33 of 35 evening valuation requests got no reply from a person that night.
Research by Stitch AI with Institution Marketing · October 2026
Prefer to watch? Paul Gandar, founder of Stitch AI, walks through the findings in a 12-minute video on this page. Watch it on YouTube, or read the full transcript at the end.
Agencies spend a lot getting the phone to ring and the inbox to fill. We wanted to know what happens next. When an ordinary person asks for a valuation, or asks to view a house, how quickly does someone actually get back to them, and how?
So in October 2026 we tested it. Stitch AI and Institution Marketing sent 154 real enquiries to estate agency branches, posing as a member of the public, and logged every call, text and email that came back for up to a week. Here's what we found, and what we'd do about it.
No agency is named in this research. The aim is to show how the industry handles enquiries, not to single anyone out.
A "contact" meant a real person: a call (missed or voicemail, since our tracking number never picked up), a personal email or a text. Auto-replies, meaning templated messages or anything sent within about a minute, were tracked but didn't count. We watched for WhatsApp messages too. There were none.
| Seller valuation request | Buyer viewing request | |
|---|---|---|
| Enquiries sent | 90 | 64 |
| When sent | Evenings (8pm to 10pm) and early mornings (6am to 7:15am) | Office hours |
| Human contact, any channel | 59 (66%) | 48 (75%) |
| No human contact | 31 (34%) | 16 (25%) |
| Median time to first contact | 5h13m | 1h28m |
| Contacted within an hour | 2 of 90 | 16 of 55 timed |
| Phoned before emailing | 49 of 59 | 35 of 48 |
| Got a personal email | 41 (46%) | 35 (55%) |
| Got an auto-reply | 28 (31%) | 16 (25%) |
| Got a WhatsApp message | 0 | 0 |
Buyer timings use the 55 enquiries with reliable send times (see the caveats).
For sellers, Birmingham was the most responsive city (23 of 30, 77%), then Newcastle (19 of 30, 63%) and London (17 of 30, 57%). London's median wait was over 13 hours, because every London form went in after 8pm.
Response rate and median time to respond by city. Newcastle buyer data (4 enquiries) is too small to use. Source: Stitch AI estate agency mystery shop, Oct 2026
This was the finding that stood out most.
Of the 35 seller enquiries sent between 8pm and 10pm, two got a human reply that evening. Of the 55 sent between 6am and 7:15am, two were contacted before 9am.
Agents made 214 calls to our number over the week. Every one arrived between 8am and 7pm. The earliest was at 8:28am and the latest at 6:51pm. Not one agency rang before eight or after seven.
In the evening, a homeowner usually got an auto-reply. 13 of the 35 evening enquiries got one, normally within a minute. It's better than silence, but it doesn't book a valuation. Then the phones start: 22 seller first contacts landed between 9am and 10am on the Tuesday, as agencies worked through the night's enquiries.
What did the two same-evening replies look like?
Neither is complicated, and the first one did what an auto-reply couldn't: it started a conversation.
When agents got in touch, versus when enquiries went in. Every one of the 214 agent calls arrived between 08:28 and 18:51. Source: Stitch AI estate agency mystery shop, Oct 2026
Buyer enquiries got a first human contact more than three times faster than seller enquiries: a median of 1h28m against 5h13m. Buyers were also more likely to hear back, 75% against 66%.
Timing explains a lot of that. Buyer requests went in during the working day, when branches were open, and seller requests went in at night or before 7:15am. In Birmingham the buyer median was 44 minutes and the seller median was 4 hours 45 minutes, but even there the seller forms arrived before any office had opened. So this test can't tell you whether agents put buyers first. It does show what a homeowner who fills in a form after work, or before it, can expect.
Some buyer responses were very quick. A London independent replied in 2 minutes, and six Birmingham agencies made contact within 15 minutes. But fast was rare overall. Only 2 of 90 seller enquiries got a human contact within an hour. On the buyer side, 16 of the 55 enquiries we could time reliably got one.
A valuation request is a potential instruction, often the most valuable lead an agency gets, and the homeowner may well have asked two or three other agents at the same time. In this test, it waited longest.
How quickly enquiries got a first human contact. Buyers pull ahead in the first hours; sellers catch up only after the overnight gap. Source: Stitch AI estate agency mystery shop, Oct 2026
About four responders in five rang before they emailed: 49 of 59 on the seller side and 35 of 48 on the buyer side. Only 46% of sellers and 55% of buyers ever got a personal email. Texts were rare: six agencies sent a personal text across both rounds. Not one of the 154 enquiries got a WhatsApp message.
