyer choose which homes to view from a brochure? Yes. In a Fondaro brochure the buyer marks the homes they love and can book a viewing, and the agent sees it on the lead.

Does Fondaro's assistant call leads? No. Ask Fondaro drafts and proposes. At HF Marbella a person dials every call, from the browser or the phone app, and a person sends every message.

About HF Marbella

HF – Heidi Fischer Marbella is a luxury real estate agency founded by Heidi Fischer and active on the Costa del Sol since 1990. It is a boutique company for German, Swiss and Austrian buyers and sellers, focused on the Golden Mile and Marbella, and looks after its clients in their own language. Office: Edificio Banús Portal II, Urb. Guadalmina Alta, 29670 Marbella. More about the agency in our first story.

The figures are Sebastian Nieblas's own, from his conversation with Alexander on the Fondaro podcast, recorded on 5 November 2026.