This is the right distinction to land on. Time-based sequences run until they stop; status-based sequences run until a human says otherwise. Both can coexist in the same CRM, and knowing which one is doing the work at any given stage matters a lot.
The practical split most well-built real estate systems use goes something like this. Days one through seven are time-based because at that stage you do not yet have enough information to make a judgment call. The contact just came in, and the CRM fires automatically while the lead is fresh. After that first cluster of touches, the better systems require a disposition, which just means someone on your team marks the lead with a status: active, unresponsive, not a fit, long-term. That status is what triggers what happens next, not the calendar.
If nobody marks a disposition, a well-configured system should stop the sequence rather than keep firing into silence. That sounds counterintuitive, but sending day fourteen to a lead nobody has looked at since day one tends to hurt deliverability and can flag your domain as spam if you are doing email outreach at scale.
The long-term nurture bucket, sometimes called a drip, is a separate sequence with a much slower cadence, maybe once or twice a month, and it stays alive until the contact opts out or gets promoted back to active. The trigger for moving someone there should be a manual tag or status change by whoever worked the lead last, confirming there is still a reason to stay in but no immediate timeline.
One thing worth confirming with whatever platform you are using: some CRMs let you set an inactivity rule that auto-moves untagged contacts after a set number of days. That is a fallback, not a replacement for the human step.
Which CRM are you building in? The logic is the same across platforms, but how you actually set the trigger varies quite a bit.
