When Is the Best Month, Week & Day to Advertise Your Rental Property?

Renting in the UK is unrecognisable from 15 years ago. Properties can be let in just one day – or even a few hours. You just need to know the best times to advertise.

We’ve used OpenRent data to reveal the best month, week, and day to advertise your rental property.

Which Month Is Best to Rent My Property?

The supply and demand of rental properties fluctuates massively over the course of the calendar year.

Landlords let their properties fastest when tenant enquiries are high and new listings entering the market are low.

The Data

We’ve taken the number of listing and enquiries per month over the last three years, and used them to see when supply is lowest, and demand highest, in the course of a given year. The month with the most enquiries per listing is the best month for you to market your property.

According to our data, the best month to advertise your property is August.

Although supply is relatively high in the summer, demand skyrockets in July, topping off in August. This midsummer surge in demand is caused by:

• Students finding accommodation before university starts
• Graduates beginning new jobs in new towns in September/October
• Parents who wait until their children’s summer holidays to move home
• Good weather making it a little more tolerable for all your belonging to be in the street as you load them into a van!

Can I Make My Property Available to Rent in August?

Most landlords operate on a cycle of 6 or 12 months. They rent a property until the end of a 6 or 12 month fixed term, then sign another assured shorthold tenancy (AST) with a fixed term: either with the same tenants, or new ones.

If your cycle doesn’t currently sync up with August and you want to experiment with when you let, then you can simply change the time of your next fixed term to ensure that the next time you’re likely to need to find a new tenant, it will be in August.

This is as simple as changing the fixed term length on your tenancy agreement. Legally, it’s pointless to make it shorter than 6 months (as you can’t evict a tenant in the first six months of an AST anyway), but you can make the fixed terms any length over this (7 months, 16 months, etc.) to help you sync up to the golden month of August.

What is the Best Week of the Month to Advertise?

Most people rent on a monthly period. Tenants pay at the end of January for the whole month of February, and so on. Does this system have any knock on effect for what time of the month is best to list your property?

It sure does.

This graph shows it’s best to advertise your rental property in the second half of the month.

The third week of a given month sees 5-10% more enquiries per property than the first week. If you put your property on the market in weeks three or four, then there will be more enquiries coming in per new listing, meaning more attention for you.

The data here could be explained by two factors. Firstly, most tenancies end at the end of the calendar month. Secondly the average time to advertise a property is 4-6 weeks before it is available (see why here).

Combined, this means tenants will be searching hardest for properties at the end of the penultimate calendar month of their tenancy.

Which Day of the Week is Best to Let My Property?

It’s key to think about how tenants search for properties.

The market is fast-paced – especially in the large towns and cities. This means most tenants use property alerts. The alerts send tenants an email as soon as a new property meeting their criteria goes live. Alerts mean your advert will receive the most attention on the very first day it goes live.

Being tactical about which day your ad goes live can make a big difference, then.

Which Day of the Week Gets the Most Enquiries?

Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday have a steady, high supply of enquiries. By the time the weekend comes around, enquiries drop off significantly. To get maximum attention from the moment you enter the market, try to get your advert out as early as possible on Monday morning.

Doing so means that tenants with email alerts will be notified that the property has gone live on the same day that they are most likely to send an enquiry. If they don’t manage it on Monday, then you still have the next two most-likely days to follow: Tuesday and Wednesday.

Although Saturday has 60% the enquiries of Monday, it is the day where the ratio of new listings to enquiries is most in favour of landlords. That means that, although the number of enquiries is lower, there are fewer new properties to spread them across, meaning your property could end up getting more attention.

You can see this in the purple line in the following graph, which shows enquiries per listing for each day of the week.

Seeing as the first day the property goes live is the day it gets most attention, landlords may also want to consider getting their ad out early on a Saturday morning.

How to Control When Your Property Enters the Market

Timing your property advert can help let your property quickly. But without being able to control when your property goes live, you can’t act on the lessons above.

You can upload an ad to OpenRent.co.uk in minutes, and appear on the major property portals within hours, sending your advert out to thousands of property-hunters, for free!

We don’t lock landlords into renewals or fixed term lengths, either. This leaves you free to wait until August before signing or re-signing with your tenants.

---