It’s worth stating plainly, even though it reflects on our own industry rather than flatteringly: the single biggest reason landlords leave a letting agent is something a large proportion of agents are demonstrably bad at, and it isn’t a complicated problem to solve.
The evidence, laid out properly. A Rightmove exercise testing 213 estate and letting agents by sending genuine valuation enquiries found that approximately 70% failed to respond within 24 hours. Separate, larger-scale research across more than 10,000 agents found that only around 30% of portal enquiries received any response at all — meaning the majority of initial contact attempts simply went nowhere. And roughly half of all enquiries, across both landlords and tenants, arrive outside standard office hours, between 6pm and 9am — a window in which a significant proportion of agencies aren’t set up to respond at all until the following working day.
Now place that next to what actually makes landlords leave. The National Residential Landlords Association’s own research into why landlords left their previous agent found fees came second, at 26%. The top reason, at 38%, was response times.
The conclusion is uncomfortable but straightforward. The primary reason landlords leave agents is not that agents are too expensive. It’s that a large number of agents are slow, or simply fail, to respond — and that failure is not a matter of skill or expertise. It doesn’t require special training or deep market knowledge to answer an email within a day. It requires having a process that ensures it happens, and treating it as a genuine priority rather than something that gets attended to when time allows.
Why this matters more now than it used to. Under the Renters’ Rights Act, the practical cost of slow responses has risen. Deadlines are tighter and carry real financial penalties — the Information Sheet deadline, rent increase notice periods, possession notice periods. An agent who’s slow to respond to a landlord query is now, by extension, more likely to be slow in a way that has genuine legal and financial consequences, not just an inconvenience.
What this should change about how landlords choose an agent. Rather than treating fee comparison as the primary decision point, ask directly about response times — not as a vague reassurance, but as a specific, measurable commitment. Ask what happens when it’s missed. Ask how it’s tracked. An agent unable to answer these questions with any specificity is very likely one of the roughly 70% who don’t reliably respond within a day, whatever their marketing materials say.
And the honest bar for anyone in this industry to clear. Given how low the actual standard currently sits across the sector, simply responding reliably and quickly isn’t an exceptional achievement — it’s a baseline that a large proportion of the market isn’t meeting. If you’ve emailed a letting agent this week — any agent, including your own current one — and heard nothing back, that single data point tells you more about how responsively your property would actually be managed than almost anything in a glossy brochure.
General information, not legal advice. Property Lounge, Guildford.
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