Published 2026-07-12 · data as of 2026-07-15 · by Flatscout
Median time from first listing to 'Let Agreed' is 28 days — and the folk wisdom that good flats go in hours is only true for a tiny 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 54,650 rental listings that reached 'Let Agreed' status.
| Measure | Days |
|---|---|
| Fastest quarter (25th percentile) | 17 |
| Median | 28 |
| Slowest quarter (75th percentile) | 38 |
Only 4.5% of rentals were let within 7 days of listing, 18% within 14 days, and 55% within 30 days. The median rental takes four weeks to let — so if you've been searching for three 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 roughly one in twenty.
| Borough | Tracked lets | Median days |
|---|---|---|
| Southwark | 536 | 24.3 |
| Waltham Forest | 210 | 25.9 |
| Hackney | 431 | 26.0 |
| Camden | 665 | 26.9 |
| Wandsworth | 759 | 27.4 |
| Lewisham | 263 | 27.5 |
| Islington | 577 | 27.7 |
| Hillingdon | 218 | 28.2 |
| Kensington and Chelsea | 432 | 28.2 |
| Hammersmith and Fulham | 562 | 28.8 |
| Greenwich | 314 | 29.2 |
| Brent | 228 | 29.5 |
| Westminster | 684 | 29.9 |
| Richmond upon Thames | 215 | 30.0 |
| Haringey | 275 | 30.1 |
| Tower Hamlets | 1,109 | 30.2 |
| Lambeth | 540 | 30.2 |
| Ealing | 207 | 30.9 |
| Merton | 231 | 30.9 |
| Newham | 302 | 31.9 |
The spread between boroughs is smaller than most people expect — about a week separates the fastest (Southwark, 24 days) from the slowest of the big markets (Newham, 32 days). Demand pressure is broadly London-wide; what changes borough to borough is supply volume, not clearing speed.
Flatscout's pipeline re-checks every active listing's status continuously. We took every rental listing whose status changed to 'Let Agreed' 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 few hours of measurement lag — immaterial at a scale of days. Room listings and short-let stock are excluded from the borough table.