Saturday at 11am is the busiest hour of the week for property viewings, according to new data from Alto.

The property software provider claims almost 250,000 viewings started during that one-hour slot over the past year. That represents 4.6% of all weekly viewings recorded in its data.

In fact, the five busiest viewing times all fall on a Saturday. After 11am, the most popular slots are 10am, midday, 1pm and 2pm.

By comparison, Friday at 4pm is the busiest non-Saturday slot. However, Alto claims viewing volumes are 45% lower than at the Saturday peak.

The figures also highlight how concentrated viewing activity remains within traditional agency hours. Some 95% of viewings take place between Monday and Saturday, from 9am to 6pm.

Meanwhile, just 4.69% take place on Sundays or after 6pm. Alto’s data shows Saturday now generates 11.5 times as many viewings as Sunday.

However, the busiest periods also produce some of the highest cancellation rates.

Around 23% of viewings scheduled for 10am on Saturday are cancelled. According to Alto, that is the highest cancellation rate of any hour during the day.

By contrast, 7pm has the lowest cancellation rate at 19%. Sunday also records the lowest cancellation rate by day, at 19%.

The data suggests many agents continue to operate their viewing diaries largely within conventional working hours.

Of the 2,228 branches that booked at least 50 viewings during the year, 10.5% recorded none after 6pm. Almost a quarter, 24%, did not book a single Sunday viewing.

Where evening appointments are offered, unaccompanied viewings are more common. At 7pm, 71% are unaccompanied, compared with 67% on Sundays.

During the middle of a weekday, the proportion falls to around one in four.

Evening viewing activity also changes seasonally. It accounts for 3.8% of appointments during summer, falling to 2.1% in January.

An Alto spokesperson said: “Agents are the hardest-working people in property. But the diary has been built around when branches are open rather than when their customers can come, and perhaps that model needs to be looked at, because a handful of evening slots is the difference between four viewings and eight.”

Alto, which provides CRM software to estate agencies, offers a Lead Flow service that can respond to enquiries and book viewings outside normal branch hours.”