That pattern says as much as the speed figures. Almost every follow-up in this test relied on the enquirer picking up a call from an unknown number or opening an email at the right moment. Plenty of people fill in a form at 9pm precisely because they can't take calls at work. If a ringing phone and a voicemail are the only follow-up, some of those leads will go cold.
We didn't test WhatsApp, so this research can't tell you whether it would have produced more conversations. What it does show is a channel that not one agency in the sample tried.
You could argue an auto-reply is a response. So we went back and read all 44 of them. Did any of them let the enquirer do something?
For sellers, no. None of the 28 automated replies to a valuation request offered a slot, and 27 just said thanks, we'll be in touch. Buyer auto-replies were better: 4 of 16 let the buyer book or register for a viewing, and 8 asked sensible questions about finances and timing. Not one told the enquirer when someone would call. (We didn't click the links or answer the questions, so we can't say how far those journeys go.)
Then there's the phone. Our test number never answered, so every agent call was missed. What matters is what happens next. Agencies that tried again usually did so hours later or the next day: the median gap between first and second call was 5 hours 55 minutes for sellers and 18 hours 24 minutes for buyers. Only 9 rang back within the hour. Many sent an email minutes after the missed call asking for a call back, and 23 agencies made one call and gave up.
The obvious fixes are to work later, ring earlier and send more follow-up emails. They help, and they're in our recommendations below. They also all depend on the same thing: the enquirer being free to answer the phone, or check their inbox, at the moment the agent gets round to them.
The bigger gap in this data sits between acknowledging an enquiry and starting a conversation. 44 enquiries got an automated reply, almost all within a minute, and every one was a one-way message. The enquirer was told their message had arrived, and then waited.
An interactive first reply works differently. It can answer the question that was asked, ask a few of its own (which property, when are you thinking of moving, when is a good time to talk) and let the person reply when it suits them, at 9pm or 7am. By the time a negotiator picks it up, the basic qualifying is done and a call time may already be agreed.
Speed to first response matters. Speed to a meaningful conversation is worth more.
1. Treat the evening as part of the working day. In this test nobody phoned after 7pm. A same-evening reply from a real person, or a conversation that starts automatically, would set an agency apart from almost everyone else here.
2. Make the first reply start a conversation. If you can't staff the evening, let people book a valuation slot or a call time from the first message, ask a couple of useful questions, and say when someone will be in touch. "We've received your enquiry" leaves them where they started.
3. Be first in the morning. Clear overnight leads before 9am. The agency that calls at 8:30 is first in the queue.
4. Follow a missed call with a written message. Many prospects won't answer an unknown number. A short personal message after a missed call, on a channel people read, such as text or WhatsApp, costs nothing and can agree a time to talk.
5. Treat a valuation request as the priority lead it is. If your process gets back to a buyer in an hour, the homeowner who might list with you shouldn't wait five.
6. Measure it. Mystery-shop your own branches. It takes an evening.
Most agencies in this test did get back to people eventually. But the evening, the early morning and the first hour were left to an auto-reply, and a lot of follow-up was a missed call and a voicemail. We think the answer is an immediate, two-way conversation that a negotiator can then step into.
That's what we build. Here's how it maps to what we found:
None of this replaces the negotiator. It gets the conversation going while they're out on a valuation or off for the evening, and takes care of the admin before they pick it up. This research didn't test WhatsApp, and we're not claiming it would have converted more of these enquiries. It's an approach worth testing against what agencies do now.
See how agents reply on WhatsApp in seconds, or read more about Agent Assist.
Other recent studies have looked at parts of this picture:
We haven't found another published test that compares seller valuation requests with buyer viewing requests, separates human contact from auto-replies, and tracks WhatsApp as a channel.
Download the full report (PDF, 22 pages). It's free, and you don't need to give an email address.
It includes the full method, results by city, chain and independent, out-of-hours timings, the auto-reply and missed-call analysis, the caveats and anonymised data tables.
You're welcome to use any chart or figure from this research. Please credit Source: Stitch AI estate agency mystery shop, Oct 2026 with a link to this page. The embed code for each chart is below.
