If you run an independent estate agency in London, you already know how much of your marketing budget goes to Rightmove. Fees rose by 18% in 2025, with general inflation running at around 2.5% at the time. For many single-branch independents, Rightmove alone now accounts for up to 13.5% of their total sales commission. That is a significant outgoing for a portal whose core product has changed very little in over two decades.
Against that backdrop, the agency website often ends up as an afterthought. A property feed gets connected, the listings populate automatically and the website ticks along in the background. It looks like it’s doing its job. But for most independent London agents, the website is quietly underperforming in ways that cost real business, and in 2026 the gap between a passive website and an active one is wider than it has ever been.
CRM integration and automated property feeds are genuinely useful. They keep listings current, save time and ensure your properties appear consistently across platforms. There is nothing wrong with having them. The problem is when the feed becomes the entire website strategy.
A website that is essentially a mirror of your Rightmove listings tells a prospective vendor very little about why they should choose you. It doesn’t demonstrate your local knowledge of the area. It doesn’t show your track record in specific streets or postcodes. It doesn’t answer the questions a seller has at 10pm when they’re weighing up which agent to call in the morning. It just shows them properties, which they can also see on Rightmove, Zoopla and every other portal you’re already paying for.
Vendors choose an estate agent based on trust, local expertise and a sense that the agent understands their specific situation. None of that comes through a property feed. It comes through content, design and the experience someone has when they land on your website and spend a few minutes with it.
The way people research estate agents before making contact has shifted considerably. Google searches for “estate agent in [London borough]” or “best estate agents in [area]” still happen, but they are now joined by AI-driven queries through tools like ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overview and Perplexity. When a potential vendor asks one of these tools which estate agents in their area are worth speaking to, the recommendation is built from everything the AI has been trained on: your website, your reviews, your presence in local press, directory listings and mentions across the web.
A business that has a well-maintained website but almost no presence or content anywhere else online is harder for AI systems to characterise with confidence. For London estate agents competing in dense, highly competitive borough-level searches, this matters. The agencies that come up in AI-generated recommendations are not necessarily the largest. They are the ones with consistent, credible signals across multiple sources.
Unlike property portals, your own website is the one place where you can show past sales as a genuine portfolio of your expertise. A well-designed page showing properties you’ve sold in a specific postcode, with real context about how they were marketed and what results were achieved, tells a far more compelling story than a live feed ever can. Google’s March 2026 core update made clear that it is rewarding sites that are the primary source of useful information, not those that aggregate or repackage content available elsewhere. An agency website built around its own results, its own team and its own local knowledge sits exactly where Google wants to direct traffic.
Social media plays a role here too. An active Instagram or Facebook presence that shows the human side of your agency, your team, your local area knowledge and recent activity builds the kind of brand signals that both potential clients and AI systems respond to. It is not a replacement for a strong website, but the two work together. A vendor who finds you on social media and then visits a website that feels dated, hard to use or empty of real content is far less likely to pick up the phone.
One of the most common patterns we see with estate agency websites is that they get built, launched and then left largely untouched for years. The property feed keeps the listings current, which creates an impression of activity, but the rest of the website quietly ages. Pages that once ranked well drop as competitors invest in theirs. User experience issues that were minor at launch become more significant as visitor expectations rise.
At b:web, our approach to ongoing work with estate agents is built around what we call continuous improvement packages. The idea is that SEO and user experience are not separate workstreams. The best way to increase leads and valuations from a website is to keep improving both at the same time: better content, better page structure, better conversion points, better performance in search. A site that is faster to load, easier to use and more clearly targeted at the questions a vendor is asking will outperform a static site regardless of how well it was built at launch.
This is particularly relevant for London agents because the competition is intense and the cost of portal dependency is high. Every valuation instruction that comes through your own website rather than a portal referral is one that hasn’t cost you a percentage of your commission. Building a website that generates those direct enquiries consistently is, over time, one of the most cost-effective things an independent London agent can invest in.
Rightmove’s fees are unlikely to fall. Analysis by Property Industry Eye found that Rightmove fees now account for up to 13.5% of an agent’s sales commission, and that figure has only moved in one direction. A 15-branch agency quoted in the same report was paying £400,000 a year to the portal. For independent single-branch agents in London, who typically pay standard rates without the volume discounts available to large corporates, the pressure is acute.
The response to rising portal costs isn’t to leave Rightmove. It is to make sure that your own website is working hard enough to reduce your dependence on it over time. That means investing in it continuously, not just once every few years when it starts to look visibly dated.
We have worked with London estate agents including Devenports Estate Agency on exactly this kind of ongoing work: website design, property feed integration, SEO and continuous improvement across both user experience and search performance. If you’d like to talk through what that could look like for your agency, get in touch with the b:web team and we can start with a quick review of where your website stands today.
