What it costs to start an estate agency.

There is no licence to sell houses in the UK, so the compulsory costs are registrations rather than qualifications. For a one branch agency set up as a limited company, the published fees are:

That is £892 for one branch with one person to approve, before the redress scheme. Registering with HMRC is not optional paperwork: GOV.UK says it is a criminal offence to trade as an estate agency business without being registered.

Residential sales and lettings agents must also belong to an approved redress scheme, and National Trading Standards issues penalties to agents who do not have one. Membership is priced by the schemes themselves, so ask each of them for a quote. If you will let property and hold tenants’ or landlords’ money, you also need client money protection, which National Trading Standards enforces in the same way.

Rightmove does not publish a price list, but it does publish the average. In its results for 2025, agency advertisers paid an average of £1,530 a month, up from £1,440 the year before. That is £18,360 a year for the average agency advertiser, around twenty times the legal minimum above.

Two things follow. First, a new agency with no stock is paying for visibility it cannot yet use, so it is worth asking what the portal will offer while your listings build up. Second, the portal sends buyers to your listings, not vendors to your door. Rightmove’s own figure shows 16,385 agency branches advertising at the end of 2025, every one of them on the same page as you. Winning the instruction happens somewhere else: usually on your own website, after a vendor has looked at three agents.

Rightmove reported that new agent formation in 2025 was the highest on record, helped by falling interest and mortgage rates. That is encouraging if you are about to join them, and a warning at the same time: in most towns there are more agents chasing the same vendors than there were a year ago. The agencies that grow are the ones a vendor can tell apart at a glance, which is mostly a question of what they see online before they ever pick up the phone.

Everything above is a fixed price. The website is the one large cost where you decide the size, and the range is enormous: from free templates to bespoke builds costing tens of thousands. We keep every published price in this market in one table on what an estate agency website costs, checked against each company’s own website every week.

How to decide what to spend comes down to one question: what is the website for? If it only has to prove you exist, a template will do and you should spend the money on the portal. If it has to win instructions, it needs to do what the usual agency template does not: take a vendor from “who is this agency” to a valuation in your diary, on a phone, late in the evening.

Whichever you choose, check two things before you sign: that the domain is registered to your company, and that you can take the website with you if you leave. Who owns your website explains what to ask.

The order matters, because some of these have to be in place before you take a single instruction.

1. Decide the structure. A limited company costs £100 to register online and is usually registered within 24 hours. Whichever you choose, the HMRC and ICO steps still apply.
2. Register with HMRC for money laundering supervision before you trade, and put the approval checks through for each owner, officer and manager.
3. Join a redress scheme, and arrange client money protection if you will hold rent or deposits.
4. Pay the ICO data protection fee. An agency handles vendors’, buyers’ and tenants’ personal details from the first day.
5. Build the website before the portal listing goes live. A vendor who sees your first board or listing will look you up, and the website is what they find.
6. Then the portal, once you have stock to put on it.

For one branch, one person to approve, trading as a limited company:

• Legal minimum: about £892 in published fees, plus your redress scheme, and client money protection if you let property.
• Portal: about £18,360 at Rightmove’s 2025 average, if you advertise there all year.
• Website: your choice, from next to nothing to a bespoke build. Ours starts from £10,000 plus VAT and is yours outright; the pricing page has the detail.
• Also to budget for: your CRM, insurance, an office if you have one, boards, photography and floor plans. These vary too much by supplier for a single figure to be honest.

The fixed costs are small and predictable. The two big ones, the portal and the website, are where a new agency’s first year is won or lost, so spend the most time on those.

• GOV.UK: Money laundering supervision for estate agency businesses
• GOV.UK: Money Laundering Regulations registration fees
• National Trading Standards: Estate and Letting Agency Team
• legislation.gov.uk: The Data Protection (Charges and Information) (Amendment) Regulations 2025
• GOV.UK: Register your company
• Rightmove plc: Full year results for the year ended 31 December 2025

More guides for agency owners are on the guides page.