The 21% Still Saying ‘We’ll Get Back to You on Monday’

Sunday, 6.47pm. A buyer sends an enquiry through the branch website about a three-bedroom semi in the area. They want to know if Saturday viewings are available and whether the vendor would consider a chain-free offer.

Nobody replies.

The message sits there until Monday morning. By 9.12am, when the negotiator finally rings back, the buyer has already booked a viewing with another agent.

I know this pattern because I spent ten years on the agency floor living it. Most of the time it was not because someone could not be bothered. The negotiator was out on viewings, the branch phone had rolled to voicemail, or the enquiry landed at the wrong moment and got buried in the Monday morning catch-up.

The 79% benchmark is useful , but it is not the whole story

When people say “79% have moved, 21% still say Monday”, I think it is a handy way of describing the difference between agencies that deal with out-of-hours enquiries properly and those that still leave them sitting there. But I would not present it as a verified national statistic.

The evidence is messier than that. Research and supplier data suggest that somewhere between roughly 40% and 60% of property enquiries come in outside normal office hours, depending on the source and what counts as “out of hours”. Clevaa has pointed out how much those numbers vary, while the Instep UK Property Responsiveness Report found that 93.8% of calls to UK property businesses between 6pm and 9pm went unanswered.

So your agency’s number may not be 79%. It might be 40%, 55% or more.

But the real issue is exactly the same: what happens when an enquiry comes in and there is nobody there to deal with it?

A lot of the agencies getting this wrong are not backward businesses. They may have a strong website, a tidy Reapit or Alto setup, and hardworking negotiators. The problem is simpler than that. The business is still set up on the assumption that the customer will wait until Monday.

Most won’t.

The real problem is bigger than a missed call

An out-of-hours enquiry is not just a missed ring on the phone.

It is usually a series of little breakdowns that add up:

• The lead comes in from Rightmove, Zoopla, OnTheMarket, your website or a social advert.
• The alert lands in a shared inbox or one negotiator’s email.
• Nobody finds out whether the person is a buyer, vendor, landlord or tenant.
• Nobody asks about timescale, chain position or area.
• The CRM record gets added later, sometimes half-complete.
• The first proper reply comes after the prospect has already spoken to another agent.

So by Monday morning, you are not just behind. You are working from worse information.

The negotiator might have a name, a mobile number and a property reference, but not know whether the buyer is chain-free, whether they need to sell first, or whether they have already lined up two other viewings. A valuer might ring a would-be vendor without realising they have spent the weekend speaking to three competing agents.

That is where your reputation takes a knock as well.

If a buyer gets a sensible reply on Sunday, they remember your branch as switched on and available. If a vendor asks for a valuation and gets a proper acknowledgement straight away, they feel like their instruction matters. If your reply on Monday is “sorry, we were closed”, that may be perfectly reasonable from your side : but from the customer’s side, you made them wait.

In my experience, “we’ll get back to you on Monday” usually sounded fair inside the branch. To the customer, it often sounded more like: “you can wait.”

What the cost of waiting looks like

Take an agency getting 50 enquiries a week. If about half come in outside normal hours, that is roughly 25 opportunities arriving while the team is unavailable.

Of course, not all 25 are worth chasing. Some will be time-wasters, duplicates, portal noise or people outside your patch. But if only a small number of them are genuine valuation leads, solid viewing enquiries or decent landlord instructions, the cost adds up quickly.

For the sort of agency I’ve worked in, where one completed instruction can be worth several thousand pounds in commission, losing even one instruction a week soon turns into a five-figure hit over a month. Then add the staff time spent digging through inboxes, ringing back cold leads and trying to piece together conversations after the moment has passed.

There is a staffing cost too. If your negotiator walks in on Monday to 15 unqualified enquiries, the first chunk of the day disappears into sorting, reading and prioritising instead of speaking to the warmest people first. From a branch manager’s point of view, it also becomes hard to tell whether the real problem is portal quality, weak follow-up or simply nobody covering the period between 5pm and 9am.

