Your valuation form is costing you instructions

A valuation request is the only thing on an agency website that turns directly into money. Everything else, every search, every saved property, every look at the team page, is somebody browsing. A valuation request is a person putting their hand up and saying they are thinking about selling.

So it is strange how little thought the form usually gets. It tends to be whatever the previous website had, or whatever the form builder defaulted to, with a few fields added over the years because somebody in the office once wished they had known something before the call.

So we went and counted. Nine agency valuation forms, taken off the top of a search rather than picked, a mix of national chains and independents. They asked eight, eight, ten, thirteen, fourteen, fourteen, fifteen, fifteen and fifteen questions. The middle of that is fourteen.

Counting them was harder than it should have been, and that is a finding in itself. Two of the pages we opened had no valuation form of their own at all. They hand the seller straight to an external booking tool on a supplier's domain, so the form that seller meets is somebody else's, with somebody else's questions on it, and the agency cannot change a field on it without asking that supplier. A third ran its form through a separate lead handling service. If the most valuable page on your website belongs to somebody else, that is worth knowing.

Nine is not a survey and we are not going to pretend it is. But not one of them asked three, five of them asked thirteen or more, and every single one asked something that belonged in a conversation rather than on a form.

What the form is for

It is not for collecting information. It is for starting a conversation.

That distinction decides every other question on this page. If the form is an intake, then more fields are better, because each one saves the office a job. If the form is an invitation, then every field is a reason to stop, and the only ones worth keeping are the ones you cannot have the conversation without.

The information is not lost by leaving it out. It is simply gathered later, by a person, from somebody who has already agreed to talk to you and will happily answer. Nobody has ever refused to say how many bedrooms they have once the valuer is standing in the hall.

Count the fields on yours

Go and look at it now, and count.

What you need in order to make contact is a name, one way to reach them, and the address of the property. That is three, and the address is the only one that is genuinely non-negotiable beyond the obvious, because without it you cannot route the enquiry to the right branch or arrive at the right house.

Everything else is a decision to spend some of their patience. Sometimes that is worth it. Usually nobody has decided either way.

The fields that do the most damage, roughly in order:

Why are you thinking of moving? This asks somebody to explain themselves before they trust you. People move for redundancies, separations, bereavements and illnesses, and your form has just asked them to pick one from a dropdown. Even where the answer is a cheerful one, it is a question that belongs to a conversation, not to a web form.

When are you looking to move? Five of the nine asked a version of this, and one offered seven options running from ready to sell now down to just curious. A seller who does not know yet has to either guess or lie, and just curious is not a box anybody wants to tick about themselves in front of an estate agent. The honest ones close the tab.

How did you hear about us? One of the nine asked it. That is your question, not theirs. You are asking the vendor to do your marketing attribution by hand, badly, at the exact moment they are trying to leave. Your analytics already knows, or it should.

Your title. Three of the nine wanted to know whether you are Mr, Mrs, Miss or Ms before they wanted your name, and one offered seven options including Rev and Sir. It is the first thing the form asks and it changes nothing about the valuation.

Are you also looking to buy? A fair question for the call, because the answer changes who in the office picks it up. On the form it reads as being qualified before you have been met.

None of these are bad questions. They are good questions asked at the wrong moment, by the wrong thing.

Instant figures, and being straight about them

An instant online valuation is a genuinely useful tool, and we build them. It is also, if we are honest with ourselves, a way of exchanging a number for an email address.

That works when the number is presented as what it is: a broad estimate drawn from sold prices nearby, which knows nothing about your extension, your kitchen, or the fact that the house next door backs onto a bypass. Vendors understand that perfectly well when you say it. They are not fools, and the ones who are going to instruct you are not put off by an honest caveat.

What does damage is the version that promises an instant valuation and then quietly turns out to be a form that books an appointment. The vendor came for a number, gave you their details, got a phone call instead, and has learned something about how you operate before you have said a word to them.

Pick one and be straight about it. Either give them a figure and explain its limits, or ask for the appointment and say plainly that a real valuation needs somebody to look at the place. Both are respectable. The bait is not.

What happens when they press send

This is the most wasted moment on most agency websites.

The typical confirmation says thank you, we will be in touch shortly, which tells the vendor nothing and leaves them with a small quiet doubt about whether the form worked at all.

Use it. Tell them who will call, from roughly what number, and when. Tell them what the call will be about and how long it takes. If you book valuations in a particular way, say so. A confirmation that reads "Sarah or Mark will call you from an 01743 number, usually within a working day, to find a time that suits you" does more for your conversion rate than any amount of work on the form itself, because it turns an unanswered form into an expected call.

Then send the same thing by email, because people forget, and because an email with a name in it is harder to ignore than a withheld number at half past four.

And a small thing that is not small. If somebody fills in that form at eleven at night, which plenty do, the confirmation should not imply they are about to get a phone call. We will call you tomorrow morning reads as competence. We will be in touch shortly, at eleven at night, reads as a lie.

Most of them are filled in on a phone

Usually in the evening, often on a sofa, frequently one-handed.

That means the phone number field brings up a number pad rather than a keyboard. It means the address is a postcode lookup rather than typed out by hand. Five of the nine made the visitor type it out, and one of those offered six separate address lines, which is a lot of thumbing for something a postcode already knows. It means no date picker that fights the thumb, and no dropdown with thirty options where a text box would do.

It also means the button has to be reachable and obvious. A pale outlined button at the foot of a long form, on a phone, at night, is a button that does not get pressed. That is not a question of taste, it is whether the form works.

One more, about the consent box

Most agency forms end with a wall of tick boxes and small print. What the wording has to say is a question for whoever advises you, and we are not that.

The design question is ours, and it is this. It does not have to be the first thing they meet, it does not have to be four boxes where one would do, and it does not have to be set in grey six point type that reads as something you are hoping nobody looks at. A clear sentence in the same size as everything else, saying what you will do with their details, costs nothing and reads as an agency that has thought about it.

Where the form lives

One route, reachable from everywhere, rather than a single buried page called Valuation.

The place most agencies miss is the property pages. Somebody reading a listing in their own street, or a page marked sold on a house like theirs, is the most likely vendor on your whole website. A quiet line on that page offering to tell them what theirs is worth will outperform the valuation page itself, because it reaches them at the moment the thought occurs rather than waiting for them to go looking for it.

The measure

Here is the question worth asking before any of the above.

How many valuation requests did your website produce last month?

If you cannot answer that without ringing somebody, then the form is not the first job. Knowing is the first job. You cannot tell whether a change helped if the only evidence is a feeling about how busy the office has been.

Once you can see the number, all of this becomes testable, and the arguments stop being matters of opinion.