Two kinds of question, and only one of them needs you.

The clerical half

Area, budget, timeline, how many bedrooms, whether they need to sell first, whether they are pre-approved. Facts a person can state about themselves, which Lewis asks for one at a time and records only when they actually say them.

Nothing here is inferred. No budget assumed from a postcode, no timeline read into “soon”, no area guessed from an area code. If a reply cannot be placed, the next message asks about it.

The half that needs a licence

• Any commitment. A date, a time, a dollar figure, a promise. Every one of those is held for your approval, because a commitment made under your licence is yours.
• Any fact about a property. Blocked outright. There is no MLS behind Lewis.
• Any advice. What a place is worth, whether to offer, what the market will do. Not attempted.
• Anything that would steer. Blocked on the output of every message, in any direction, however gently phrased.

What it does with the half a form cannot hold

“More modern.” “I don’t like the interior.” “Too dark.” Those are half of what somebody wants and no checkbox holds them.

Lewis treats them as evidence rather than a flag: they reorder what is already in range and they never filter, and they are never quoted back at somebody as if they were a fact about a home. That last part is a hard rule: it is what stops the product saying “this modern two-bed” about a home off an inference over marketing copy.

Absence is treated as unknown rather than negative, which matters more than it sounds: penalising listings with thin descriptions would quietly bury half the market.

When it hands over

Two replies and two of the three core facts, by default. Or immediately, if they ask to see a place: no threshold applies to that.

And a search can fail with results still in it. If everything in range is the thing they already rejected, the message says so with arithmetic in it: “13 of the places in your range are modern”, rather than quietly loosening a constraint they meant.