The portals are watching your vendors before they move

Zoopla's MyHome tracks valuations for roughly six million homeowners, watching for the signals that someone is thinking about moving, so it can route them to an agent at the right moment. Read that twice, because it describes something significant: the portal is no longer waiting at the point of search. It has moved upstream, to the months before anyone types anything.

Why upstream matters

By the time a vendor is searching for an agent, the decision is half made. They have a shortlist in their head, usually assembled from boards they have driven past, a name a neighbour mentioned, and whoever has been quietly present while they idly wondered what the house is worth. That wondering phase can last a year or more, and historically no one owned it. Now a portal is trying to.

If a homeowner spends that year checking an estimate on a portal, the portal knows more about their intent than you do, and it is in a position to decide which agent gets introduced. That is a service being sold back to you, built on a relationship that could have been yours.

The answer is not to compete on scale

You are not going to out-database a portal, and you should not try. What you can do is be the place your local homeowners check, because you know things about their street that no national estimate does. A portal's number is an algorithm applied to comparable sales. Yours can be an algorithm applied to comparable sales plus the fact that the two flats on that corner both sold above asking last month, and the school catchment changed, and the extension next door set a new ceiling.

What that looks like on a website

An instant valuation tool that gives a genuine, useful figure rather than a thinly disguised lead capture form. Homeowners can tell the difference immediately, and a tool that demands an email before showing anything gets abandoned. Give the number, then earn the conversation by being obviously worth talking to.

Then follow up like a human. A homeowner who checked their value is not a lead to be hammered; they are someone at the start of a long think. A short, useful email when something relevant happens on their street beats a fortnightly nag, a point we make at greater length in our piece on nurturing vendors without nagging them.

And make sure the tool is on your own site, with your own name on it, feeding your own system. A valuation tool that lives on a third party's platform is a relationship you are renting.

The lettings equivalent

The same logic applies to landlords, who are, if anything, easier to reach this way. A landlord checking what their property might now let for is telling you they are reviewing their arrangements, which is exactly the moment a switch becomes possible. We covered this specifically in our article on the rental valuation tool that grows your book.

The point

Portals are excellent at scale and they will keep moving earlier into the journey, because that is where the value is. The defence is not to match them. It is to be genuinely, specifically local at the moment someone starts wondering, on a website that belongs to you. That relationship, once it exists, is very hard for anyone to buy away from you.

If your site does not yet have a valuation tool worth using, or has one that nobody finishes, our estate agent websites build it into the funnel properly, and a free site review will show you where vendors are currently dropping out.