UK estate agency, updated July 2026
A quarter of UK sellers say 60 minutes is the longest they will wait for an agent to reply, and two-thirds expect an answer within four hours. That is Zoopla and YouGov, from November 2025, across 1,000 people who actually sold. An AI receptionist from DILR Voice answers every portal lead, valuation request and viewing call on the first ring at any hour, for $0.14 a minute, and hands the call to a negotiator the moment it needs one.
Estate agency is a speed business and the phone is still where it is won. Zoopla and YouGov found 63% of sellers still prefer to be contacted by phone. Callwell's analysis of around 500,000 portal leads found 47% of them were people trying to book a viewing. Those are calls with a right answer, which is exactly what an AI receptionist is good at.
Valuation requests are where the money leaks. When Rightmove tested more than 200 agents, roughly 70% failed to respond to a valuation request within 24 hours. That research is from 2014 and we will keep saying so, but if it is even directionally true today it is the most expensive unanswered phone call in the business.
What it will not do is win you the instruction. Negotiation, chain conversations, a seller who is upset: send those to a person. The agent's job is to make sure your negotiators only get the calls worth their time, and that nothing rings out at 8pm on a Sunday.
The research
These are two separate studies, eleven years apart, and we are showing them side by side rather than merging them into one number. Read the dates on each before you draw a conclusion.
Zoopla with YouGov, November 2025. 1,000 UK homeowners who sold in the previous five years. Percent of respondents.
Rightmove, 2014. More than 200 UK agents tested. Percent of agents. We have not found a comparable public audit since.
Sources: Zoopla and YouGov via The Negotiator, November 2025 and Rightmove via Property Industry Eye, June 2014. The caveat matters more than the charts. The expectation data is from 2025 and the measurement data is from 2014. They were not run together, they do not use the same panel, and the gap between them is not a controlled finding. We are showing you the best public data on each side of the question, dated, because most pages in this vertical quote the Rightmove numbers as though they were taken last week. Rightmove reported 18.8 million portal enquiries across the 12 months it studied.
The work
Callwell's analysis of around 500,000 inbound portal leads found Rightmove drives 60% of agency portal leads and Zoopla 32%, and that 55% of those leads are buyers. Here is what that looks like on the phone.
47% of portal leads, per Callwell's 2021 dataset
Identifies the property, answers questions from your own particulars through a RAG knowledge base, offers slots, books the viewing and captures the caller's details. No negotiator involved until there is something to negotiate.
This is the highest-volume, lowest-judgment call in the branch, and it is the one most likely to ring out during a viewing or after 6pm.
7% of portal leads, and the most expensive one to miss
Takes the request live, captures the address and the seller's situation, books the appraisal into the diary and triggers the follow-up, instead of leaving a voicemail that gets returned tomorrow.
Rightmove measured roughly 70% of agents failing to respond to a valuation request within 24 hours. A quarter of sellers now say 60 minutes is the maximum. Those two facts are 11 years apart, and both are worth reading twice.
The calls nobody is in the branch to take
Answers on the first ring at 9pm on a Sunday, at the same rate as it does on a Tuesday morning. No rota, no answering-service allowance to run down, no overage.
Buyers browse portals in the evening. If your out-of-hours plan is an email autoresponder, note that 63% of sellers told Zoopla and YouGov they prefer the phone.
The honest limit
Negotiation, chain conversations, an upset vendor, anything where a wrong answer costs you the instruction. DILR Voice does warm human transfer with context, so your negotiator is not asking the caller to start again.
Not AI instead of negotiators. AI answering everything on the first ring, and escalating the calls that deserve one of your people.
Lead composition from Callwell via The Negotiator, April 2021. That study covered around 500,000 inbound portal leads and excluded telephone leads from its dataset, so read it as the shape of your portal enquiries rather than of your phone line. Note also that the widely quoted "Callwell surveyed 10,000 agents and found under 25% email response" figure does not match this study, and we could not find a source for it, so it is not on this page.
Book 30 minutes and we will run a live inbound demo on your actual branch call flow, portal leads and all, then tell you honestly which of your calls should still go to a negotiator.
What people actually ask
We do not reproduce Reddit quotes, because we cannot link you to a thread we have verified. Read the live discussion and judge it yourself:
Go deeper
Book 30 minutes and we will run a live inbound demo against your real branch calls. Or start free with $10 of credits and no credit card, and hear it answer first.
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