Not about the fee percentage. Ask this instead: “What’s your guaranteed response time to a landlord query, and what actually happens if you miss it?”
Here’s why that question matters more than the number most landlords fixate on. The National Residential Landlords Association surveyed landlords about why they’d left their previous agent. Fees came second, at 26%. The top answer, at 38%, was response times — not being contacted back promptly, not having queries answered, generally feeling like the agent had gone quiet.
That finding is backed up by independent testing. A Rightmove exercise sending valuation enquiries to 213 agents found that around 70% failed to respond within 24 hours. Separate research across more than 10,000 agents found only around 30% of portal enquiries received any response at all. And roughly half of all landlord and tenant enquiries arrive outside standard office hours — between 6pm and 9am — a window where a lot of agencies simply aren’t set up to respond.
Why most complaints aren’t really about money. Read through landlord reviews and forum complaints about agents, and the pattern is remarkably consistent: inspections that were promised in the management agreement but never actually happened, phone calls that went unreturned, statements that were meant to arrive monthly but didn’t, problems that were only discovered weeks after they started because nobody flagged them. One landlord’s summary of the experience, found repeatedly in different words across different sources: it feels like managing the property yourself, while still paying someone else to do it.
What a good answer to the response-time question sounds like. A specific number — same working day, within four hours, whatever it genuinely is — attached to a specific consequence if it’s missed, whether that’s an internal escalation process or simply an acknowledgement that it’s tracked and reviewed. An agent who can answer this precisely is telling you something real about how the business actually operates day to day.
What a vague answer sounds like. “We pride ourselves on excellent communication” with no number attached is not an answer — it’s marketing language standing in for one. Ask the follow-up: what’s the actual average, and how is it measured? An agent who’s never measured it probably doesn’t manage to it consistently either.
Fee percentages get compared constantly because they’re easy to compare — one number against another. Response time is harder to compare because most agents don’t publish it. That’s exactly why it’s the more useful question to ask before instructing anyone.
General information, not legal advice. Property Lounge, Guildford.
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