How many estate agency enquiries really arrive after hours? An honest look at the data

Nobody has actually graded the after-hours percentages estate agents keep getting quoted. Every figure in circulation, 62%, 65%, 57%, 50%, is a number a chat or call vendor published about its own service, and not one of them is an independent benchmark. The honest answer is that there is no clean, neutral, nationwide statistic for the exact share of enquiries that arrive out of hours. What we do have is solid: an independent count of how many enquiries a branch handles each month, genuine first-party data on when people hunt for property, and a recent survey of how fast sellers expect a reply. Put those three together and the picture is hard to argue with. A meaningful slice of demand lands in the evening and at the weekend, when most branches are shut, and the agent who answers first tends to win the instruction.

This piece does the thing the genre has been avoiding. It separates the figures you can stand behind from the ones you cannot, names the source of every number, and grades the vendor claims openly rather than recycling them. If you have ever pasted "62% of enquiries arrive out of hours" into a board deck, this is the article to read first.

The question everyone quotes a number for

Ask how many property enquiries arrive after hours and you will be handed a percentage within seconds. The trouble is where the percentage comes from. Trace any of the popular ones back to source and you arrive, every time, at a company that sells out-of-hours cover and is quoting its own data.

That is not a conspiracy, it is just how the genre grew up. A chat provider looks at the enquiries that passed through its own widget, finds that a good share landed in the evening, and publishes the share as a headline. A missed-call service totals up the calls its own customers missed and extrapolates a national figure. The number then gets repeated in a trade article, picked up in a LinkedIn post, and within a year it reads like an established fact. It is not. It is a self-selected sample with a product attached.

The honest position, and the one this article takes, is that there is no clean independent statistic for the precise national share of estate agency enquiries that arrive outside office hours. Anyone who tells you otherwise is almost certainly quoting a supplier. What there is, and it is genuinely useful, is a set of independent and first-party figures that, assembled carefully, tell you most of what you need to know without anybody having to invent a percentage. So let us start with the figure that is not in dispute.

What the independent figures actually say

Here is the one number to anchor everything else to. According to the Propertymark Housing Insight Report for September 2025, the average member branch took around 73 new prospective buyers and 111 new prospective tenant registrations in that single month. Propertymark is the trade body, not a supplier, which is precisely why this figure carries weight that no vendor statistic can.

Read it carefully, because the qualifiers matter. That is per branch, per month, for September 2025. It is not annual, it is not national, and it is registrations rather than total enquiries. Combined, it works out at roughly 184 new registrations crossing the average branch in a month, a steady drumbeat of fresh demand: somewhere in the region of six new prospective buyers or tenants every single day, weekends and evenings included, because demand does not keep office hours even if the office does.

The same report sketches how much pressure sits behind those registrations. Propertymark recorded roughly eight tenants chasing every available rental property, and on the sales side, just 1% of properties sold above asking price while 93% sold below (September 2025). The lettings market in particular is a scramble. When eight households are competing for one flat, the one who reaches a human first, books the viewing first and gets their paperwork moving first has a material advantage. Every registration that lands at 9pm and waits until the next working day for a reply is a registration your competitor may already have answered.

When the enquiries land: the evening peak

Knowing the volume is half the story. The other half is timing, and here the most credible source is not a vendor at all, it is Rightmove's own first-party view of when people use the portal.

Rightmove found that the nation is busiest home-hunting at 8.48pm on a Wednesday, with the busiest hour of the day running 8 to 9pm, every day (Rightmove, 2019). The quietest point, for the curious, was around 4am on a Monday, which will surprise nobody. This is behaviour data drawn from how millions of people actually browse, not a claim about any product's performance, and that is exactly what makes it a credible spine for the timing question.

One caveat, stated plainly rather than buried: this is Rightmove data from 2019. It is several years old. Browsing habits move, and we would happily cite a fresher first-party reading if a comparable one existed. So treat the 8 to 9pm peak as a well-evidenced direction of travel rather than a live measurement of this evening. That said, the underlying logic has not aged at all. People look at property when they are off work, the kettle is on and the children are in bed, which lands you squarely in the evening. Nothing about the last few years suggests that has reversed.

