Rightmove Sends the Enquiry. The Branch That Rings First Books the Viewing
Every branch pays the portal invoice. Rightmove and Zoopla deliver the enquiries, often within seconds of the applicant pressing the button. What happens in the next half hour decides whether that invoice turned into a viewing or into a line in someone else’s diary.
The uncomfortable truth, which Rightmove’s own research has pointed to for years, is that most branches are slow. Not because negotiators are lazy, but because the enquiry arrives when the branch is busy, or shut, and the applicant has usually sent the same enquiry to two other agents.
What the recent research says
Rightmove’s Handling Enquiries guide, produced with Property Academy from mystery-shopping exercises, set out what “exceptional” looks like: answer every call, respond to email enquiries personally within a working hour, and never send a generic dump of similar properties.
A Homeflow mystery shop published in September 2023 sent sales and lettings enquiries to agents and timed the replies. On the sales side, 39 percent of agents did not respond at all. Among those that did, the average was 229 business minutes, almost four working hours, and only half replied within an hour. Lettings enquiries did better: 70 percent received a reply and 40 percent of responses came within the hour.
Sellers’ patience is shorter than that. A Street Group survey of 1,830 current and recent home sellers, reported by Estate Agent Today in July 2026, found 85 percent expect a reply to their first enquiry within 24 hours and one in five consider anything over four hours too slow. When a buyer shows interest, 30 percent want to hear within the hour. When an offer lands, 63 percent expect to be told immediately or within the hour. Four working hours is already outside what a fifth of vendors will accept.
Same clock as everywhere else
The research on response time is American in origin but the mechanism does not change at the border. A 2007 study led by James Oldroyd at MIT Sloan, covering more than 15,000 web enquiries, found that calling within five minutes rather than thirty was associated with roughly 100 times higher odds of reaching the person and 21 times higher odds of qualifying them. A 2011 Harvard Business Review audit of 2,241 companies found 23 percent never replied to a web enquiry at all, and the average among those that did was 42 hours.
A branch that emails the applicant at 11 the next morning is that 42-hour average with a Rightmove logo on it. The applicant has already been offered a viewing by the agent who rang at 8:50 the night before.
When enquiries actually arrive
Rightmove’s Little Blue Book, back in 2018, told agents that the busiest hour for enquiries was around 8 to 9pm. That is an older publication, but the behaviour behind it has only strengthened. Applicants browse on the sofa after dinner, on the train in the morning and on Sunday afternoons. Almost none of that is inside branch hours.
Zoopla’s Leads Push Service will deliver an applicant or appraisal lead into the branch CRM in seconds. Rightmove’s integrations do the same. The plumbing is fast. The branch still has to speak to the person, and at 8:45pm nobody is on the phones.
What a branch can do about it
There are three honest approaches, and most well-run branches use some combination.
A duty negotiator on the phones. One person owns new enquiries for the day: ring within minutes, qualify, book the viewing or valuation, then hand to the listing negotiator. It works during branch hours and falls apart at 6pm.
WhatsApp after the ring, not instead of it. Many applicants will happily confirm a viewing time on WhatsApp. But opening on WhatsApp with no call is a faster version of the generic email. Ring first, confirm in writing second. And speak to counsel about GDPR and PECR before writing any outbound messaging policy.
Voice on the CRM create. The newest option is voice AI that rings the applicant the moment the enquiry hits the CRM, whatever the hour, in English or the applicant’s own language. mergro is built for exactly this: it rings the enquiry within seconds, asks the branch’s own qualifying questions, offers two viewing or valuation slots, and writes the notes back to the CRM the branch already runs. The negotiator walks in the next morning to a booked viewing rather than an unread enquiry.
It is not a US call centre script. The vocabulary, the hours and the compliance context are British, and the negotiator remains the person who conducts the viewing and wins the instruction. A fuller breakdown of how a branch covers enquiries without copying a US model is in this guide to UK estate-agent enquiries.
Three numbers to pull this week
Export last month’s Rightmove and Zoopla enquiries from the CRM and work out:
- Median minutes from enquiry to first live call or pickup. Use the median. One enquiry rung a week late will hide the real pattern in a mean.
- Share answered by email inside a working hour with no call. That is the Handling Enquiries trophy, and it is also a viewing the branch down the road may have booked.
- Viewings held versus viewings booked. Attendance tells you whether the first conversation qualified the applicant or just filled the diary.
Split sales from lettings from valuations. A combined figure will mislead the partners.
The branch that rings
Rightmove and Zoopla have done their part. The enquiry arrives in seconds. Whether it becomes a viewing depends on the branch picking up the phone before the applicant has put theirs down. In 2026 that no longer requires a negotiator on the phones until 10pm. It requires deciding that the enquiry gets rung, every time, and putting something in place that does it.
Prakhar Gupta is the founder of mergro, a voice AI for estate and letting agents that rings every enquiry in seconds and books the viewing.
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