Estate agents and property
The portal brings you buyers. Buyers do not pay you. Instructions pay you, and almost nothing in a typical agency's marketing is aimed at winning one.
You are an estate agent, a lettings business or a property firm. Your income is commission on completions, your stock is instructions, and the portals have most of the buyer demand.
You spend a great deal on portals and a little on your own marketing, and you could not say what a valuation booking costs you or which of them became an instruction.
What we keep finding
Five things that are true across agencies.
This is a sector with enormous marketing spend and very little marketing measurement, largely because the portals made it possible to ignore the question for fifteen years.
The whole budget is aimed at buyers, who are not the customer
Buyers are abundant and free. Vendors and landlords are scarce and worth thousands each. Agencies routinely spend nine tenths of their marketing attention on the abundant side of that equation.
A valuation request is counted, a valuation attended is not
A meaningful share of booked valuations never happen, and the share varies wildly by source. An agency optimising on requests is optimising toward the sources that produce the flakiest ones.
Instruction win rate is a feeling rather than a number
Most agents can tell you roughly what they win. Very few can tell you what they win by valuer, by source or by property value band, which is where the actual management decisions are.
Portal spend is never compared with own channel spend
Both produce instructions eventually, through very different routes, and almost no agency has cost per instruction from each side by side. It is usually the largest unexamined line in the business.
The lettings and sales sides are measured with one set of numbers
A landlord is a recurring revenue relationship and a vendor is a one off transaction. They are worth different amounts, take different lengths of time and need different advertising.
Between the click and this sign there are four months, two people and about nine steps. Most agencies measure the first one and the last one.
What changes
What you can say afterwards.
What a valuation costs, and what an attended one costs
Two different numbers, both worth having, and the gap between them is usually the first thing worth fixing.
Which sources produce instructions
Followed through from the click to the signed agency agreement, with the time it took recorded.
What the portals are really worth
Compared with your own channels on cost per instruction, so the renewal negotiation is one you can have with numbers in front of you.
Where each valuer stands
Win rate by valuer and by price band, which is a management number rather than a marketing one and is usually more valuable than either.
What we measure here
The numbers an agency runs on.
- Valuation requested, valuation attended and instruction won, as three events
- Instruction win rate by source, valuer and price band
- Attribution windows extended to match a four month decision, not a thirty day default
- Sales and lettings separated throughout, with their own values
- Portal cost per instruction against own channel cost per instruction
- Vendor and landlord campaigns funded separately from buyer traffic
- Completion value fed back, so the advertising learns what a large instruction looks like
Questions people ask
The ones that actually arrive.
Can you connect this to Reapit or Alto?
In most cases yes. What we need is valuations, instructions and completions with dates and values, which those systems hold. Where the export is genuinely locked down, a weekly summary from the office works and we would set it up that way rather than wait six months for an integration.
Should we come off Rightmove?
Not on our advice, and not without a year of your own channel producing instructions first. Agencies that leave before they have built an alternative usually go back. What we can do is give you the number that makes it a real decision instead of a gamble.
Our marketing is mostly leaflets and local sponsorship.
Some of that genuinely works in this trade and it is measurable with a bit of care: dedicated numbers, dedicated landing pages, a control area that gets nothing. We would rather measure what you already do than replace it on principle.
How long before this pays for itself?
Longer than in most sectors, because the cycle is long. Expect the first honest read at about three months and a proper picture at six. Anybody promising you instructions in week four is describing a leaflet drop.
Proof
An Australian taxi company
More calls, at less than half the cost, by telling Google which callers paid.
A different sector. It is the proof for the method rather than for the market: the conversion was redefined, the reported number got smaller, and the money got larger.
Read the case study- more booking calls
+27%
more booking calls
- lower cost per call
−56%
lower cost per call
- average cost per click
$2.10
average cost per click
Where this usually starts
Two pieces of work, in this order.
Businesses that sell the same way
Your turn
Bring the number you do not trust.
30 minutes. Most of these conversations start with somebody describing a report they have stopped believing.