There's a number I can't quite shake. 8:48pm on a Wednesday is the single busiest minute for house-hunting in Britain — more people are on Rightmove then than at any other moment of the week.
Sit with that for a second. The busiest moment in the entire property week happens when almost every estate agency in the country is shut, the phones are off, and the team's at home with the telly on. The nation is doing its most serious looking precisely when nobody's there to answer.
That one stat tells you most of what's changed about the job. But it's not the only number that stopped me.
A few that stuck
Only 2% of agents have a single local rival. Most compete against six or more agencies for every instruction. You are almost never the only option on a vendor's list — which means being chosen matters as much as being good.
Nearly one in four agreed sales fall through before completion. A quarter of the deals you sweat to agree quietly collapse — and 38% of those go in the first four weeks, when tight communication matters most.
Britain spends over a billion minutes a month on Rightmove alone. House-hunting isn't a chore people rush — it's a national evening hobby, done on the sofa, on a phone, long after 6pm.
None of these are opinions. They're just the shape of the market now — and most of them point the same way.
So we made a thing
I kept quoting these numbers to people, so we built a little page for them: propfind.io/facts — eleven genuinely true, individually-sourced facts about UK estate agency, laid out as cards you can swipe through on your phone. Tap a heart on the ones that land. Every card links its source, because a "fun fact" nobody can check is just a rumour in a nice font.
It takes about sixty seconds. Some of them you'll nod at. One or two might genuinely surprise you — I didn't know Boxing Day, not New Year's Day, is when the market wakes back up each year.
Because that's the gap we built PropFind to close. Its AI assistant sits on your website and answers every buyer and seller enquiry the moment it lands — 8:48pm on a Wednesday included — from your own stock, books the viewing, and pings you when a lead's worth a call.
Have a flick through
Numbers are easy to nod at and forget. We made these ones a bit harder to forget — and a bit more fun to argue with.
Take a minute, swipe through, and see which one gets you: propfind.io/facts. Send it to the person on your team who still thinks the 6pm enquiries can wait until morning.
All eleven facts carry their source on the card — Rightmove, Estate Agent Today, PropertyWire, Zoopla and IBISWorld among them.