The busiest hour in the British housing market is Saturday at 11:00am

There is one hour in the week when Britain mainly looks round houses, and anyone who has tried to book a viewing already knows which one it is: Saturday at 11:00am.

Almost 250,000 viewings started in that single slot last year, according to new figures from Alto, the CRM provider behind roughly a third of UK estate agency.

That is 4.60% of an entire week's viewings, crammed into 60 minutes.

The five busiest hours in the whole week are all on a Saturday: 11:00am, then 10:00am, then midday, 1:00pm and 2:00pm.

The first slot that is not a Saturday is Friday at 4:00pm, and it is 45% smaller than the Saturday peak.

95% of every viewing booked in Britain runs Monday to Saturday, between 9:00am and 6:00pm.

Just 4.69% happen on a Sunday or after 6:00pm.

Which is, of course, exactly when most working buyers and renters are free to go and look at a house.

Saturday now runs 11.5 times more viewings than Sunday, according to the data from Alto. 

However, the busiest hours are also the flakiest. Viewings booked into the 10:00am run-up to the Saturday peak are cancelled 23% of the time, the worst of any hour in the day.

The safest slot in the week is 7:00pm, cancelled 19% of the time.

And though the quietest, the safest day is Sunday, at 19%.

So the hours everybody fights over are the ones most likely to fall through, and the quiet ones do stick.

Of the 2,228 branches that booked 50 or more viewings last year, 10.5% never booked a single one after 6:00pm. Nearly a quarter, 24%, never booked a single Sunday.

And where agents do open up the evening, most of them hand over the keys rather than send a person.

At 7:00pm, 71% of viewings are unaccompanied. On Sundays it is 67%. In the middle of a weekday it is closer to one in four.

Evening viewings also nearly halve in winter, falling from 3.8% of the diary in summer to 2.1% in January.

Buyers and renters do not get less busy in January, so that is the daylight setting the diary rather than the demand.

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's Lead Flow answers enquiries and books viewings 24 hours a day, so an enquiry at 9:00pm on a Sunday does not sit until Monday morning.