You pay the portal for leads your own listings created.
Agents pay a portal for leads generated by their own listings, then compete with two other agents for the same one. A site with a proper listing feed and real neighborhood content is the only durable way out, and at a local level it is genuinely winnable.
Your listings are on the portal, your leads are on the portal, and your site is a business card.
Three things that make this trade its own problem
Your MLS decides what the feed can do
Display rules, refresh frequency and how listings must be attributed all vary by board. Any agency promising you one national answer on listing display has not read your rules, and you are the one who gets the letter.
Fair housing narrows the targeting
Housing is a restricted category on the big ad platforms. The age, ZIP and demographic targeting most agents assume they are buying is simply not available, so the creative and the landing page have to do that work instead.
The portal outranks you for your own listing
Your inventory creates the lead and somebody else sells it back to you, sometimes to three of you at once. Nothing about that changes until you rank for something the portal cannot be bothered to write.
Where we would start
- Website DevelopmentA listing site that respects your MLS rules, built around neighborhoods and search rather than around a headshot and a slogan.→
- SEONeighborhood guides and monthly market reports — the one thing an individual agent can genuinely outrank a national portal for, because it takes local knowledge to write.→
- Email MarketingThe long stretch between "just looking" and "we will list in the spring", which runs for months and is where most agents stop sending anything at all.→
- Business AutomationInstant lead routing and follow-up. In this trade the first agent to respond usually gets the appointment, and everything after that is a negotiation about second place.→
Local or national — where this one is actually decided
Hyper-local, down to the neighborhood and the school zone. Worth knowing too: agents are now eligible for Local Services Ads through their own verification path, which is a different route onto the page than the map pack.
Work the number out before you spend anything
Score your local search. Free, no sign-up, and the answer is yours whether or not you ever call us.
Open the tool
Tell us what your customers search for
Describe the enquiries you want more of and the ones you would rather stop getting. You will get a straight read on what would actually move it, from the person who would do the work.
Start a conversation