How can your website win more landlords?

Most advice on winning landlords is about service: answer quickly, keep tenants happy, ask for referrals. All true, and none of it is seen by a landlord who has not yet picked up the phone. The website’s job comes earlier. A landlord deciding whom to call is told by Rightmove exactly what to check, and most of it can be answered on your own pages.

So the short answer: give landlords a section of their own that shows the homes you have let, explains each level of service with its fees, introduces the people who will manage the property and lets them book a rental valuation with the lettings team. Then make sure every rental listing on your site is the kind of advert a landlord would want for their own home, and lawful under the rules that changed in May 2026.

The government’s English Private Landlord Survey 2024, which heard from over 9,000 landlords between April and May 2024, gives the picture for England. Its figures cover landlords who registered a tenant’s deposit directly.

• Half have no agent. 52% said they used no agent, close to 49% in 2021 and 52% in 2018. 43% used an agent’s letting services and 18% its management services.
• Most are small. 45% owned one rental property and 38% owned two to four. The 17% with five or more held 49% of tenancies.
• Bigger landlords use agents more. 63% of landlords with five or more properties used an agent for letting, against 50% with two to four and 30% with one.
• Many are thinking of selling. 31% planned to shrink their portfolio in the next two years, including 16% who planned to sell everything.

Two things follow for the website. First, the landlord you most need to persuade has often never used an agent, so the page has to explain what letting and management actually involve, not assume they know. Second, if you sell as well as let, a landlord selling up is a sales instruction. A landlord section that offers a sales valuation as well as a rental one keeps that client when they leave the sector.

Rightmove’s guide “How to choose an agent as a landlord” (July 2025, updated August 2025) is unusually specific. It tells landlords to “spend some time searching the internet as if you were a tenant looking for a property like yours”, to compare “the quality of photos, descriptions, floorplans, and rents of different agents”, and to include let agreed homes “so you can see which agents are letting similar properties to yours”. It suggests a shortlist of four to six agents and a phone call with each, and advises not to talk about fees straight away.

Its list of questions is, in effect, a brief for a landlord page:

If your website answers these, the phone call starts further on. If it does not, the landlord fills the gaps from whichever of the four to six agents does. Keeping let homes on the site works the same way as keeping sold ones, and the wording and permission points in our guide to showing sold properties apply to lettings too. Any figure you publish about how quickly you let should come straight from your own records.

In our view, a landlord section that wins instructions has five parts.

1. Service levels explained plainly. Let only, rent collection and full management, what each includes and what the landlord still does themselves. Remember the survey: half of landlords manage without an agent and need to see what they would be handing over.
2. The fees, as the law requires. In England, section 83 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015 requires a letting agent with a website to publish its fees there, each described and priced including tax, with its redress and client money protection schemes named; regulation 4 of the Client Money Protection Schemes Regulations 2019 adds a copy of the certificate. Link each service level to the fees page rather than burying it in the footer. Our guide to publishing fees covers how to show them.
3. The people. Who manages the property, where they are based and how a landlord reaches them, because Rightmove tells landlords to ask exactly that.
4. Proof. Homes you have let, landlord reviews and the areas and property types you know best. Rightmove tells landlords to look for an agent with “experience in your type of property”, so a student let specialist or a family homes specialist should say so.
5. One clear next step. A rental valuation booking that goes to the lettings team, not a general enquiry form, and for landlords thinking of selling, a route to a sales valuation.

Rightmove sends landlords to look at the homes you are marketing now. On your own website those listings usually come from the same feed as the portals, so they need the same care: good photographs, a floorplan, a description that reads like someone has been inside.

They also need a price. Since 1 May 2026, under the Renters’ Rights Act 2025, a written advert for a home to let in England, including “an online property advert”, must state a specific rent, not a range, and a landlord or “letting agent cannot ask for, encourage or accept an offer that is higher than the advertised rent”. The government’s guidance for councils lists failing to include a price in a written advert as a breach, and says websites that only host adverts cannot be found liable; the landlord or agent who publishes the advert is. The landlord guidance puts the fine at up to £7,000 for a first breach.

For the website, that means three checks: every rental listing shows a rent, including any your feed marks as price on application; nothing on a listing or enquiry form invites offers above it; and a landlord reading your listings sees an agency that follows the rules it will be applying to their property.

Traffic tells you little. A lettings website gets most of its visits from tenants, so a rise in visitors can hide a fall in landlord enquiries. Google Analytics lets you mark an event as a key event, “an action that’s particularly important to the success of your business”; make the rental valuation booking one, separate from viewing requests, and compare it month by month and against the landlords you actually take on.

We build one bespoke website per agency, one agency per patch. How we design estate agent websites shows what goes into one, and lettings as well as sales is one of the things that moves a project up the range on our pricing page.

• Rightmove: How to choose an agent as a landlord (28 July 2025, updated 27 August 2025)
• GOV.UK: English Private Landlord Survey 2024, main report (5 December 2024)
• GOV.UK: Rental bidding, a guide for landlords
• GOV.UK: Rental bidding, a guide for local authorities and councils (13 November 2025)
• legislation.gov.uk: Consumer Rights Act 2015, section 83
• legislation.gov.uk: The Client Money Protection Schemes for Property Agents (Requirement to Belong to a Scheme etc.) Regulations 2019, regulation 4
• Google Analytics Help: About key events
• The Negotiator: Turn web traffic into landlord enquiries, not just clicks (21 August 2026)

More guides for agency owners are on the guides page.