Updated 22 October 2026

The key facts

  • 37 enquiries per listing. Hello Neighbour listings average 37 viewing enquiries, against about 10 per rental home on Rightmove's Q2 2026 Rental Trends Tracker (16 July 2026).
  • The advertised rent is a ceiling. Since 1 May 2026 an advert must state one rent and you cannot accept more, with fines of up to £7,000 (GOV.UK rental bidding guidance).
  • Rightmove holds the attention. 89% of all time spent on UK property portals in December 2025 was on Rightmove, on Comscore's measure (Rightmove plc results, 26 February 2026).
  • Three questions, not five. Two or three screening questions drew a 39.7% response rate; four or more cut it to 23.2% (8,304 Hello Neighbour screening messages, 2026).
  • Nearly 70% of applicants at vetted viewings want the property, with a 4.1% no-show rate over the past year on Hello Neighbour viewings.

In this article:

  1. Start with the property and the price
  2. Professional photos and a floor plan
  3. Write an advert that filters
  4. List where tenants are looking
  5. Be ready before the advert goes live
  6. Ask the right pre-qualification questions
  7. Run viewings well
  8. From viewing to offer

Getting good enquiries is the start and at Hello Neighbour we want our listed properties to have the widest audience. Our listings average 37 viewing enquiries for each property we list, against around 10 per rental home across Rightmove according to its Q2 2026 Rental Trends Tracker. Then it is about making sure you pick a tenant that reduces the likelihood of any problems once they move in. Every stage before the offer is a chance to attract the people the home suits and lose, politely and lawfully, the people it does not. This guide takes those stages in order, drawing on Rightmove's own advice, the government's rules for adverts and screening, and data from more than 10,000 viewings run on our platform. It stops at the accepted offer; referencing, contracts and deposits which are further opportunities to get this right are covered in our complete guide to finding a tenant yourself.

Start with the property and the price

The work begins before anyone picks up a camera. Clean thoroughly, fix the small things (blown bulbs, dripping taps, sticking doors), and make each room look like what it is. Our article on whether your property looks rental ready covers the details, including what to provide in a new build.

Price from evidence and data. Since 1 May 2026, the rent in your advert is a ceiling. GOV.UK's guidance on rental bidding says any written advert must state a specific rent, not a range, and you cannot ask for, encourage or accept an offer above it, with fines of up to £7,000. An over-ambitious figure no longer starts a negotiation; it simply sits unlet and that is costly. Set the rent from comparable homes advertised nearby as well as a host of other local and national data, as our guide to getting the valuation right explains. Pricing realistically pays: 82% of properties on our platform let at the asking price.

Professional photos and a floor plan

Rightmove gives landlords clear advice here. Its guide to marketing a rental property recommends "around nine photos and a quality floor plan", taken on a bright day, and suggests leaving out close-ups of fixtures such as taps unless they genuinely add something. Its previous guide to the ultimate lettings listing, based on Rightmove's 2020 data, put numbers on it: listings with five or more photos drew 10% more leads and let 1.5 days faster, and listings with a floor plan drew 8% more leads and let 1.8 days faster. At the time, 65% of lettings listings had no floor plan at all.

The floor plan matters most for quality. When applicants on our platform decided against a property after viewing it, the most common reasons were kitchen size or layout (21%), overall size (19%) and storage (12%), and issues of size and configuration made up 48% of all the reasons given, according to our extensive analysis of viewing feedback. A floor plan with room dimensions answers those questions before anyone books, so the people who still ask to view already know the space works for them. Professional photos through Hello Neighbour cost £79 (including VAT) and a floor plan costs £25, and our article on why photos, video and floor plans make a difference explains what matters in detail further.

Write an advert that filters

A good advert does three jobs: it shows the property well, answers the obvious questions before they are asked, and puts off people for whom the home is wrong. State the rent, the deposit, the date the property is available, whether it is furnished, which bills (if any) are included, the council tax band and the EPC rating. Describe the commute, the nearest station and the shops in plain terms, since Rightmove's guidance on viewings notes and our own experience make it clear that transport links are something tenants usually care about.

