How fast do rentals actually let? We tracked 255,159 of them

Published 2026-07-12 · data as of 2026-10-16 · by Flatscout

Median time from first listing to 'Let Agreed' is 25 days — and the folk wisdom that good flats go in hours is only true for a small slice of the market.

Flatscout watches every rental listing from the moment it appears on Rightmove, Zoopla or SpareRoom until its status changes. That gives us something the portals don't publish: the actual elapsed time from a listing going live to the agent marking it let. We analysed the 255,159 rental listings that reached 'Let Agreed' status in the 180 days to 16 October 2026.

The headline numbers

10.9% of rentals were let within 7 days of listing, 30% within 14 days, and 59% within 30 days. The median rental takes about four weeks to let — so if you've been searching for a few weeks and everything feels gone, you're actually competing on a normal timeline. The panic-inducing 'gone in hours' listings are real, but they're a small slice: roughly 1 in 9 goes within the first week.

The fastest London boroughs

The spread between boroughs is smaller than most people expect — about 7 days separate the fastest (Hackney, 20 days) from the slowest of the big markets (Westminster, 27 days). Demand pressure is broadly London-wide; what changes borough to borough is supply volume more than clearing speed.

How we measured this

Flatscout's pipeline re-checks every active listing's status continuously. We took every rental listing whose status changed to 'Let Agreed' in the 180 days to 16 October 2026 (and within 365 days of first appearing), and measured the gap between our first sighting of the listing and the status change. Because we poll rather than receive events, each timing carries up to a couple of days of measurement lag, so treat the figures as upper bounds. Room listings are excluded. The figures are refreshed monthly.

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