66% of estate agency enquiries arrive outside office hours

TL;DR

In our first pilot, 66% of enquiries arrived outside 9am–5pm, Monday to Friday.
11pm was the busiest single hour of the day.
Measured across roughly 100 portal and website enquiries at one agency over three months.
Small sample, one agency — we’ll update this as more agencies come on. But the shape of it surprised us, and it changes what “responding quickly” actually means.

The number

Two thirds of the enquiries an estate agency receives land when nobody is at a desk.

That’s not a claim about the industry. It’s what we measured at the first agency to run Signal on its live enquiries: 66%, exactly, of portal and website enquiries arrived outside office hours. Not 66% of enquiries were answered late — 66% arrived at a time when there was no one to answer them.

How we measured it

We’re publishing the method alongside the number so it can be judged properly.

Definition of office hours: 9:00–17:00, Monday to Friday. Anything else — evenings, nights, weekends — counts as outside.
Population: roughly 100 enquiries from one estate agency, across sales and lettings, over three months.
Channels counted: portal email enquiries (PropertyPal and Rightmove) and website enquiry forms. Phone calls and walk-ins are not included — by definition they only happen when someone is there to take them.
What was measured: the timestamp the enquiry was created, not when it was first read or answered.
Result: 66% outside office hours. The busiest single hour of the day was 11pm.

The data is aggregated and anonymised, and is published with the agency’s agreement.

What the pattern looked like

The 11pm peak is the detail that stuck with us. It isn’t a lunchtime spike or a Saturday-morning rush — it’s people on the sofa, after the kids are down, scrolling the portals and firing off enquiries about the houses they’ve been thinking about all day.

From the agency’s side, an enquiry sent at 11pm on a Tuesday gets its first human response at 9am on Wednesday at the earliest — a ten-hour gap on a good day. One sent at 11pm on a Friday waits until Monday. By then the buyer or tenant has often already spoken to someone else, or simply moved on.

Why it matters

Most agencies measure responsiveness by how quickly the team replies during the day. That’s the wrong lens if two thirds of the demand shows up when the team isn’t there. The response-time problem isn’t a speed problem — it’s a coverage problem.

It also means a “fast” agency and a “slow” agency look identical to the majority of enquirers. Whether your negotiators reply in five minutes or fifty makes no difference to the person who enquired at 11pm; both replies arrive the next morning.

The caveats

This is one agency, around 100 enquiries, over one three-month window, in one market (Northern Ireland). It’s a real measurement, not a survey estimate, but it is a small sample and it may not generalise. Lettings and sales may differ; a city-centre branch may differ from a rural one; the 11pm peak may be a local habit.

We’ll update this post as more agencies run Signal and the sample grows. If the number moves, we’ll say so here.

What to do about it

You don’t need Signal to act on this. At minimum, every portal and website enquiry should get an immediate, honest acknowledgement outside office hours — something better than silence until 9am. Most CRMs and portal integrations can do that.

What Signal does is the next step: it answers the enquiry properly at 11pm — asks the qualifying questions, captures the buyer’s or tenant’s position, books the viewing — so the team walks in on Wednesday morning to a qualified, booked prospect rather than an unread email. That’s the whole reason we built it.

Cite as: Signal PropTech, “66% of estate agency enquiries arrive outside office hours”, September 2026. Data: ~100 portal and website enquiries, one agency, three months; office hours defined as 9:00–17:00 Mon–Fri.