<figure>
<a href="https://www.stitch-ai.com/blog/estate-agent-response-times-2026">
<img src="https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6756f220d41062cfb024bbfe/6adb5f17f88acfe54de5050a_6adb5bc008f308e9228e98c4_estate-agent-calls-by-hour-of-day-2026.png" width="1200" height="630" loading="lazy"
alt="Bar chart of when estate agents contacted our 154 enquiries by hour of day. All 214 agent calls came between 8am and 7pm, while 35 enquiries were sent between 8pm and 10pm and 55 between 6am and 7am.">
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<figcaption>Source: <a href="https://www.stitch-ai.com/blog/estate-agent-response-times-2026">Stitch AI estate agency mystery shop, Oct 2026</a></figcaption>
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<a href="https://www.stitch-ai.com/blog/estate-agent-response-times-2026">
<img src="https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6756f220d41062cfb024bbfe/6adb5f18f88acfe54de50513_6adb5bc0945194954d0f4044_estate-agent-time-to-first-contact-2026.png" width="1200" height="630" loading="lazy"
alt="Line chart of how quickly enquiries got a first human contact. About 30% of buyer viewing requests were contacted within an hour, while seller valuation requests stayed near 2% until two hours and reached about 65% by 48 hours.">
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<figcaption>Source: <a href="https://www.stitch-ai.com/blog/estate-agent-response-times-2026">Stitch AI estate agency mystery shop, Oct 2026</a></figcaption>
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<a href="https://www.stitch-ai.com/blog/estate-agent-response-times-2026">
<img src="https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6756f220d41062cfb024bbfe/6adb5f18f88acfe54de50510_6adb5bc08465b5fce1cb8421_estate-agent-response-rate-by-city-2026.png" width="1600" height="655" loading="lazy"
alt="Two bar charts comparing seller and buyer response rates and median response times in London, Birmingham and Newcastle. London sellers waited a median of 13 hours, against about 2.5 hours for London buyers.">
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<figcaption>Source: <a href="https://www.stitch-ai.com/blog/estate-agent-response-times-2026">Stitch AI estate agency mystery shop, Oct 2026</a></figcaption>
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We sent 154 enquiries: 90 website valuation requests to branches in London, Birmingham and Newcastle (30 per city), and 64 Rightmove viewing requests (30 in London, 30 in Birmingham and 4 in Newcastle).
In our test the median time to first human contact was 5 hours 13 minutes. Only 2 of 90 would-be sellers heard from a person within an hour, and 31 of 90 heard nothing at all.
75% of our 64 daytime viewing requests got a human contact. The median time to first contact was 1 hour 28 minutes, and 9 of the 55 enquiries we could time reliably got a response within 15 minutes.
In our test, buyers heard back sooner: a median of 1 hour 28 minutes for a viewing request against 5 hours 13 minutes for a valuation request. The seller requests were sent out of hours and the buyer requests during the working day, so this doesn't show that agents put buyers first.
Rarely. Of 35 valuation requests sent through agency websites between 8pm and 10pm, 2 got a human reply that evening. All 214 calls agents made to us came between 8:28am and 6:51pm.
Not in our test. None of the 154 enquiries got a WhatsApp message. Agents phoned, emailed and occasionally texted: six agencies sent a personal text across both rounds.
Not in this study. 44 enquiries got an automated reply, almost all within a minute, but none of the 28 seller auto-replies offered a valuation appointment and none in either round said when someone would call.
Mostly they call. About four in five agencies that responded phoned before emailing (84 of 107). Texts were rare and no agency used WhatsApp.
It's the time between someone enquiring and a real person getting back to them. In this study, the agencies that stood out simply replied within minutes, or the same evening.
We don't name them. Results are reported by city and by chain or independent only.
Yes. Please credit "Source: Stitch AI estate agency mystery shop, Oct 2026" and link to this page. The full PDF is free to download above.
This is the full transcript of the video We mystery-shopped 154 estate agency enquiries, narrated with a voice clone of Paul Gandar, founder of Stitch AI.
Hello, I'm Paul Gandar, founder of Stitch AI. In October we ran a simple test. We sent one hundred and fifty-four enquiries to estate agency branches in London, Birmingham and Newcastle, posing as an ordinary member of the public, and we logged every call, text and email that came back for up to a week. Some of those were homeowners asking for a valuation. Some were buyers asking to view a house on Rightmove. What we wanted to know was simple. Agencies spend a lot of money getting the phone to ring and the inbox to fill. So what happens next? How quickly does a real person get back to you, and how do they do it? Over the next few minutes I'll take you through what we found, what we think it means, and what I'd do about it if I ran an agency. Before we start, one thing to be clear on. We don't name any agency in this research. The point is to show how the industry handles enquiries, not to single anyone out.
