The estate agency template, and why it never books a valuation.

The four parts

Almost every estate agency website in the country is built from the same kit:

1. A hero with a search bar. A photograph of a street, a town or a front door, and a box asking where you would like to live.
2. Something about the agency. Local knowledge, friendly team, established in 1987.
3. Properties for sale. A grid of the current stock, pulled from the CRM.
4. A blog. Usually three posts, the newest one two years old.

Then, somewhere near the top right, a button that says Free Valuation. That button is doing all the work, and it is doing it alone.

Who that website is actually for

The search bar serves a buyer. Buyers are useful, and they are also already on Rightmove and Zoopla, where the stock is bigger and the search is better. An agency website will not out-search a portal, and it does not need to.

The person who pays the agency is the vendor. They are not searching. They are comparing. They are sitting at home in the evening with three agency websites open, deciding which one to let into their house. On the standard template, that person is offered a stock photograph, a paragraph about the team, other people's houses, and a form.

The vendor is the visitor worth thousands of pounds, and the template gives them nothing to do except fill in a form and hope.

Why the form is where it ends

A Free Valuation button opens a form. A form asks the vendor to volunteer their name, address and phone number, and then to wait. It gives nothing back, promises nothing, and asks for the most private thing in the exchange first.

Compare that with what the vendor actually wants at that moment, which is usually much simpler. What is my house worth, roughly. Who are you. What will you do that the other two will not. When can you come. A form answers none of those, so most people leave, and the agency never knows they were there.

What we build instead

Same information, different job. The site is built to take one person, the vendor, from curious to booked, and to make every other visitor's next step obvious.

• One idea per screen, in an order. The site makes an argument, in a sequence, the way a good valuation appointment does. It does not present nine equal options and wait.
• A valuation journey, not a valuation form. The vendor is taken by the hand: a few easy questions, real answers along the way, and a time in the diary at the end. Booking a valuation should feel like booking a restaurant, not applying for a mortgage.
• Property shown properly, and enquiring made trivial. Big pictures, fast pages, and a way to ask about a house that takes one tap and no account.
• Speed. Vendors compare agents on a phone, at night, often on a poor connection. A site that takes four seconds to appear has already lost to the one that took one.
• Local pages that are actually local. Real streets, real numbers, real sold boards, so the agency turns up when somebody searches their town and not just their name.

How to tell which one you have

Open your own website on your phone, as a vendor rather than as the owner, and ask four questions.

1. In the first screen, is there anything that speaks to somebody thinking of selling?
2. How many taps from landing to a time in the diary?
3. What do I get back before I hand over my phone number?
4. If you removed the logo, could you tell it from the agency down the road?

If the honest answers are nothing, too many, nothing and no, the website is a brochure. That may be all you need it to be. If you want it to bring in instructions, it has to be built for that job on purpose.