Nobody comes back to your website

Pull up the visitor figures for your website last month. Then work out how many of those people had been before. For most property firms the second number rounds to nothing. Every month the site meets a fresh crowd of strangers. It serves them once and never hears from them again.

That is not a design fault. Nothing on the site gives anyone a reason to come back, and nothing catches them on the way past.

What you are actually buying from a portal

Rightmove can charge an independent branch between £1,500 and £2,000 a month. A £1.5 billion class action backed by more than 250 agent businesses is before the Competition Appeal Tribunal. Agents are not paying it quietly.

None of that changes what you have to do next month. Tenants and buyers start their search on the portals, so that is where your stock has to be. No website changes that, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

But look closely at what the money buys. It buys attention, briefly, on somebody else's platform. A tenant searches, sees fourteen flats, clicks three, enquires on one. If that one is yours you get an email address. If it is not, you get nothing, and the person who nearly enquired leaves no trace that they were ever there.

An email address given to you directly, with permission, behaves differently. The portal can raise its prices or change how its rankings work next quarter. Your own list carries on regardless. It is the only part of your marketing that nobody else can reprice.

The applicant who is three weeks early

Most people looking for somewhere to live are looking before you have anything to show them. Say a decent two-bed comes free at the end of April. The person who would have taken it on the first viewing was searching in early April, found nothing suitable on your site, and went to the agent down the road.

A registration form closes that gap. Four or five fields, no more: what they want, how many bedrooms, which area, what budget, and when they need to move. When something matching comes up, they hear about it on the morning it goes live rather than a fortnight later off a portal refresh.

For a lettings firm this is the cheapest thing on the list to build and the fastest to pay for itself. Bringing a letting forward by even a week is worth real money, and there are numbers on that in what an empty unit really costs.

One honest limit. We can build the registration form and the alert that goes out. We cannot make anyone in your office reply to the eleven people who answer it within the hour. The alert is only worth having if somebody picks it up.

The client you will not hear from for four years

A landlord with two flats might instruct you once every three years. A vendor sells once a decade. In between there is silence, and the silence is not a complaint. They are perfectly happy. They simply have no reason to think about you, and by the time the next instruction comes round they will start again with a fresh search, where whoever is most visible that week wins.

A short update, four times a year, keeps you somewhere a search engine cannot reach: their inbox. It does not need to be clever. What similar properties actually achieved in rent last quarter is enough for one edition. A change in the rules, explained in plain terms and with the bit that affects them highlighted, is enough for another.

The material information duties under the DMCC are exactly that sort of subject, and there is a piece on them at property listings compliance in 2026. Writing to your landlords about it does not make anyone compliant, and neither does a website. That duty stays with the firm. What a well-built site can do is put the required detail in front of whoever is listing the property, at the moment they list it, so it is harder to leave out.

A list needs feeding

This is where these projects usually fail.

A mailing list is not an asset the day it is installed. It becomes one after the fourth or fifth send. That means somebody in the office writing 300 words, four times a year, on a date that is in the diary. A list that gets one email in fourteen months is a list of strangers, and half of them will report you as spam for the trouble.

If nobody will own that, do not build it. Build the applicant alerts on their own instead. Those are mostly mechanical: the only real work is publishing new stock promptly, which you are meant to be doing anyway.

Two things to get right from the start. People must have actually asked to hear from you, with the box unticked by default and a working unsubscribe on every send. And never buy a list. Bought lists are worse than having no list at all, because they train your own domain to land in junk folders.

Growth will look unimpressive for a while. Forty addresses in the first year is a fair result for a small firm, and forty people who asked to hear from you beats four thousand portal visits you paid for and can never contact again.

Registration and a mailing list can be added to a site you already have. If you want to know what that comes to for your firm, ask us for a quote.