Guide
Sales progression KPIs for UK estate agencies
Most agencies measure sales agreed and completions, and nothing in between — which is exactly where the five months and the money go. These are the eight numbers worth tracking, with the current national benchmarks to measure against.
Last updated 27 September 2026
You do not need software to track these. A spreadsheet with one row per sale and a date column per milestone will do it, and doing it by hand for a month teaches you more about your pipeline than any dashboard.
The eight numbers
1. Offer-to-memo days
How: Days from offer accepted to the memorandum of sale going out.
Why: The one stage you control completely. If this is more than a day or two, everything downstream starts late and you have nobody else to blame.
Target: same day or next day.
2. Sale agreed to exchange
How: Median days, not mean — one nightmare leasehold will drag a mean anywhere.
Why: The number the whole industry is measured on, and the one your vendors feel.
104 days nationally (Connells, May 2026), against 76 in 2019.
3. Sale agreed to completion
How: Median days to keys released.
Why: What a vendor actually experiences. Longer than most agents quote at valuation.
154 days (Rightmove, July 2026) — the longest on record.
4. Fall-through rate
How: Sales collapsing before completion ÷ sales agreed, over a rolling 12 months.
Why: Rolling, because quarterly numbers on a small branch are mostly noise.
About 23–24% nationally (Rightmove and TwentyCi, 2026).
5. Permanent loss rate
How: Of those that collapse, the share that never completes with you at all.
Why: The fall-through rate makes a good headline; this one is what costs you money.
Roughly a quarter of fall-throughs (derived from Rightmove, 2026).
6. Pipeline value at risk
How: Sum of expected fees on live sales weighted by how likely each is to complete.
Why: Turns "we have 40 in the pipeline" into a number your accountant can use.
No published benchmark. Track your own trend.
7. Days since last movement
How: Per sale: days since any milestone, document or message changed.
Why: The single most useful operational number on this list. A sale nobody has touched for a fortnight is the one that is quietly dying.
Flag at 7 days. Escalate at 14.
8. Leasehold gap
How: Median days to exchange on leasehold minus the same figure for freehold.
Why: If your patch is flat-heavy, this tells you how much of your delay is structural rather than fixable.
58 days nationally — 155 against 97 (Connells, 2026), the widest on record.
Two traps
Means, not medians. Progression data is skewed by a small number of catastrophes. A branch with a median of 95 days and one eleven-month leasehold will report a mean close to 120 and conclude the wrong thing.
Measuring the whole pipeline as one. Freehold houses with cash buyers and leasehold flats in a chain are different businesses. Split them before you benchmark, or the leasehold gap above will hide inside your average.
What good looks like
Honestly: nobody knows. There is no published benchmark set for UK agency progression performance, which is partly why this page exists. The national figures above are the best available comparators, and they are averages across a market that includes corporates with dedicated teams and one-person branches doing it between viewings.
The useful comparison is you against yourself, last quarter. If your days-since-last- movement is falling and your offer-to-memo is under two days, the rest tends to follow.
Sources
Rightmove press releases, February and July 2026. Connells Group, May 2026 (own transaction data, method not published). TwentyCi via PropertyWire, April 2026. Benchmarks are national medians or means as published; where a source does not state which, we say so rather than guess.