In estate agency there's a problem that barely exists in any other sector: the product is often not exclusively yours. The same flat is on the portals, shared, advertised by five agencies at once, with the same photographs and near-identical text.
The uncomfortable question is this: take the price and the location out of your marketing, and what's left to make someone choose you?
The listing isn't where you win
A property listing is a commodity. It sits on portals everyone checks, compared side by side with dozens of others, and people looking for a home filter by area, type and price — not by agency.
It's a mistake to put all the effort there. The listing does need to be well made, and we'll get to that, but the decision about who to work with gets made somewhere else: when someone checks out who that agency actually is, before calling or after the first viewing.
It's the agency's own website that decides that, and it's almost always the most neglected thing of all — a listing fed by the portal and little else.
Two photographs per property change more than a slogan does
That said, the part of the listing that still sets people apart is the photography. It's the one thing where two listings of the same property can genuinely differ.
Phone photos with the bed unmade and the ceiling light on say, without meaning to, how that agency treats its work. Photos taken with the flat tidied and at the right time of day say the opposite — and they don't cost a fortune.
The same goes for the text. "Excellent opportunity, great location, lots of light" is on every listing. A description that says what's actually there — the orientation, the floor, what renovation work has been done and when, what's left to do — saves pointless viewings on both sides and attracts people looking for exactly that.
What sets an agency apart is knowing the area
It's the asset the portals don't have, and no competitor can copy it without actually living there.
What's actually sold on that street in the last year, not just asked. How long it takes to sell a two-bed in that parish — and why the same two-bed has a different price in one town than in the next. What schools are nearby, what building work is planned, where residents park. Which properties in a given building tend to have damp problems.
This is genuinely valuable content, and it's what turns an agency from a middleman into someone who actually knows the subject. A page per area, with this written down and kept current, does double duty: it convinces readers and it shows up in searches from people searching by place name — which is the subject of the article on local SEO.
Half the business is on the seller's side
There's an interesting asymmetry in this sector: almost all marketing is aimed at buyers, while winning instructions is the scarce resource.
Someone with a property to sell is choosing who to trust with the most valuable thing they own. That person wants to see something else: how long your properties take to sell, how they're photographed, how many sell close to the asking price, and how the agency communicates during the process.
A page built for owners, answering exactly that, is often the missing piece — and it doesn't compete with any portal.
Replying fast beats everything else
One practical note worth its own section. Someone who sees a listing and asks for information is, at that exact moment, asking three other agencies too.
Replying within minutes, with a real answer and not an automated one, wins more business than any campaign. For that, enquiries from the site and from the portals need to land in one place, and it needs to be clear who answers them — which is more of a systems problem than a marketing one.
What Contágio does in this sector is on the property page.
What sets your agency apart?
Tell us where you work and how enquiries reach you today. We'll see what you can show that nobody else can.