A form sales advisers like: the fields that really matter

A buyer who fills in the form on a development website wants one thing: someone to get back to them with a real answer. The sales adviser needs little more than that: which unit the enquiry is about, how and when to get in touch, and how far along the buyer is with the decision. Every field beyond that has a cost, because it is one more reason to give up halfway, especially on a phone. Below we look at which enquiry form fields really matter for a property developer, which ones to drop, how to handle consent and spam protection, and where an enquiry should go once it is sent.

Short for the buyer, rich for the adviser

A good enquiry form is not a survey. It is the start of a conversation. The buyer types only what the website cannot know by itself, and the form adds the rest of the context automatically. The adviser gets a complete enquiry even though the buyer filled in three or four fields.

There is a legal side to this too. The GDPR requires data minimisation (Article 5(1)(c)): you collect only what you need for the purpose. A form that asks for a date of birth or a home address at first contact is longer and harder to justify.

What the website should pass on by itself

The most useful information in an enquiry often does not come from the fields the buyer fills in:

• The unit and the development. If the buyer asks from a unit's page, the enquiry should carry the unit number, floor, floor area and the price at the moment of sending. The adviser does not have to ask which flat it was, and the buyer does not copy a number from a floor plan.
• Where on the site. A unit page, the location section, the finishing standard: a hint of what the buyer was looking for and where to start the conversation.
• The source of the visit. UTM parameters and whether the buyer came from a property portal, a search engine or directly. It costs the buyer nothing and later shows where your enquiries come from.
• The language version. Someone writing from the English version of the site probably prefers to talk in English.

One note on the source of the visit: if it has to survive the move between pages, the site usually stores it in the browser. Poland's Electronic Communications Law (Prawo komunikacji elektronicznej, Article 399, the Polish implementation of the EU ePrivacy rules) requires consent to store information on a user's device, except what is strictly necessary to provide the service. Decide how it is stored together with your cookie policy.

On the Agnieszki 9 website, an enquiry starts with an "Ask for details" button next to a specific unit. The buyer does not have to look for the form or describe which flat they mean.

Fields that really help the adviser

1. First name. One field. The adviser can ask for a surname in the conversation, if it is needed at all.
2. Preferred contact channel. Phone or email? Instead of requiring both, ask which one the buyer prefers and require only the details for that channel.
3. Best time to call. A few slots to pick from, such as "morning", "afternoon", "after 5 pm". An adviser who calls at a good moment starts the conversation in a better position than one who catches the buyer in a work meeting.
4. Financing. One optional question: cash, mortgage, not sure yet. Buying with a mortgage is a different conversation: payment schedule, deadlines and paperwork for the bank. Keep it optional, because not everyone wants to share this up front.
5. Purchase timeline. For example "within three months", "within a year", "just looking". Also optional. It helps order the callbacks, but it should never decide whether someone gets an answer at all.
6. Message. Optional, with a hint in the field: "What would you like to ask? For example about parking or the completion date."

That is enough for the adviser to prepare for the first call. Everything else comes out of the conversation.

Fields that hurt

• Phone and email both required. Some people want information by email first and will not give a number at this stage.
• Data you do not need yet: address, date of birth, income. If you need them at all, it is at the reservation stage.
• Questions the site already knows the answer to. "Which development are you interested in?" on a single development's site just makes the form longer.
• A required "How did you hear about us?". Measure the source automatically. An optional question can stay if the team actually uses the answers.
• Long drop-down lists with dozens of options, and fields where it is unclear what format to type.
• Puzzle CAPTCHAs. More on that below.

Consent: short and separate

This section is not legal advice, but a few rules follow directly from the law.

Answering an enquiry usually does not need a separate consent. If buyers ask to be contacted about a unit, the GDPR offers other legal bases, such as steps taken at the person's request before entering into a contract (Article 6(1)(b)) or the controller's legitimate interest (Article 6(1)(f)). Which basis to rely on is the controller's decision, ideally made with a lawyer. What is mandatory is the information required by Article 13 GDPR: who the controller is, the purpose and legal basis, how long the data are kept and what rights the buyer has. A short notice below the form with a link to the privacy policy usually does the job.

Marketing is a separate matter. In Poland, sending commercial information, including direct marketing, by email or phone requires the recipient's prior consent. Since November 2024 this comes from Article 398 of the Electronic Communications Law, which replaced the earlier Telecommunications Law. Agreeing to be contacted about a particular unit is not consent to receive further offers.

What consent should look like. Under the GDPR, consent must be freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous (Article 4(11)). In practice:

• a separate checkbox for each purpose, for example offers by email and offers by phone,
• the checkbox unticked by default (Recital 32 GDPR; the EU Court of Justice ruled the same in Planet49, C-673/17),
• sending the enquiry does not depend on the marketing consent (Article 7(4)),
• withdrawing consent is as easy as giving it (Article 7(3)), and the form says so next to the checkbox,
• the wording says in plain language who will contact the buyer, how and about what.

Example wording: "I'd like to receive information about new developments and offers from XYZ by email. I can withdraw this consent at any time." Short, specific, no jargon.

Spam protection without puzzles

A form without protection soon fills up with enquiries from bots, and advisers waste time sorting through them. That does not mean making buyers click on pictures of crosswalks. Several layers the buyer never sees work best:

• A honeypot field. A hidden field people do not see but bots fill in. An enquiry with the honeypot filled is quietly dropped.
• Fill time. A form sent a fraction of a second after the page opened was not filled in by a person.
• Rate limits. A few submissions from one address in a short time is plenty for a person and stops bulk attempts.
• Background checks. Tools such as Cloudflare Turnstile verify the browser without showing a puzzle. In "managed" mode only some visitors see a single checkbox, and the "non-interactive" and "invisible" modes need no action at all.

Any third-party tool that processes visitors' data should be listed in your privacy policy.

After sending: the enquiry goes where the adviser works

The best form achieves nothing if the enquiry lands in a shared inbox and waits for someone to notice it. After sending, take care of a few things:

• The enquiry goes into the CRM as a new lead with the full context: unit, price at the moment of sending, source, preferred channel and best time to call.
• Assignment to an adviser by development or by duty roster, with a notification on their phone.
• Duplicate detection. If the same buyer asks about a second unit, the adviser sees the whole history, not two separate enquiries.
• A confirmation for the buyer saying when to expect a reply, with the details of the unit they asked about.
• A report for management: how many enquiries came from each source and how quickly advisers respond.

If your enquiries still land in email inboxes and someone copies their status into a spreadsheet, this is a good moment to sort it out. We build development websites with forms that know which unit the buyer is looking at and let them choose a convenient time to talk, and internal systems where leads from forms go straight to the advisers. If you would like a second opinion on your current form, get in touch.