Here's how it worked. The research was run for us by Institution Marketing. In round one, we sent ninety valuation requests through agency websites, thirty in each city, for a three-bedroom house. Every one of them went in outside office hours. Thirty-five were sent between eight and ten on a Monday evening, and fifty-five between six and quarter past seven the next morning. In round two, we sent sixty-four viewing requests through Rightmove, during normal office hours. Thirty in London, thirty in Birmingham, and just four in Newcastle, because Rightmove's limits stopped us there. We were strict about what counted. A contact meant a real person: a phone call, a personal email, or a text. Our tracking number never picked up, so every call was a missed call or a voicemail. Auto-replies, meaning templated messages or anything that arrived within about a minute, were tracked separately and didn't count. We also watched for WhatsApp messages. I'll come back to that, because there weren't any.
Let's start with the headline. Forty-seven of the one hundred and fifty-four enquiries, that's thirty-one per cent, got no human contact at all. No call, no text, no personal email, in a whole week. On the seller side it was thirty-one out of ninety, about a third. On the buyer side it was sixteen out of sixty-four, a quarter. Think about what that means for an agency. Someone has gone to your website, found the valuation form, typed in their details and pressed send. That's a homeowner putting their hand up and saying, I might want to sell. And a third of them, in our test, never heard from a person.
The finding that stood out most was what happens in the evening. Of the thirty-five valuation requests we sent between eight and ten at night, two got a reply from a person that same evening. Two out of thirty-five. Over the week, agents made two hundred and fourteen calls to our number. Every single one of them arrived between eight in the morning and seven at night. The earliest was at twenty-eight minutes past eight, and the latest was at nine minutes to seven. Not one agency rang before eight or after seven. In the evening, what a homeowner usually got was an auto-reply. Thirteen of the thirty-five evening enquiries got one, normally within a minute. It's better than silence, but it doesn't book a valuation. So what did the two same-evening replies look like? One was a Birmingham independent that replied three minutes after the form went in, with a proper message asking when would suit for a visit and about the planned move. The other was a London independent that replied fifty-two minutes later to say it would call the next day. Neither of those is complicated, and the first one did something an auto-reply couldn't. It started a conversation.
The early morning wasn't much different. We sent fifty-five valuation requests between six and quarter past seven. Two of those were contacted before nine o'clock. Then the phones started. Twenty-two agencies made their first contact between nine and ten that morning, as branches worked through the overnight enquiries. So if you're the homeowner, you filled in a form before work, and the calls arrive at nine, when you're probably sat at your desk or in a meeting. And if you're the agency, you're in a queue with everyone else who got the same enquiry overnight. The one that calls at half past eight is first in that queue.
Now to the comparison in our title. The median time to first human contact was five hours thirteen minutes for a seller's valuation request, and one hour twenty-eight minutes for a buyer's viewing request. Only two of the ninety sellers heard from a person within an hour. On the buyer side, sixteen of the fifty-five enquiries we could time reliably got a contact within an hour, and some were very quick. One London independent replied in two minutes, and six Birmingham agencies made contact within fifteen. I want to be careful here, because timing explains a lot of that gap. The buyer requests went in during the working day, when branches were open. The seller requests went in at night or before seven fifteen in the morning. Even in Birmingham, where the seller median was four hours forty-five against forty-four minutes for buyers, the seller forms still arrived before any office had opened. So this test can't tell you whether agents put buyers first. What it does show is what a homeowner who fills in a form after work, or before it, can expect. And a valuation request is a potential instruction, often the most valuable lead an agency gets. That homeowner may well have asked two or three other agents at the same time. In our test, that lead waited longest.
This next finding is, for me, the most important one, and it's about how agents got in touch rather than how fast. About four in five of the agencies that responded rang before they emailed. That's eighty-four out of a hundred and seven. Fewer than half of the sellers, forty-one out of ninety, ever got a personal email. Six agencies sent a personal text. And not one of the one hundred and fifty-four enquiries got a WhatsApp message. Not one. So almost every follow-up in this test relied on the enquirer picking up a call from an unknown number, or opening an email at the right moment. Plenty of people fill in a form at nine at night precisely because they can't take calls at work. If a ringing phone and a voicemail are the only follow-up, some of those leads will go cold. I should be clear about what we didn't test. We didn't try WhatsApp as an alternative, so this research can't tell you whether it would have produced more conversations. What it does show is a channel that not one agency in the sample tried.
