The nation's busiest time for online house-hunting revealed

When is your best time to go house-hunting online? Well, according to Rightmove, 8.48 pm on Wednesdays is the optimal time for the nation to start browsing online for a home.

The Rightmove data shows that visits to their platform peak between 8 pm and 9 pm daily. Essentially, people are getting dinner out of the way before settling down to look at homes for sale.

Rightmove crunched the data even further to reveal there are more people online at 8.48 pm on a Wednesday than at any other minute of the week.

The quietest hour is, unsurprisingly, 4 am on a Monday.

Meanwhile, estate agents and online portals such as Rightmove and Zoopla are bracing themselves for an increasingly busy post-Christmas rush of online house-hunting, known as the Boxing Day bounce.

Rightmove says its site sees an average of 141 million visits every month from house-hunters.

In the run-up to the festive season, December is usually the quietest month for buying and selling property.

However, Boxing Day is becoming better known for the rush to start viewing properties rather than the traditional Christmas sales of times past.

In 2018, page views on Rightmove rose by 231 percent between Christmas Day and January 2. The busiest December day for traffic was Sunday, December 30.

Clearly, rather than thinking of their new year resolutions, people are starting to think about a possible home move!

Miles Shipside, of Rightmove, said: "We know just how obsessed the nation is with property. But to see such precise consistency in terms of browsing times is really quite remarkable.

"It may be that the Wednesday peak of 8.48 pm coincides with the final advert break of many TV shows.

"A few years back, the busiest time of day was lunchtime. But as mobile usage increased, this has changed to property lovers revisiting us every evening."

And he added: "As we move into December, we see people start to get distracted by turkey and tinsel.

"But once the celebrations are in full swing, it doesn't take long before traffic rises again.

"Some may realise their home is too small. Or they finally decide that next year will be the year they take on an exciting project and buy a fixer-upper property."