Sit the timing beside the volume and the implication writes itself. If a branch is taking roughly 184 new registrations a month, and the heaviest browsing window each day falls well after most offices have locked up, then a real and recurring share of that demand is forming at precisely the hour there is nobody at the desk to answer it. You do not need a vendor's percentage to see the shape of the problem. The independent denominator and the first-party timing data give it to you between them.

What sellers expect when they do get in touch

There is a temptation to assume that a missed evening enquiry is fine because the person will simply ring back in the morning. The data on expectations says otherwise.

In a survey of 1,000 home-sellers conducted by YouGov and commissioned by Zoopla in November 2025, 26% said they expect a reply within an hour and 67% within four hours. On top of that, 63% said they would rather be contacted by phone than by email or in person. The disclosure matters here: Zoopla is a portal and an interested party, so this is sentiment from a commissioned survey, not neutral academic research. It is still a thousand real sellers telling you what they want.

Now close the loop. Sellers expect a reply within the hour, but how often do agents manage it, even with the lights on? A Rightmove mystery test of 213 letting agents put hard numbers on it. It is from 2014 and it measures response speed in office hours, not after-hours arrival, so read it as direction, not a live reading.

If only one agent in ten could clear that bar with the office open and staffed, the odds at 8.40pm with nobody at the desk speak for themselves. The expectation does not pause overnight just because your phone line does, so the impatient sellers, the 26% who wanted an answer within the hour, quietly try the next agent on the list.

Grading the figures agents keep getting quoted

This is the part the rest of the genre skips, so it is worth doing properly. Below are the after-hours figures you are most likely to have seen, each named at source and graded for what it is actually worth. None of them is presented here as a benchmark, because none of them is one. The grade in each case is not a comment on the company, it is a comment on whether a figure a supplier publishes about its own platform can stand in for an independent measurement. It cannot.

The grades above do the work, so we will not relitigate every row. Two are worth pausing on, because they show the spread is not random noise. Moneypenny's own 26% is the lowest figure in the set, less than half what the chat vendors quote, drawn from its own switchboard. Same question, same kind of self-selected source, less than half the answer. Both cannot be the market.

Nested's 91% is the highest, and the cleanest tell of all. It comes from a commissioned survey that asks whether agents ever receive any out-of-hours enquiries, a yes or no, not what share of volume arrives out of hours. Almost everyone says yes, so a near-universal figure is exactly what you would expect. It is a true answer to an easy question wearing the costume of a hard one, and quoting it as a volume share is a category error.

The number that gives the whole game away

Here is the single cleanest demonstration of everything above, and it is worth slowing down for. There is a figure doing the rounds on vendor blogs, including Cymphony, aibridgeclub and Nesti, that "40% of enquiries arrive out of hours", confidently attributed to Rightmove in 2024. It is a misquote, and not a small one.

Rightmove's real 40% is the 2014 figure from earlier in this article: that nearly 40% of letting agents failed to respond to a viewing request within 24 hours. That is a response-failure metric, measured during office hours. It says nothing whatsoever about when enquiries arrive. Somewhere along the chain of LinkedIn posts and supplier blogs, a statistic about agents being too slow to reply got quietly rewritten into a statistic about enquiries landing at night, re-dated from 2014 to 2024, and recycled as though Rightmove had blessed it. No Rightmove publication we can locate supports a "40% out of hours" arrival figure, and the only Rightmove 40% we can source is the 2014 response-failure one.

That is the entire thesis of this article in one example. A real, sourced, independent number, measuring one thing, gets laundered into an invented number measuring something else, simply because the invented version sells the product better. If the most-cited "Rightmove" after-hours stat in the market is not actually a Rightmove after-hours stat at all, you have your answer about how much faith to place in the rest of them.

The spread is the proof

A pattern runs through the whole set. Every figure points the same way, that a large share of demand arrives when the office is dark, which is probably true. But "probably true and pointing the right way" is not the same as "independently established", and the distinction is the whole point.

Look at what the suppliers actually claim, side by side. If any of these were a genuine measurement of the market, they would cluster. Real measurements of the same thing converge; marketing figures scatter, because each is shaped by a different self-selected sample and a different incentive. The disagreement is not a detail to reconcile. It is the proof that none of them is measuring the market in the first place.

