72.8% of lettings enquiries arrived outside standard branch hours — weekday evenings, Saturday afternoons and Sundays — in an analysis of 1,542 real portal, website and email enquiries received through Autoprop between 3 January and 20 July 2026. Nearly half (47.4%) arrived on weekday evenings and overnight, and Sunday — when most independent branches are closed — was the second-busiest day of the entire week.
These are real production numbers, not survey estimates: timestamps of enquiries received on behalf of the UK letting agencies Autoprop works with, anonymised and aggregated. No agency, applicant or property is identifiable. The dataset and definitions are described in the methodology at the end, and this page will be refreshed as the dataset grows.
The headline numbers
Of 1,542 enquiries analysed:
72.8% arrived outside branch hours (defined as Monday to Friday 9:00–17:30, Saturday 9:00–13:00, closed Sunday — a typical independent-agency pattern).
47.4% arrived on weekday evenings and overnight (17:30–9:00), including 34.7% between 5:30pm and midnight alone.
15.9% arrived on Sundays and 9.5% on Saturdays outside a 9am–1pm morning — times when most independent branches are closed entirely.
The single busiest hour of the week was 9pm–10pm, accounting for 9.4% of all enquiries — more than the 9am and 10am hours combined.
When applicants actually enquire: hour by hour
All times UK local (Europe/London). The pattern is consistent: volume builds through the day, dips in the late afternoon, then surges after 6pm once applicants are home.
| Hour | Enquiries | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Midnight–6am | 131 | 8.5% |
| 6am–9am | 125 | 8.1% |
| 9am–noon | 188 | 12.2% |
| Noon–3pm | 253 | 16.4% |
| 3pm–6pm | 192 | 12.5% |
| 6pm–9pm | 329 | 21.3% |
| 9pm–midnight | 324 | 21.0% |
More than four in ten enquiries (42.3%) arrive between 6pm and midnight. The quietest hour is 4am–5am; the lunchtime spike (1pm is the busiest daytime hour) and the 9pm peak bracket the working day on both sides.
Day of the week
| Day | Enquiries | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Monday | 214 | 13.9% |
| Tuesday | 225 | 14.6% |
| Wednesday | 293 | 19.0% |
| Thursday | 200 | 13.0% |
| Friday | 179 | 11.6% |
| Saturday | 186 | 12.1% |
| Sunday | 245 | 15.9% |
Sunday out-ranks every day except Wednesday — more lettings enquiries arrive on Sunday than on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday or Saturday, and every one of them lands while most branches are shut. Friday, when every branch is open all day, is the quietest day of the week.
Why this matters
An enquiry that arrives at 9pm on a Sunday and gets its first reply at 9:30am on Monday has waited more than twelve hours; a Saturday-evening enquiry can wait nearly forty. Applicants rarely wait: they enquire on several properties at once, and the first agency to respond substantively usually gets the viewing. On these numbers, an office-hours-only response process leaves roughly seven in ten enquiries sitting unanswered at the moment they arrive.
Methodology
Dataset: 1,542 lettings enquiries (portal, website and email) received through Autoprop's production systems on behalf of the UK letting agencies it works with, 3 January to 20 July 2026. Timestamps were converted to UK local time (Europe/London, BST-aware) before bucketing. Test, demo and internal traffic was excluded, and batch-imported records were screened for and none exceeded normal clustering. "Branch hours" are defined as Mon–Fri 9:00–17:30 and Saturday 9:00–13:00, closed Sunday; individual agencies vary, so treat the out-of-hours share as indicative rather than exact for any one agency. Percentages are rounded to one decimal place and may not sum to exactly 100. The aggregation queries are retained internally and re-run for each refresh of this page.
Related reading: out-of-hours enquiry handling: why 9-to-5 agents are losing lets, what is an AI letting agent?, and ten AI enquiry-handling tools compared.