The best argument you own is not on your website

A note first. This article describes what we found on eleven agency websites on 9 November 2026, and makes some suggestions about publishing trading figures. It is not legal, data protection or advertising compliance advice. Any performance figure you publish needs to be one you can evidence, and if you are thinking of using HM Land Registry data on your own site, read the licence terms on the download page rather than relying on our summary of them.

Think about what a vendor is doing when they look at two agency websites on a Sunday evening. They are not comparing fees, not yet, and they are not reading the buying guide. They are trying to work out which of you can sell their house. Not houses in general. Their house, on their road, at something close to the figure you are about to put on it.

Most of what would settle that is already in your office. You know what you listed, what you agreed, what it completed at, how long it took and how close to the asking price you landed. In our view it is the most useful material an agency owns for winning an instruction, because it is specific, local and about results rather than adjectives.

So we went and looked at what agency websites actually show a vendor about it.

What we found, on 9 November 2026

Eleven agency brands, twelve pages. We searched for estate agents in six towns, Shrewsbury, Lincoln, Taunton, Colchester, Hereford and Carlisle, covering six counties between them. The results were mostly portals and directories, so the sample is the agency owned sites that surfaced. That is not a neutral selection and we will not pretend otherwise: search ranking favours the firms spending most on being found. It covers independents, regional groups with branch networks, national chains and franchise branches.

One of the eleven gave a vendor a usable answer about what it had sold.

Three of the twelve pages showed properties with a Sold tag, and those three pages come from three different brands, one of which is the firm above. Not one of the three said what the house actually sold for. Every price shown next to a sold property was an asking price, a guide price, an offers in excess of figure, or unlabelled.

That is the number a vendor is actually curious about. A house marked sold at a guide price of three hundred and twenty five thousand tells them nothing, because the question is whether it went for that or for two hundred and ninety five. Showing the tag and leaving out the achieved figure raises the question and then declines to answer it.

So two brands showed sold properties without saying what they sold for, and the remaining eight showed no sold evidence at all. No sold section, no examples, no trading figures, nothing a vendor could point at and say: they sell houses like mine.

And on none of the eleven was there a link in the main navigation to the agency's own sold work. One brand does have Sold house prices in its menu, but that leads to a general price lookup rather than to anything that firm sold. The site that does publish its record has an in-page link reading Properties we've sold, which is the right idea, but it sits inside a page rather than in the menu, so you have to already be on that page to find it.

Eleven is a sample, not a survey, and two limits matter. Pages were read as fetched, so a sold section built with scripts a plain fetch does not run would read here as nothing, which means the count understates rather than overstates. And twelve pages is not a whole site each. That is why the navigation finding is the one we would stand on hardest: a menu is on every page, so if the sold work is not in it, a vendor is not being pointed at it.

The numbers agents do publish

Here is the part that surprised us.

Seven of the eleven put some number in front of the visitor. Four published no figure about themselves at all.

Of those seven, one published trading results. The other six published a founding date in the early 1800s, another founding date in the 1840s, a founding date in the 1960s, a run of lettings franchise awards over six consecutive years, a run of national sales awards over four consecutive years, and a count of online reviews in the hundreds.

Every one of those is worth having and we are not sneering at any of them. A long history and a shelf of awards are real achievements. They just do not answer the question the vendor came with. A founding date says the firm has lasted, not whether you can shift a three-bedroom semi on their street in the next three months. An award says a panel of judges liked the business. A review count says people were pleased, usually without saying whether they were selling, buying or renting.

One qualification. One brand did show a percentage giving what proportion of sales over the previous twelve months were flats, though its page does not say whether that is its own sales or the local market. Either way it describes a mix rather than a result.

The one that does it properly

We are not naming them. The point is the pattern, not the firm, and it has not asked to be an example. Roughly, this is what it puts in front of a vendor: a carousel of properties it has agreed sales on, headed with the period it covers, each giving the street, the town, the property type and a price. Then, separately, the trading figures. Sales in four figures over a twelve-month period, viewings in five figures, a couple of thousand qualified buyers on the books, and the average percentage of asking price achieved across all branches, which is ninety seven per cent.

That last figure is the one doing the work. The carousel is nice, but like the other two sites its prices are not labelled as achieved, so a vendor cannot tell what they mean. A vendor comparing two agents does not really want to know how many houses you sold. They want to know whether the price you quote is roughly the price they get, and one honest aggregate figure with the period on it does more for that than any amount of copy. And it is a regional firm with branches doing this, not a national with a data team.

