Should your website show the homes you have sold?

A vendor choosing an agent is choosing who to trust with a price. Rightmove’s guide for sellers tells them to pick “a shortlist of three agents” and says local agents “will better understand local buyer demand, the price of other homes that have sold nearby, and what is most important to buyers in your area”. Its advice on researching an agent suggests asking: “Can I see examples of your success in selling properties like mine?”

A sold section on your website answers that question before the vendor picks up the phone. “Local knowledge” on a homepage is a claim; a list of homes you sold on streets the vendor recognises is evidence. That is why a sold record sits near the top of what an estate agent website should include.

The objections usually raised are real but practical, and all of them have the same answer:

• Buyers enquire about homes that are gone. Keep sold homes out of the property search, in their own section, with no viewing or enquiry button.
• It clutters the site. A sold page filtered by area or street is easier to use than a homepage carousel of old listings.
• Owners may object. That is a permission question, covered below, and the code already answers it.

The words on each listing are not a matter of taste. The National Trading Standards Estate Agency Team’s guidance on property advertising terms, updated in June 2026, says agents must accurately describe and update a property’s marketing status in a timely manner under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, and that status information must be “clear, easily accessible to potential buyers and up to date while any advertising is still live”. It defines the terms:

Older advice is looser. Propertymark’s advice to members (published in 2018) says “Sold” can be used once contracts have been exchanged. The national definition now points to the sale concluding, so in our view a website should move a home to “Sold” only at completion, which is also the date you will show on it.

Two more rules from The Property Ombudsman’s Code of Practice apply directly to the website. If a seller accepts an offer but wants marketing to continue, your marketing must clearly explain that an offer has been accepted subject to contract (paragraph 9e). And the code lists, as misleading, “listing properties that are not currently available to buy” and “claiming to have sold a property which was sold by another agent” (paragraph 7n). A home sold by a rival after you lost the instruction does not belong in your sold section.

Paragraph 3b of the code says: “In your canvassing material, if you seek to use a property you have recently sold and where completion has occurred, you must obtain the new owner’s prior permission in writing.” Note who that is: the new owner is the buyer, not the vendor you acted for. A sold section exists to win new instructions, so the safe course is to treat it as canvassing material and ask for permission at completion, when you are already in touch with both sides.

Propertymark’s advice adds a time element. For “sold in your road” flyers and similar material, it treats a home as recently sold for “not exceeding one calendar month from the date of completion”. For longer displays it says completion dates should be “clearly and boldly marked”, because leaving sold details up for a long time could create “a false impression that you are selling more properties than you actually are”.

A website can do better than a window card here. Show the completion month on every sold entry, sort newest first, and the visitor can judge your recent record for themselves. Photographs need a check of their own: the code says you need a third party’s permission before including material it produced (paragraph 7o), so make sure your photographer’s licence covers reuse after the sale.

You do not have to rely on your own records for prices. HM Land Registry’s price paid data covers “all residential property sales in England and Wales that are sold for value and are lodged with us for registration”, and it is released under the Open Government Licence, which requires you to acknowledge the source and, where possible, link to the licence. HM Land Registry says the data “is not personal information about individuals but property related information”, but it also says users must make sure their use does not breach the Data Protection Act 2018 or the electronic marketing rules. Publishing prices on a page is one thing; using the addresses to mail owners is another.

Two limits to explain on the page. The time between a sale and its registration “typically ranges between 2 weeks and 2 months”, so the most recent sales will be missing. And the data excludes some transactions, such as sales not for value and right to buy discounts. Your own CRM is more current for your own sales; Land Registry is the independent figure for the area. Our local pages for agencies are built on the same data.

A sold list tempts agencies to turn it into a headline. The ASA says it considers “leading” and “number one” claims “to relate to sales or market share”, and its advice on property sales sets out what does not prove them:

• Board counts. Counting sold or for sale boards “is not an adequate method of substantiating comparative claims about property sales”, because not every agent puts up boards and some boards are not what they appear.
• Postcode comparisons from Land Registry data. Agents do not sell only in one postcode and nor do their rivals, so the ASA advises avoiding these claims as “likely to be difficult to substantiate”.
• Portal figures alone. Portal data is “an inadequate method of substantiating comparative claims” about sales generally, though a claim can stand when it says exactly what it compared, such as sold properties shown on one portal, over stated dates and places.

The safer approach is the one that persuades vendors anyway: publish the list itself and state plain facts from it, such as how many homes you completed in a named area over named months. Your CRM can prove that; a superlative needs far more.

Put together, the rules describe a sold section that works: a page of its own, filterable by area or street; each entry with the completion month, a photograph you are licensed to use and the new owner’s permission on file; “Sold” only after completion; and a link from every entry to book a valuation, because the vendor reading it is deciding whether to invite you. The same sold homes make each area page worth ranking, as our guide to getting more valuation requests explains.

That is the kind of website we build: bespoke websites for estate agencies, one agency per patch, designed around the vendor’s decision. How we design estate agent websites sets out what goes into one, and what it costs is on our pricing page.

• National Trading Standards Estate Agency Team (Business Companion): Terms used in property advertising (sales), June 2026
• The Property Ombudsman: Code of Practice for Residential Estate Agents (TPOE27-9, March 2026)
• Propertymark: Assured Advice 30, Advertising sold properties
• GOV.UK: About the price paid data (HM Land Registry)
• The National Archives: Open Government Licence v3.0
• ASA: Property sales and lettings
• ASA: Property, sales and Land Registry data
• ASA: Property, sales and the use of website data
• ASA: Property, sales and board counting
• Rightmove: How to choose the right estate agent
• Rightmove: How to research an agent to sell your property (16 March 2020)

More guides for agency owners are on the guides page.