The portal already has the buyers. You are competing for the seller.
Every agent in town advertises the same flats to the same buyers on the same site. None of that decides who gets the next instruction.
The short answer
Buyers go to the portal, because that is where every property is. Your listing competes there on price and photographs and very little else.
The seller is the scarce thing. Winning that is a different job and almost nobody spends money on it.
Why the portal is not your marketing
Paying to list on a portal puts you in a row with every rival, on a page the portal owns, in front of a buyer who will never learn your name. It is distribution and it is necessary.
It is not a reason anybody would choose you to sell their flat, which is the only decision that grows an agency.
What a seller is actually deciding
Somebody thinking of selling wants to know what their place is worth, how long it will take, and whether you have sold anything like it nearby.
They usually think about it for months before ringing anybody. That long quiet period is the whole opportunity, and it is not on the portal.
Where the money should go instead
Pages about the streets you actually sell in, what went recently and roughly for what. Ads aimed at the people who own in those streets rather than at everyone looking to buy.
That is a smaller audience and a much shorter distance to an instruction.
The photographs are the product
A seller judges you by the last listing you published, because it is the only evidence of how theirs will look. Bad photographs do not just cost you that sale. They cost you the next instruction, from somebody who saw them and quietly decided.
Questions worth asking
My listings are on the portals. Why my own site?
The portals sell you to buyers. Your site sells you to sellers, and sellers are where the money is. That is a different page making a different argument.
Should I advertise properties or myself?
Properties get the clicks. Advertising yourself gets the instructions. Run the property ads if you want the traffic, but the campaign that pays is the one aimed at somebody deciding who to list with.
What happens to a listing after it sells?
Keep it, marked as sold. A page of what you sold is the argument for instructing you, and deleting it throws away the only proof you have.
How fast do I have to reply?
Faster than you think. Enquiries go to whoever answers first far more often than to whoever is best, and most of them arrive outside office hours.
What decides the price?
Whether you want the site, the ads or both, how many languages, and whether the listings come out of a system you already use. Ads on their own are a small setup.
Tell us where your last 3 instructions came from, and we will tell you whether the portal had anything to do with it. Get a free audit.
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