And the catch, which is just as instructive

The figures on that site carry an asterisk, and the asterisk gives the period as October 2023 to September 2024.

So the best example in our sample is describing a twelve-month period that ended more than two years before the date we read it, while the copy around it says in the last year.

That is not a dig, and we would rather have their page than the eight with nothing on them. It is the real difficulty with this idea. Publishing your record is easy once; keeping it true is the work, and a figure that impressed when it went up turns into a liability as it ages, because evidence with an out of date period on it is worse than none.

Two ways to deal with it. Somebody owns the job and updates the figures on a date in the diary, which works as long as that person stays. Or the numbers come out of the system that already runs the website, so they stay true whether anybody remembers or not. We would pick the second and we have an obvious interest in saying so, but the first is a real option plenty of firms could do tomorrow.

"We cannot publish what houses sold for"

That is the obvious objection, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a brush off. There are three strands to it, and only one of them is a real obstacle.

Is the price secret? Not permanently, in England and Wales. Residential sales lodged for registration go into HM Land Registry's Price Paid Data, published monthly on the twentieth working day. Scotland and Northern Ireland work differently and are not in that dataset.

The timing matters though, and it cuts against the quick version of this argument. Land Registry says registration typically lags the sale by two weeks to two months, occasionally longer, and that the two most recent months of data are incomplete. So for an older completion the price is already public. For one in the last couple of months, it may well not be. And if you are thinking of pulling that data onto your own site, read the licence terms on the download page first: the price data is published for reuse under the Open Government Licence, and the download page sets separate conditions on the address component, which we are not summarising here because the two gov.uk pages do not describe them the same way.

Has the vendor agreed to it? A fair question, and the one nobody raises. Using a specific client's sale as marketing is different from reporting your own figures. Whether your agency agreement covers it is worth checking, and a completed, registered sale is safer to feature than one still subject to contract.

Do you need any of this to make the argument? No, and this is the useful part. The strongest version uses your own figures in aggregate and names no property at all.

Here is the shape of it. The figures below are invented, so please do not quote them back at us.

Eighty one homes sold in the twelve months to September 2026, at an average of ninety four per cent of the asking price, taking on average fifty one days to a sale being agreed.

No address, no property, nothing from anybody else's data. It comes out of your own records, and we think it is the most convincing thing most agents could put on a website. One caution on identifiability: at the volume most firms sell, no individual sale can be worked out from a figure like that. If you sell a handful of houses a year in one village, that stops being true.

What to actually put up

In rough order of how much we think each is worth.

• Your aggregate figures, with the period stated on them. Sales agreed, average percentage of asking price, average time to sale agreed. There is more to say about which of those figures are worth trusting and which flatter you, and we will come back to that, but any of them stated honestly beats none. The period is not a detail. It is what makes the number believable, and it is the thing the one good site in our sample got wrong.
• Properties you have sold, kept current. Street and town is usually enough and often better than a full address. Enough of them that a vendor finds something near enough to their own house to count.
• A way for a vendor to see your work near them. Somebody in a particular village wants to know what you have sold in that village, not across the county. We think that is where a lot of the persuasive power sits, though we should say none of the sites in our sample were tested for it, so that is judgement rather than finding.
• A before-and-after story or two, told plainly. Relisted at a revised figure in the spring and agreed within three weeks, that sort of thing. One caution: write it so it does not become a claim about the previous agent. The interesting part is what changed, not whose fault the first attempt was.

Where it goes

The obvious place is a page under About Us, next to the history and the team photos. We would argue that is wrong, because it puts the evidence where a vendor goes once they are already interested rather than where they are deciding.

Two better places. In the main navigation, where a vendor browsing can find it without hunting, which is where none of the eleven had it. And beside the valuation request, because that is the point where somebody is weighing up whether to hand over their address and phone number. We wrote about that form on 5 November 2026, and the two arguments join up: the form asks a vendor to trust you, and the sold record is what earns it.

The measure

Open your own site on your phone and start from the homepage, the way a vendor would. Can you find out how many houses the firm sold over a stated period, and what percentage of the asking price it achieved?

If it takes you more than about fifteen seconds, a vendor will not get there at all, because they are giving you far less attention than you give your own website. They will look at the next agent's site for the same thing.