The Text-First Customer Is About to Move: What Home Services Need to Change

The home service company that figures out text-first customer communication in the next eighteen months will get a multi-year head start on every competitor still relying on phone calls and email. The window won’t stay open. A whole generation of customers is about to become the dominant home service buyer, and most of them hate phone calls and stopped checking email regularly years ago. That’s the wave Fabian Lobato, who runs concierge operations for Smart City across major U.S. metros, sees coming. He shared the prediction and a working approach on a recent episode of the Snoball Effect Podcast.

The Generation Shift, In One Number

Fabian’s evidence isn’t industry research. It’s the data from his own concierge team, which handles thousands of customer conversations per year across moving, utilities, internet, insurance, and other move-in services.

“Almost 90 percent of our conversation is over text,” he said.

Smart City’s customers skew toward apartment renters in major metros, which means they skew younger than the average homeowner. But the trend isn’t isolated to renters. The same shift is showing up in homeowner segments as the original first-time homebuyer cohort that grew up with smartphones ages into multi-property life. Their preferred channel hasn’t changed. Text is still the default.

The implication for home service sales: every quote that goes out via email or every follow-up that lives on the phone is operating with one hand tied behind the company’s back. The prospect saw the notification on their lock screen for a fraction of a second, decided they didn’t want to listen to a voicemail or read a long email, and forgot about the message inside an hour. The home service company logged the touch. The prospect never registered it.

What Tasteful Text Follow-Up Actually Looks Like

The objection most home service operators raise to text follow-up is that it feels intrusive. That objection is right for the wrong reason. Bad text follow-up is intrusive. Generic templates, daily “just checking in” pings, marketing-styled messages from a 1-800 number. Those texts deserve the resistance they get.

Tasteful text follow-up is different in three ways. The first is provenance. The text comes from a recognizable number tied to a real person at the company, not from a generic short code that screams marketing. The recipient knows who sent it.

The second is value per touch. Every text either advances the conversation, answers a question the prospect probably has, or provides something genuinely useful. The texts that get ignored are the ones that ask for something without giving. The texts that get read are the ones that provide a logistics detail, a useful tip, or a thoughtful question.

The third is opt-out architecture. The system has to recognize when the prospect has booked, when they’ve replied via a different channel, or when they’ve indicated they’re not the right fit, and stop the sequence the moment any of those signals fires. The texts that build trust are the ones that adapt to the conversation. The texts that destroy trust are the ones that keep coming after the conversation ended.

Fabian is actually building a tool to handle this exact pattern for the moving industry. The concept: a text-follow-up layer that sits on top of the mover’s existing CRM. When a quote goes out, the system fires a seven-text sequence designed to keep the prospect engaged with varied value. If the quote books, the sequence stops. If the prospect replies, the conversation hands off to a human in real time who picks up where the system left off. The premise is that text doesn’t replace phone or email. It becomes the default front door, and the other channels back it up.

What This Means for Home Service Companies in 2026

Three concrete moves for any home service company that wants to be ready when the wave fully lands.

The first is to assign a sender. Every text follow-up should appear to come from a specific person at the company, ideally the sales team member who handled the original quote. A prospect texting back “hey, I have a question” should land with that person directly, not in a shared inbox where the response gets delayed.

The second is to rebuild the standard follow-up cadence around text as the primary channel. The phone call still has a role for high-intent moments. The email still has a role for documentation. Neither should be the default first attempt anymore. The text goes first, the email backs it up, and the phone call is reserved for moments where the conversation actually needs a voice.

The third is to start tracking response rates by channel. Most home service companies don’t segment their follow-up analytics. They’ll see overall close rates without seeing that text follow-ups are converting at three times the rate of email or that voicemail open rates have collapsed since 2023. The companies that segment will see the asymmetry. The companies that don’t will keep optimizing the channels that are quietly dying.

The Takeaway

Pick one upcoming week and shift your default follow-up to text. Send the first touch by SMS within an hour of the quote. Use a recognizable number. Make every message useful. Watch the response rate against your current baseline. The companies that make this switch this year will look back from 2027 with a moat their competitors can’t cross. For the full conversation with Fabian, including the eight-touch follow-up reality and what a clean referral journey looks like from the partner side, check out the complete episode write-up.