Estate Agents & Lettings
Marketing for estate agents & lettings
Buyers are not your customers. Vendors and landlords are, and they behave completely differently. Most estate agency advertising spends its budget on people looking at houses instead of people who own one and are thinking about selling.
In short
Marketing for estate agents & lettings in the UK turns on three things that are specific to the trade. A sale instruction on a £300,000 home at a fee somewhere between 1% and 1.5% is roughly £3,000 to £4,500 plus VAT, paid on completion three to five months later. A market appraisal converts to an instruction perhaps a third to half of the time depending on how good your valuers are. Google search wins for valuations. The biggest source of wasted spend is portal and property browsing, searches such as Rightmove and Zoopla, which has to be negatived out before the budget means anything.
The economics that should drive the budget
A sale instruction on a £300,000 home at a fee somewhere between 1% and 1.5% is roughly £3,000 to £4,500 plus VAT, paid on completion three to five months later. A market appraisal converts to an instruction perhaps a third to half of the time depending on how good your valuers are. So at a cost per booked valuation of £50 to £150, which is a normal UK range for local search, cost per instruction lands somewhere between £120 and £450 against a four-figure fee.
Lettings works on a different clock and is frequently undervalued. A tenant-find fee is modest, but full management at 8% to 15% of rent on a £1,100 a month property is roughly £1,000 to £2,000 a year, recurring for as long as the landlord stays. Five years of that beats a single sale comfortably, and it does not depend on the market moving. A portfolio landlord with four properties is worth more than most vendors you will ever meet.
The consequence for measurement is simple and widely ignored. Website sessions, portal views and enquiry counts tell you almost nothing. The only number worth reporting weekly is market appraisals booked, split by sales and lettings, with the source attached to each one.
Seasonality
The market has two clocks. Buyer interest famously restarts on Boxing Day, when portal traffic peaks for the year, but that is browsing rather than instructing. Vendor behaviour lags it by several weeks: valuation searches climb through January, and the spring market proper runs from late February to about the end of May, which is when most of the year’s instructions are won.
There is a second, shorter window from early September to mid-October, driven by people who want to be moved before Christmas. From late November the sales side is effectively closed for new instructions. Lettings ignores all of this. General lettings peaks June to September, and in a university town the critical period is February and March for September tenancies. Budget should follow vendor and landlord research, which means spending ahead of the spring rather than during it.
What we configure
- Valuation campaign built and measured separately from lettings
- Portal brand terms and buyer browsing excluded from day one
- Instant online valuation feeding a booked appraisal, not a PDF
- Postcode-level Meta audiences for recently sold creative
- Fees published for lettings management, honestly
- Speed-to-lead automation on valuation requests
- Reporting on market appraisals booked, not sessions
What people actually search, and what it is worth
| Intent | Typical search | Value | How we handle it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vendor valuation | house valuation [town], how much is my house worth, estate agents [town] | The revenue intent | Core campaign into an instant online valuation followed by a booked appraisal. This is where the budget belongs. |
| Landlord and management | letting agents [town], property management fees, landlord services [town] | Recurring, compounding | Separate campaign with a genuine fees page. Landlords compare percentages openly, so refusing to publish yours loses them. |
| Buyer and tenant browsing | houses for sale [town], flats to rent [town], 3 bed house [postcode] | Low direct value | We generally do not bid here. Capture it organically for stock and applicant registration, and leave the portals to fight. |
| Agent comparison | best estate agent [town], estate agent fees, [competitor] reviews | High value, low volume | Brand campaign plus reviews-led content. Vendors shortlisting three agents are the closest thing to a warm lead in this sector. |
Where the budget leaks
Every sector attracts searches that can never become a customer. These are the ones specific to estate agents & lettings, and they go into the negative keyword list before launch rather than after the first invoice.
| Category | Example searches | Why it costs you |
|---|---|---|
| Portal and property browsing | Rightmove, Zoopla, OnTheMarket, houses for sale near me, property for sale | Colossal volume, all of it buyers. The portals will outbid you indefinitely and the traffic cannot become an instruction. |
| Fee-comparison and online-only | sell my house free, no fee estate agent, cheapest estate agent, sell house without agent | Attracts vendors who have already decided not to pay a percentage. Expensive clicks that end in a fee objection. |
| Adjacent property services | conveyancing quote, mortgage broker [town], home survey, removals [town], EPC | Related to a move but not your service, and the searcher already has an agent or is not selling at all. |
| Careers and franchising | estate agent jobs, how to become an estate agent, estate agency franchise, NAEA qualification | Steady background volume that never converts, plus competitors researching your brand. |
Want this checked against your own numbers?Two minutes on the phone is usually enough to say whether the arithmetic works for a estate agents & letting business your size.
