Do estate agents still need their own website when Rightmove exists?

Yes, but not for the reason most agencies think. Your website's job is not to compete with Rightmove for buyers looking at properties. It is to win vendors deciding which agent to instruct, which is a search the portals structurally cannot serve, because they are not in the business of telling anyone which agency to choose.

Once you see the website as a vendor-acquisition asset rather than a second listings feed, most of the confusion clears up, including why so many agency websites underperform. They are built as portals, for buyers, competing on the one job they will always lose.

What the portals do well, and what they do not

Rightmove and Zoopla are extraordinarily good at one thing: putting property in front of buyers at scale. No agency website will out-reach them on listing searches, and building a strategy that tries is a waste of budget.

What they do not do is help a homeowner decide who to instruct. Every agency on a portal looks broadly the same: a logo, a phone number, a set of listings. The portal has no incentive to differentiate you, because its customers are all of you. The vendor's actual question, who is good in my area, what do they charge, what will they do differently, is answered somewhere else entirely.

Where the instruction decision is actually made

A vendor's journey typically runs over several months: idle valuation curiosity, a look at what similar homes sold for, some searching for agents in the area, reviews, and increasingly a question put to an AI assistant. Only at the end does anyone book a valuation.

Almost none of that happens on a portal, and all of it is reachable from your own site, if the site is built for it. That means content answering vendor questions, genuine local market knowledge, transparent fee information, real reviews, and named people rather than a stock photo of a handshake.

The commercial argument

• ✓You own it. Portal fees rise, algorithms change, and terms are set without you. Your own visibility cannot be repriced by someone else.
• ✓It compounds. A location page built this year still works next year. Portal spend stops the day you stop paying.
• ✓It is your differentiation. On a portal you are a logo. On your own site you are the agency that clearly knows this town.
• ✓It is what AI reads. When an assistant is asked which agent to use, it draws on the corroborated public record, a large part of which is your own site.
• ✓It captures earlier demand. Portal traffic is people who already know what they want. Your site can reach the vendor who is still deciding whether to sell at all.

Why so many agency websites do not earn their keep

The usual reason is that they were built as a smaller Rightmove. Property search front and centre, everything else buried, and, most damagingly, that property search built as a filter that never changes the URL, so Google cannot index any of it.

The result is a site that competes with the portals on their strongest ground and does nothing on the ground it could win. Fixing that is usually a question of structure rather than a rebuild: make property results indexable, then add the vendor-facing content that is currently missing entirely. Our estate agent website design page goes through what that looks like in practice.

So should you cancel Rightmove?

For most agencies, no. The portals deliver buyer volume that is genuinely hard to replicate, and vendors still ask which portals you list on. The realistic position is that portals are a distribution cost and your website is an acquisition asset, and the two are not substitutes.

The agencies that have successfully reduced portal dependency did it by building their own demand first, over years, not by cancelling and hoping. That is the same work as SEO for estate agents, and it is a strategy, not a switch.