So this is not just about lost commission. It is about slower replies, poorer notes, extra admin and a customer experience that feels patchy at exactly the moment another agency may be quicker.

How AI actually closes the out-of-hours gap

The sensible answer is not to let a system run your branch on its own. It is to give it one clear job and be very specific about where your team steps back in.

In simple terms, the out-of-hours setup should do this:

Call or portal enquiry comes in → the person gets a quick response → key details are taken → the record is added to the CRM → an appointment is booked or the right staff member picks it up.

For phone enquiries, an AI voice agent for estate agents can answer in a natural UK voice, make it clear straight away that it is an AI assistant, and ask the same questions a good negotiator would ask early on:

• Are they buying, selling, letting or renting?
• Which property or area are they enquiring about?
• What is their timescale?
• Do they need to sell first?
• Have they already spoken to another agent?
• What day and time would suit for a viewing or valuation?

If they want to book something, it can check the agreed diary rules, offer suitable slots and send a confirmation. If the call is urgent or falls outside what it is allowed to handle, it passes the matter to a person or sets a priority task for the team in the morning.

For website and portal leads, workflow automation can watch the agreed inboxes and forms, spot where the enquiry came from, create or update the contact in Reapit, Alto or Dezrez, and attach the right property reference. It can also send an immediate acknowledgement and alert the right negotiator.

What matters is the quality of the notes. The record needs to say more than “called about property”. It should capture the answers, the source, the time it came in, what the person wants next and whether someone in the branch needs to follow up. That means your negotiator starts at 8.30am with something useful instead of a blank task and a guess.

The system should not value property, negotiate an offer, agree a price, give legal advice or decide whether someone can afford to proceed. Those are still human jobs.

We also make sure the basics are covered properly : GDPR, access controls and a clear audit trail. You need to know what was collected, where it was stored, who saw it and when it was handed over. On voice calls, the greeting should clearly say that AI is being used, and any outbound contact still needs to be checked against your consent position, PECR and the relevant Ofcom guidance.

The aim is not to make your branch feel robotic. It is to make sure the customer is not left hanging just because the office is shut.

What this looks like at Nexform AI

At Nexform, we start with a proper conversation about how your branch handles this now. Which calls come in after 5pm? Where do your Rightmove and website enquiries actually land? Who sees them first? What does the negotiator find in Reapit, Alto or Dezrez the following morning?

From there, we usually suggest the smallest Pilot that can prove whether this is worth doing, rather than trying to roll out a huge estate agency automation project from day one. For this sort of issue, that might be one branch, one phone line, one part of the CRM and a clear set of rules for when a person takes over.

A typical paid Pilot sits in the £3,000–£8,000 range, depending on the systems involved and how much needs connecting. The goal is to get it live in weeks, see how well the enquiries are being captured and handled, and then decide honestly whether a wider Build makes sense.

If the Pilot does not genuinely help, I would rather say that plainly than push you into a bigger job.

Stop asking good enquiries to wait until Monday

The agencies still saying Monday are not stuck there forever. You do not need a six-month project or a new CRM to sort this out.

You just need to ask one uncomfortable question: what actually happens when a real Sunday enquiry reaches your agency?

If the honest answer is “they get an email and somebody looks at it on Monday”, there is probably a sensible Pilot worth exploring.

If out-of-hours enquiries are costing your agency instructions and you'd like to see what a practical AI-assisted lead capture workflow could look like for your specific setup, book a 30-minute Discovery call. We’ll walk through your current process, identify where the leads go cold and outline what a Pilot would cover. No slides, no pitch : just a working conversation between two people who know the industry.

About the author

Phil Yassein is the founder of Nexform AI. He spent 10 years in UK estate agency before building AI automation specifically to fix the operational problems he lived with. Nexform AI is an approved Crown Commercial Service supplier and works with UK agencies on Discovery, Pilot and Build engagements.