Call 07443 392243WhatsAppWhat the buyer is actually checking
A vendor deciding which agent to instruct does most of the work before they contact anyone. They look at how many of your boards are up in streets near them. They open your listings on the portals and judge the photography, the floorplans and the descriptions, because that is what their own house will look like. They read your Google reviews, and they take recent negative ones seriously. They check whether you have sold anything similar nearby and what it went for.
Then they book two or three valuations, usually in the same week, and choose within a fortnight. The choice is rarely made on the highest figure alone, although over-valuing still wins more instructions than the industry likes to admit. It is made on a combination of the number, the fee, and whether the valuer sounded like they knew the street.
What wins is evidence rather than adjectives. Sold prices on their road with dates. Photography that is visibly better than the other agents on the same portal page. A fee stated without theatrics. Reviews from the last six months rather than a wall of five-year-old ones. And speed of response, because the agent who returns the valuation request within the hour is frequently the one who gets seen first and sets the anchor for the other two.
Which channel wins here
Google search wins for valuations. Somebody typing “house valuation [town]” has declared themselves a potential instruction, and the volume, while modest, is the most valuable traffic in the sector. Local SEO and Google Business Profile matter for the same reason, and reviews do double duty because vendors read them during the shortlist.
Meta is genuinely strong here, which is unusual among the sectors we work in. Vendors are not searching yet, but they do notice a “just sold in your street” post targeted to a handful of postcodes, and that creative reliably outperforms anything generic. Lettings landlord campaigns work on Meta too, because portfolio landlords are a definable interest audience.
Now the honest part. Bidding against Rightmove and Zoopla for property browsing terms is money set on fire; they have more budget and the traffic is buyers who generate no fee. Bidding on online-only agent brand names is expensive and converts badly, because those searchers are specifically looking for a fixed fee. And the largest single driver of instructions in this sector remains local presence and canvassing, which is not something we do. We would rather say so than sell you digital as a replacement for boards and door-knocking.
Why keeping them matters more than winning them
A vendor is a one-off; a landlord is an annuity. Most agencies market hard for sale instructions and do almost nothing to keep managed landlords, who leave quietly over service rather than fees. The higher-return work is usually retention: landlord communication that makes the management fee visible, review requests at the right moment, and a nurture list for past vendors who will move again in five to eight years and currently hear nothing from you. Withdrawn and unsold instructions deserve the same treatment, because a vendor who takes their house off the market in October is a live prospect again in February.
Questions from estate agents & lettings
Should we advertise our property listings on Google?
Almost never. Searches for houses for sale in your town are dominated by the portals, who will outbid you, and the people clicking are buyers rather than vendors. Buyers cost you money to service and generate no fee unless they later sell through you. Put the budget on valuation and landlord searches, and let the portals carry the applicant traffic.
How do we compete with fixed-fee online agents?
Not on price, and not by pretending the fee gap does not exist. Compete on the things they structurally cannot do: accompanied viewings, a valuer who knows the street, negotiation on the day, and chasing a chain through to completion. Vendors who chose a fixed fee and had a poor experience are also a legitimate audience, and they are searchable.
What is a realistic cost per valuation?
In UK local search, somewhere between £50 and £150 per booked market appraisal is a common range, higher in London and competitive commuter towns. Judge it against your appraisal to instruction rate and your average fee rather than in isolation. If you convert four in ten and average £3,500, even the top of that range is inexpensive.
Is lettings marketing different from sales marketing?
Different enough to need its own campaign. The landlord is buying an ongoing service, compares management percentages openly, and cares about compliance, void periods and tenant quality rather than a headline valuation. The seasonality differs too. Merged with sales, lettings gets the smaller share of the budget despite producing the recurring revenue.
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