Half Your Rightmove Leads Are Going Cold
You are paying for Rightmove. You are paying for featured listings. You are paying for premium placement. And then you let half the leads that come through sit in an inbox for hours before anyone reads them.
This is the uncomfortable truth about Rightmove lead management for most letting agents. The portal delivers the enquiries. The agency fails to convert them.
The Problem Is Not Lead Quality
Agents often blame Rightmove for "poor quality leads." In many cases, the quality is fine. The problem is timing.
A tenant browsing Rightmove at 9pm sends three enquiries to three different agencies. The agency that responds first gets the viewing. The agency that responds the next morning gets ignored.
Research consistently shows that responding to an online enquiry within 5 minutes makes you 21 times more likely to convert that lead compared to responding after 30 minutes. After an hour, the lead is effectively dead.
Where Most Agencies Lose Leads
- Evening and weekend enquiries - the majority of portal browsing happens outside office hours. If your team only processes leads 9-to-5, you are missing peak demand
- High-volume periods - during busy seasons, your negotiators are already stretched. New enquiries pile up while they are on the phone or at viewings
- Incomplete follow-up - the first response happens, but the follow-up does not. The applicant who said "I'll check my diary" never hears back
- Manual processing bottleneck - reading the email, checking the property, checking the diary, composing a response. Ten minutes per enquiry multiplied by 30+ enquiries a day
What Good Rightmove Lead Management Looks Like
Effective lead management from Rightmove (and Zoopla, and OnTheMarket) requires three things:
1. Instant Response
Every enquiry gets a meaningful response within minutes, regardless of time of day. Not an auto-acknowledgement, but a response that advances the conversation - proposing specific viewing times, answering the applicant's question, providing relevant property details.
2. Systematic Follow-Up
Every lead is tracked and followed up. No enquiry disappears into an inbox. Applicants who do not respond to the first message get a follow-up. Those who viewed but went quiet get chased. This happens automatically, not when someone remembers.
3. Speed to Viewing
The goal is to get from enquiry to confirmed viewing as fast as possible. Every hour of delay is an hour for the applicant to find another property or another agent. The best agencies go from enquiry to confirmed booking in under 60 seconds.
The AI Approach to Portal Leads
AI-powered systems can monitor your Rightmove, Zoopla, and OnTheMarket feeds 24/7. When an enquiry arrives, the AI reads it, understands the property and applicant context, checks your diary for availability, and responds with a personalised message and specific viewing slots.
This happens in seconds, not hours. At 10pm on a Sunday as efficiently as 10am on a Tuesday.
The result is that your agency is always the first to respond. Your diary fills up overnight. Your negotiators start the day with confirmed viewings rather than an inbox to wade through.
Measuring What Matters
If you want to improve your Rightmove lead conversion, start tracking these metrics:
- Average response time - from enquiry received to first meaningful response sent
- Enquiry-to-viewing rate - what percentage of enquiries convert to booked viewings
- Viewing-to-let rate - what percentage of viewings result in an application
- Time-to-let - days from property listing to tenancy agreement signed
Most agents do not track these numbers, which means they cannot improve them. Start measuring, and the path to improvement becomes obvious.
Learn how viewing automation eliminates the bottleneck, read about the real cost of slow response times, or see how Autoprop handles portal leads.