You could argue that an auto-reply is a response. So we went back and read all forty-four of them, to see whether any of them let the enquirer actually do something. For sellers, the answer was no. None of the twenty-eight automated replies to a valuation request offered a slot, and twenty-seven of them just said thanks, we'll be in touch. Buyer auto-replies were better. Four of sixteen let the buyer book or register for a viewing, and eight asked sensible questions about finances and timing. But not one auto-reply, in either round, told the enquirer when someone would call. Then there's the phone. Because our number never answered, every agent call was a missed call, and what matters is what happens next. Eighty-seven agencies phoned, and sixty-four of them followed up. But where they rang again, the median gap between the first and second call was five hours fifty-five minutes for sellers, and over eighteen hours for buyers. Only nine rang back within the hour. Many sent an email minutes after the missed call asking us to call back. And twenty-three agencies made one call and gave up.
So what should agencies take from all this? The obvious fixes are to work later, ring earlier, and send more follow-up emails. They help, and they're in our recommendations. But they all depend on the same thing: the enquirer being free to answer the phone, or check their inbox, at the moment the agent gets round to them. The bigger gap in this data sits between acknowledging an enquiry and starting a conversation. Forty-four enquiries got an automated reply, almost all within a minute, and every one was a one-way message. The enquirer was told their message had arrived, and then they waited. An interactive first reply works differently. It can answer the question that was asked. It can ask a few questions of its own, like which property, when are you thinking of moving, and when is a good time to talk. And it lets the person reply when it suits them, at nine at night or seven in the morning. By the time a negotiator picks it up, the basic qualifying is done, and a call time may already be agreed. Speed to first response matters. Speed to a meaningful conversation is worth more.
Here are the six things I'd do. First, treat the evening as part of the working day. In our test nobody phoned after seven, so a same-evening reply from a real person, or a conversation that starts automatically, would set an agency apart from almost everyone else. Second, make the first reply start a conversation. If you can't staff the evening, let people book a valuation slot or a call time from that first message, ask a couple of useful questions, and tell them when someone will be in touch. We've received your enquiry leaves them exactly where they started. Third, be first in the morning. Clear the overnight leads before nine. Fourth, follow a missed call with a written message. Many people won't answer an unknown number, and a short personal message, on a channel they actually read, like a text or WhatsApp, costs nothing and can agree a time to talk. Fifth, treat a valuation request as the priority lead it is. If your process gets back to a buyer in an hour, the homeowner who might list with you shouldn't wait five. And sixth, measure it. Mystery-shop your own branches. It takes an evening.
I'll be open about Stitch's interest here. We build WhatsApp messaging software for estate agents, and this is the problem we work on. Here's how it maps to what we found. Website forms, valuation requests and portal leads from Rightmove, Zoopla and OnTheMarket can trigger a WhatsApp message to the enquirer straight away, at any hour. Once the person replies, an AI assistant can ask the questions a negotiator would: viewing preferences, buying position, the property to be valued, and when suits. The AI then summarises the conversation and passes it to the right negotiator or branch, so whoever picks it up already knows what the enquirer wants. When a call to the branch can't be picked up, Voice2WhatsApp gives the caller a WhatsApp route to carry on the conversation. And msgboxx, the WhatsApp team inbox we built, gives authorised colleagues one shared, verified number, full conversation history and CRM integration, rather than messages scattered across personal phones. None of this replaces the negotiator. It gets the conversation going while they're out on a valuation or off for the evening, and takes care of the admin before they pick it up. To be clear, this research didn't test WhatsApp, and I'm not claiming it would have converted more of these enquiries. It's an approach worth testing against what agencies do now.
A few honest caveats before I finish. The samples are small: thirty branches per city per round, and only four buyer enquiries in Newcastle, which is too few to judge. Seller and buyer requests went in at different times of day, so the speed gap is partly timing. Some calls came from numbers we couldn't match to an agency, so the call figures are minimums. We never answered a call, so we can't say what a live conversation would have achieved, and we didn't measure how many of these enquiries would have become instructions. And this was one week in October twenty twenty-six, so it describes these branches in that week, not every agency in the country. The full report is free to download from the Stitch AI blog, with no email address needed. It has the method, results by city, chain and independent, and anonymised data tables. You're welcome to use any of our charts, as long as you credit the Stitch AI estate agency mystery shop and link back to the page. If you'd like to see how agents can reply on WhatsApp in seconds, you can book a demo on our website. Thanks for watching.
Research by Stitch AI with Institution Marketing. © 2026 Stitch AI Ltd.
