Your qualifications are buried and your team page has no faces
Somewhere near the bottom of your website, under the copyright line, there is probably a row of small grey logos. RICS. Propertymark. ARLA or NAEA. Maybe a redress scheme. They have been shrunk to the size of a stamp and put in the part of the page almost nobody scrolls to. On plenty of firms' sites they are not there at all.
Those letters took years to earn and cost money every year to keep. They are the strongest thing you can say about your firm that a competitor cannot simply type into their own homepage. And they are filed next to the cookie notice.
What the letters actually do
A landlord choosing a managing agent cannot assess your work in advance. They cannot read your file notes or audit your client account. So they judge by proxy, and the proxies available are the way the phone was answered and whatever the website tells them.
Professional membership is one of the few proxies that is hard to fake and simple to check. It says someone outside your firm has looked at how you operate, and it usually means there is a complaints route that does not end with you. For a landlord already let down once, that can be the difference between an enquiry and a closed tab.
The reason firms bury it is that among peers the letters are unremarkable. Everyone at the local branch meeting has them. Mentioning it feels like announcing that you have a telephone. But you are not writing for peers. Most of the public have never had it explained that a chartered surveyor answers to a professional body, and that membership carries conditions. Fewer still realise the agent down the road may belong to nothing at all.
Where they belong instead
Not the footer. The footer is where things go to be technically present.
Put it where the decision is being made. The landlord page and the management page, for a start, and again beside the contact form. Write it as a sentence rather than a badge. A logo asks the reader to already know what it means, whereas a line of plain English does the work for them. Name the body and say what membership requires of you. Say what a client can do if they are unhappy. Add the membership number too, because a number reads as checkable.
Client money protection and redress scheme details belong in the same place and in the same plain terms. A site can carry them clearly and make them harder to forget when they come up for renewal. It cannot make you compliant. That duty stays with you, in the same way it does with the material information rules on your listings.
A name is not a person
Then there is the team page. Four names, four job titles, no photographs.
The argument for an independent firm over a corporate one is that the client gets a person, and gets the same person next year. Someone who knows the building and picks up when you ring. That is the whole case, and the website answers it with a list of surnames.
A prospective client on that page is working out whether to ring you, and who they are likely to get. A photograph of a real person makes that call easier to make. A list of names does not.
One warning. This only works with photographs of your actual people. A stock image of two strangers shaking hands over a set of keys reads as a firm with nothing real to show, and readers clock it faster than you would expect. If the picture is not of your staff, no picture is better.
What a team page should actually contain
A proper photograph of everyone. Taken on the same day and in the same light, with everybody looking at the camera. Not a cropped wedding photo for one person and a headshot from 2011 for another. Consistency reads as a firm; a mixed bag reads as whatever people happened to have on their phones.
The qualification spelled out beside the name. MRICS means nothing to most landlords. "Chartered surveyor, member of RICS" reads. The same goes for ARLA, NAEA and anything else your people have sat exams for. Put it directly under the name, where somebody skimming will actually catch it.
What each person does, in the client's language. Not "Operations Manager". Who to ring about arrears. Who does the inspections. Who handles the deposit at the end of a tenancy, and who picks up when a boiler fails on a Friday afternoon.
How long they have been at it. Years in the trade, and years at your firm. A long service record in one town is the one thing a newly opened branch of a national cannot match.
A direct email or extension where the role warrants it. Publishing it will not make anyone answer faster. That is a management problem and no website will fix it. But it removes a barrier at the moment somebody has decided to make contact.
The page also has to be changeable by you, without ringing anyone. Staff leave. A team page still listing someone who went two years ago does more damage than having no team page at all, and if nobody in the office can edit the site, that is exactly what happens. Worth checking where you stand on that before it bites.
If you want your credentials and your people doing proper work on your site instead of sitting in the basement of it, ask for a price and we will quote you a fixed figure for the rebuild.