More than nine in ten calls to estate and letting agents are going unanswered on weekday evenings, according to research highlighting a potential gap between agency opening hours and when customers are available to make enquiries.

A study by InStep AI found 94.1% of calls to sales and lettings agencies between 6pm and 9pm went unanswered.

Across the wider sample of 3,047 unique UK property business telephone numbers, deduplicated from 3,169 branch records, 93.8% of calls reached nobody, while just 4.1% were answered by a person. The remainder were picked up by an automated message (1.1%), a voice AI system (0.7%), or found the number not in service (0.3%).

The calls were made on weekday evenings between May and July, with each allowed to ring until the receiving line ended the call.

Mid-sized agencies had the highest proportion of unanswered calls at 96%, compared with 93.6% among independents and 92.2% for the largest networks.

Separate data from InStep AI’s own client base indicated that a significant proportion of enquiries were being made outside normal office hours.

Some 27% of leads captured by the company arrived outside office hours, including 31% of viewing requests and 31% of applicant registrations.

Reid Cockrell, co-founder of InStep AI, said the findings reflected a mismatch between traditional agency opening hours and the times at which customers are available to contact businesses.

Cockrell said: “This isn’t a story about agencies not working hard. Most offices close at six because that’s when the working day ends. What the data shows is a structural gap between when the industry is open and when its customers are free to call.

“With tools like Ella, InStep’s AI assistant, available to the industry, we expect the proportion of answered out-of-hours calls to improve steadily over the coming months.”

The report anonymised individual results and disclosed its limitations, as well as the company’s commercial interest in full.

The company plans to repeat the research to track changes in evening answer rates over time.