Rightmove's 2020 listing guide adds some practical points: lead with your strongest photo, keep the summary to the 300 characters that show in search results, and use all ten key feature bullets. Over 74% of Rightmove traffic was already on mobile at the time, and the guide reckons a summary has about two seconds to catch a reader's attention, so the first line and first image do most of the work.

What an advert must not say. Some phrases common in older adverts are now unlawful in England. GOV.UK's guide to rental discrimination says you must not do anything that makes someone less likely to rent a property because they have children or receive benefits, and that this covers access to information and viewings as well as the final decision. Wording such as "No DSS", or "no children" without a specific, justifiable reason, puts you at risk of a fine of up to £7,000 per offence. If you have a view on pets, our article on pets and the Renters' Rights Act explains what you can and cannot say.

List where tenants are looking

The bigger the pool your advert reaches, the better your chance of finding the right tenant. As well as maximising reach you also need a portal that engages tenants.

The number of rental properties listed on the three largest portals are largely the same as most people list on all three. Below is our analysis of the homes available to rent on each of the three main portals on 1 October 2026, using each site's own search results.

Homes available to rent, 1 October 2026 Rightmove Zoopla OnTheMarket
Englandaround 115,000around 100,000around 102,000
Scotlandaround 3,400around 3,200around 3,200
Walesaround 2,600around 2,600around 2,900
Northern Irelandaround 180around 90around 70
UKaround 120,000around 105,000around 110,000

None of the portals publishes a national rental total, so these are Hello Neighbour counts, built by adding up each site's search results across non-overlapping areas and excluding homes already let agreed; but treat them as approximate. Most agents list on all three portals, so the stock is broadly similar. However, the number of tenants and how long they spend looking is not the same at all.

Rightmove's results for 2025 report that, on Comscore's measure, Rightmove took 89% of all the time people spent on UK property portals in December 2025, measured against Zoopla, PrimeLocation and OnTheMarket; SimilarWeb, Data.ai and Sensor Tower data put the figure at 75%. In other words, Zoopla shows tenants roughly as many homes as Rightmove, but holds a fraction of their attention. Visit numbers support this. Similarweb's latest public estimates of website visits, which exclude app use and so understate Rightmove, are shown below.

Website Estimated website visits (Similarweb) UK real estate category rank Average visit
Rightmove69.2 million (September 2026)16 min 56 s
Zoopla26.4 million (August 2026)25 min 15 s
OnTheMarket13.7 million (September 2026)34 min 0 s
OpenRent6.4 million (August 2026)45 min 24 s
Foxtons (a large London high street agency, for comparison)0.75 million (September 2026)232 min 34 s

On these estimates Rightmove's website draws around two and a half times Zoopla's visits, five times OnTheMarket's and more than ten times OpenRent's, before counting its app. Our own data matches: in 2026 so far, 55.4% of all viewing requests on Hello Neighbour listings, across every source, have come from Rightmove. More importantly, 57.7% of all tenants who move in came from Rightmove. Rightmove's published claims, based on data from the CRM provider Street, add that three in every four tenancies completed between January 2024 and April 2025 came from a Rightmove enquiry when compared with the next largest portal.

What that means for a free listing. OpenRent, which describes itself as the largest letting platform in the UK, offers a free advert, but its pricing page confirms the free tier appears on OpenRent only. On Similarweb's figures, that advert is seen by an audience around a tenth the size of Rightmove's, and the same is true, many times over, of a listing that sits only on a high street agent's own website. Hello Neighbour's Get Listed puts the same advert on Rightmove, Zoopla and OnTheMarket for £29, which is less than a single day's rent on a £1,000 a month let. Saving the £29 means choosing your tenant from a much smaller crowd.

For more on the portal data, see why Rightmove is an essential part of advertising your rental property.

Be ready before the advert goes live

Good applicants are usually talking to several landlords at once, so decide your viewing availability before you publish rather than after the messages arrive. Rightmove's viewings guidance makes the same point: you are competing with every other property on the market, so be as flexible about times as you can.

