BLOG: How many property enquiries REALLY arrive after hours?
Almost every after-hours percentage stat is a supplier quoting its own data, but Clevaa boss paints a more accurate picture using independent data.
Ask how many property enquiries arrive after hours and someone will hand you a percentage within seconds.
Trace it back to source and you land, every time, on a company that sells out-of-hours cover quoting its own data.
There is no clean, independent, nationwide figure for the share of enquiries arriving outside office hours, and anyone who offers you one is reading from a supplier’s marketing.
I should declare an interest here: I run a business in this space myself, and two of the companies named below compete with mine. So this piece stands on independent figures only – the vendor numbers, mine included, appear as exhibits, not evidence.
Put the circulating claims side by side and, for the same question, they run from 26% (Moneypenny, from its own switchboard) to 91% (Nested, from a commissioned yes-or-no survey), by way of 50% (Yomdel), 57% (ValPal), 62% (Greenhouse OS) and 65% (OneDome). [1]
Real measurements of the same thing converge. These scatter across 65 points because each rests on a different self-selected sample with a different viewpoint. The disagreement appears to be the giveaway – I don’t think any of them is really measuring the market.
Mangled numbers
The most quoted number is also the most mangled. Property industry supplier blogs confidently attribute “40% of enquiries arrive out of hours” to one big portal in 2024.
It is a misquote. The property portal’s actual 40% comes from a 2014 mystery shop, and it means nearly 40% of letting agents failed to respond to a viewing request within 24 hours. [2]
That is a measure of slow agents, taken during office hours. It says nothing about when enquiries arrive. Somewhere along a chain of LinkedIn posts, a real figure about response times was rewritten as a figure about evening enquiries, re-dated by a decade, and passed around as though the portal had blessed it. The invented version survives because it sells the product better.
So what can an agent actually stand on? Three independent numbers do most of the work.
Propertymark’s Housing Insight Report for September 2025 puts the average member branch at roughly 73 new prospective buyers and 111 new tenant registrations in the month, about 184 new applicants, six a day including weekends.[3]
The portal’s data found the nation’s busiest home-hunting to be 8.48pm on a Wednesday.”
The portal’s data found the nation’s busiest home-hunting to be 8.48pm on a Wednesday, with 8pm to 9pm the busiest hour of every day. [4]
That reading is from 2019, so treat it as direction rather than a live measurement, Lthough the logic has hardly aged. People look at property once work is done, the kettle is on and the children are in bed.
In a YouGov survey of 1,000 home-sellers commissioned by Zoopla in November 2025, 26% expected a reply within the hour and 67% within four. [5]
Put those together and the awkward part is not the volume, it is the clock.
Sellers expect an answer within the hour, yet in that same 2014 exercise only about one agent in ten replied by both phone and email inside an hour with the office open. [2]
Whatever that number looks like at 8.40pm, it is not better. The expectation does not pause overnight just because the phone line does. The impatient simply try the next agent on the list.
Nobody sensible is arguing that software should replace negotiators.
Nobody sensible is arguing that software should replace negotiators.
Movers consistently say they want to speak to a person. But “people prefer humans” is not a plan for 8.40pm on a Wednesday, when the choice on offer is not human versus machine but a helpful reply versus voicemail.
Let the technology catch the evening enquiry, qualify it and hold it until morning. Winning the instruction, in daylight, remains a job for people.
Author bio
James Mulholland (main picture) is the founder of Clevaa which builds AI receptionists for Britain’s service businesses. He recently wrote about lead response and the front-of-house work that quietly decides who wins the job on LinkedIn.