The moment you present any of these as a neutral statistic, you have borrowed a supplier's marketing and put your own name to it. The independent figures in the sections above, Propertymark's volumes, Rightmove's timing, the YouGov expectations, let you make the same argument without that exposure. That is why they are the spine of this article and the vendor numbers are merely the footnotes.

One more independent leg is worth adding, with its caveats attached, because it corroborates the responsiveness picture without leaning on a single supplier. The Property Academy mystery shop across roughly 30,000 branches found 40% of email enquiries went unanswered and 12% of calls went unanswered (Best Estate Agent Guide, 2017). Read it as 2017 and as general responsiveness, not an after-hours figure: it measures whether agents reply at all, not when the enquiry arrived. Separately, Property Academy's Home Moving Trends Survey 2024, with over 12,000 responses, found the phone was the preferred channel at six of the seven stages of a move. That one sits alongside YouGov's 63%, as a second voice on channel preference, and nothing more. Neither tells you an out-of-hours share, and neither is offered as one. They simply make the responsiveness gap harder to wave away.

The sensible middle: text and voice on your own site

When the conversation turns to fixing the evening gap, it tends to lurch between two unappealing poles. At one end sit the human-only incumbents, whose pitch is essentially that people want to speak to a person and not to a machine. At the other sits the thing agents are quietly nervous about: an artificial voice cold-calling prospects, or barking at them the moment they land on a page. Both framings are a little overdrawn, and the sensible answer lives in the middle.

The human-only argument is half right. People do value speaking to a person, and nothing here suggests replacing your negotiators with software. But "people prefer humans" is not a plan for 8.40pm on a Wednesday, when there is no human at the desk and the choice is not human-versus-machine, it is helpful-reply-versus-voicemail. An assistant that greets the visitor, answers their actual question and books the viewing is not competing with your team. It is covering the hours your team is, quite reasonably, at home.

The fear at the other end is mostly a fear of bad implementations. Outbound robocalls and pop-ups that ambush a visitor deserve their poor reputation. The version worth having is the opposite of that: it lives on your own website, it waits to be spoken to, it operates with consent, and it works in whichever mode the visitor prefers, typing a question or, for the 63% who would rather talk, holding a short voice conversation. The trade-body line on this, that AI catches the enquiry and a human closes it, is about right. The machine's job is to make sure the 8.40pm enquiry is answered, qualified and captured. Your job, in daylight, is to win the instruction.

How an AI receptionist catches the evening enquiry your branch would miss

Here is where Clevaa fits, stated plainly. Clevaa is an AI receptionist for UK service businesses, a voice and text widget that sits on your own website and answers enquiries around the clock in your agency's own voice. It is built for exactly the moment this article has been circling: the registration that forms at the busiest hour of the day, long after the office has closed.

When someone lands on your site at 8.40pm with a question about a listing, Clevaa answers it, by voice or by text, whichever they prefer, and qualifies whether they are a buyer, a tenant or a vendor. It books the viewing or valuation straight into your calendar (Cal.com or Calendly) while the person is still keen, or passes a qualified enquiry to the team to action first thing. By the time the office reopens, the morning starts with bookings and qualified leads rather than a list of voicemails to chase, and the 26% who wanted a reply within the hour got one. Anything sensitive or complicated is handed to a person, because catching the enquiry is the point, not pretending to be the negotiator.

1. 01 8.40pm Enquiry lands on your site
2. 02 Clevaa answers and qualifies the buyer or tenant
3. 03 Viewing booked into your calendar
4. 04 Next morning Your team opens to a booked diary, not voicemails

None of this depends on accepting a single vendor percentage, including ours. The case is built on the independent numbers: a branch handling roughly 184 new registrations a month, a browsing peak that lands squarely in the evening, and sellers who expect a reply inside the hour while, on the best independent evidence, only one agent in ten clears that bar even in office hours. The gap is real and it is well-evidenced. Closing it is simply a matter of having something at the desk when nobody else is. If you are weighing an always-on assistant against a managed AI answering service or a traditional call-handling firm, make the comparison with these independent numbers in hand, not a borrowed headline.

If you want to see what that looks like on your own site, point Clevaa at your agency website and it trains itself from your existing pages in under a minute. There is a deeper look at the wider category in what is an AI receptionist?, the estate-agency specifics live on AI for estate and letting agents, and Clevaa vs Moneypenny lays out the difference against a managed call service.