Offer two or three appointment windows rather than one take-it-or-leave-it slot, and avoid school runs, breakfast and late evenings. If the property is tenanted, agree access with your current tenant early; most tenancy agreements ask for at least 24 hours' written notice and viewings at reasonable times. Be careful that availability does not become a filter of its own: GOV.UK lists "offering unreasonable times" as a way a landlord can unlawfully make it difficult for someone with children to view.

Speed of reply matters as much as availability. On our platform, every tenant who enquires gets an email and a text within 30 seconds, at any hour, inviting them to answer your pre-qualification questions and request a viewing time. Those who pass are offered your available slots, and you accept, move or decline each request with one click, so a good applicant is booked in before they have heard back from the next landlord; our article on smarter viewing management shows how it works.

Ask the right pre-qualification questions

Screening before a viewing saves everyone time, but too many questions put good applicants off. We analysed 8,304 screening messages that landlords sent through our platform in 2026. Asking two or three questions drew a 39.7% response rate; asking four or more cut it to 23.2%. Landlords asked most often about employment and income (96% of messages), household size (84%) and move-in timing (81%), followed by pets and smoking (75%) and guarantors (72%). Only 20% asked about previous landlord references.

The approach that works is phased. Start with three questions: when do you want to move, what is your household income, and how many people would live in the property? Leave guarantors, pets and references until someone has passed the first round and viewed. Our guide to screening viewing requests sets out the full question set and the order we recommend.

Two legal points are important to understand. When you check affordability, GOV.UK's guidance on benefits says income from benefits must be counted in the same way as any other income; you can still decline someone who genuinely cannot afford the rent. And while household size is a fair question, GOV.UK's guidance on children only allows a restriction where you can show it is a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim, such as avoiding overcrowding or meeting licensing conditions. Ask the same questions of everyone and keep a note of why you asked what you did.

Run viewings well

A well-run viewing is your best chance to judge an applicant and theirs to judge the home. Prepare the property 10 to 15 minutes beforehand: open curtains and blinds, turn on the lights, air the rooms and check that the heating is on in winter. Rightmove's advice is that the home should feel welcoming while leaving enough of a blank canvas for tenants to picture themselves living there. We agree.

Group viewings into blocks. We run 15-minute slots, up to eight in a two-hour block, which saves you repeated journeys and lets applicants see that there is interest without any pressure on price. Stay with every visitor and be ready to talk about the area: transport, shops and what the neighbourhood is like. Our article on combatting letting fraud covers the warning signs to watch for.

Ask each applicant the same few questions at the end: how likely they are to apply, what they liked, what concerns them and how the rent compares with what else they have seen. Structured feedback makes the decision easier and tells you quickly if the price or presentation needs to change. Confirming every booking in writing helps too; our no-show rate over the past year was 4.1%, and nearly 70% of applicants at our vetted viewings told us they wanted the property. Our guide to viewings has the full checklist.

From viewing to offer

When offers come in, judge them on more than the rent: a stable income, a realistic move date and a tenant who has asked sensible questions are worth more than a quick yes. Remember that the advertised rent is now the maximum. GOV.UK's rental bidding guidance rules out telling applicants you have other offers to push the price up, so compare offers on quality instead. Once you have accepted one, the next step is referencing, followed by the contract and deposit, which our five-step guide to finding the right tenant walks through.

Hello Neighbour's Get Listed puts your property on Rightmove, Zoopla and OnTheMarket for £29, with pre-qualification and viewing management built in. Get Rented at £59 adds the tenancy paperwork, and you can add professional photos and a floor plan for £79 or have us host viewings for £45 a slot. See how it works.

You might also find these useful

The best way to find a tenant quickly: make the first week count. The best way to find a tenant: ask landlords who have done it. How to find a tenant yourself and let your property without an agent. Finding the right tenant: our guide to screening viewing requests. Finding the right tenant: our guide to viewings. Why professional photos, videos and floor plans make a difference.

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