A property goes under offer. What does your website actually do about it?

Every agency website handles under offer. Almost none of them handles it deliberately.

What usually happens is that the status comes across from the CRM, the site puts a badge on the photo, and that is the end of the thinking. The property stays in the search results looking much as it did. The viewing button still says request a viewing. The page keeps the same title, the same call to action, the same everything. Then one day the sale completes, somebody deletes the listing, and the page starts returning a not found error to anyone who had saved it.

None of that is a bug. Each of those is a decision that nobody made.

Start from what the status means to the person reading it

Three different people land on an under offer property, and they want three different things.

The buyer who has just found it wants to know whether it is worth asking. Not whether it is technically still available, which is a solicitor's question, but whether there is any point in them picking up the phone. Most sites answer that question with a badge and leave them to guess.

The buyer who saw it last week and is coming back wants to know what happened. If the page has quietly vanished they do not conclude that the house sold. They conclude that your website is broken.

And the vendor three streets away, who is not shopping at all, is reading something else entirely. They are reading evidence. A page that says a house like theirs went under offer is the most persuasive thing on the whole site, and it costs nothing to produce because it is a by-product of doing the job.

That third reader is the one who justifies all the work below, and the one almost every agency site ignores.

The badge is the least of it

Get the badge right, by all means. It wants to be legible rather than tasteful: a pale grey flash set in a thin typeface on a photograph is invisible to anybody whose eyesight is less than perfect, and it is doing an important job. Give it a solid block of colour and weight behind the letters, and keep it clear of the part of the photograph that sells the house.

But the badge is a label, not a response. The response is everything else on the page.

The call to action is the big one. On most sites, an under offer property still invites you to book a viewing. Think about what that produces. Somebody fills in a form asking to see a house that is under offer, your negotiator rings them back to explain that they cannot, and a person who was keen enough to fill in a form has their first conversation with your agency be a disappointment. You generated the lead and then spent it on an apology.

Change the invitation instead of removing it. The person on that page has just told you a great deal: the area they want, the price they can manage, the sort of house they like. The right thing to offer them is to hear first about the next one. Not a newsletter. The next one like this. That single change turns the worst enquiry on your site into one of the best, and it is a few hours of work.

And leave something to press. A page with every button taken away reads as a dead end, and sends people back to a portal to carry on their search, which is the one outcome you are paying to avoid.

The second call to action is for the vendor. On a sold page in particular, there is a reader thinking about their own house. A quiet line offering to tell them what theirs is worth belongs there. Not shouted, and not instead of the buyer's option. Alongside it.

What the search results should do

This is where opinions differ, and the honest answer is that it depends on how much stock you have.

Showing under offer properties in search results is usually right. They are proof that you sell houses, they give a thin set of results some body, and a buyer who sees one near miss is more likely to register than one who sees three available homes and nothing else. The agency's own website is not a portal, and all of those homes are yours.

The failure mode is letting them crowd out what somebody can actually buy. If a buyer sorts by price and gets a screen of homes under offer before reaching one that is available, the site has wasted their time and yours. Two rules fix it. Available properties sort above unavailable ones by default, whatever else the sort is doing. And the filter to hide them exists and is easy to find, rather than being a checkbox hidden behind an advanced panel.

The thing not to do is show the same badge for under offer, sold subject to contract and sold. They mean different things to a buyer, and collapsing them into one grey label throws away information you already hold.

When it completes, do not delete the page

This is the one that quietly costs money.

A listing page that has been live for three months has been found by search engines, linked to, shared and saved. Delete it and every one of those routes ends in a not found error. The visitor assumes the site is broken, and you have thrown away a page that was still working for you.

Two defensible options, in order of preference.

1. Keep the page, mark it sold, and change what it asks for. The photographs stay, the description stays, the badge says sold, and the calls to action become the two described above. The page keeps whatever search value it had earned, and it joins your evidence pile. This is the right answer for almost every agency.

2. Or redirect it to something genuinely relevant. If a page has to go, send it to the search results for that area or that type of property, not to the homepage. Google's own advice on removed pages is to redirect where the content has moved, and otherwise to let the old address answer honestly. It names redirecting to your homepage among the things to avoid, and it treats a page that answers with a success or a redirect where a not found belongs as a soft 404, which it describes as confusing to both users and search engines. Bulk redirecting every expired listing to the homepage is the most common version of this mistake, and it is specifically the one the documentation warns about.

And if a page really is gone with nothing equivalent to replace it, let it return a proper not found, with a page that offers a search box and a route back in. That is what Google advises for content that has been permanently deleted, and it is the better experience too: an honest dead end that helps beats a redirect that pretends.

The sold archive is a page you already own

Most agency sites have no recently sold section. The data exists, the photographs exist, the work is already done, and the page that results is the single most useful thing you can put in front of a prospective vendor.

It wants to be a shop window rather than a database. Enough properties to look convincing, shown with their photographs, recent first, filterable by area, and a valuation invitation at the foot. No prices if you would rather not, and no dates if the stock is thin. The persuasion is in the volume and the photographs, not in the detail.

One warning. An archive that stops updating is worse than no archive, because the most recent thing on it becomes a date. If the newest entry is eight months old, a vendor reads that as a quiet period. Which brings us to the real point.

None of this should involve anybody remembering

Every change described here has to happen automatically, driven by the status in your CRM, or it will not happen at all.

A process that depends on somebody updating the website when a sale is agreed works for about three weeks. Then it is a busy Friday, and a property sits available on your site while it says under offer on the portals, and a buyer who notices trusts neither. That is not a discipline problem. It is a design problem, and the fix is that the website reacts to the feed rather than to a person. If the feed itself has stopped, that is a different fault with its own symptoms.

So the question to put to whoever runs your site is not whether somebody can add a sold badge. It is this: when the status changes in the CRM, what changes on the site, and who had to be told?

If the answer is a badge and nothing else, there is a morning's work here that will pay for itself with one registration.