Portals are the default way to sell property, and for good reason: they have the traffic. But that traffic comes with a bargain that quietly works against you. Understanding it is the first step to a marketing approach that compounds instead of evaporating.
What are you really renting when you pay a portal?
You are renting attention. Portals are where buyers start, and there is no arguing with that reach. In NAR's 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, more than nine in ten buyers searched online and 52 percent found the home they bought online. So paying to place a listing in front of that audience works, and for a single resale it can be enough. The catch is that you are a tenant on someone else's platform, listed alongside every competitor on the same street, and the terms favour the landlord.
What does the portal keep that you do not?
- The data. The portal knows who viewed, searched and saved. You get a name and an email, if you are lucky. The behavioural data that makes marketing smart stays with them.
- The audience. Every euro you spend builds the portal's audience, not yours. When your project sells out, you start again from zero next time.
- The margin. The same enquiry is often sent to several agents at once, so you compete on price and speed with everyone in the same inbox, and you pay again for every new project.
Why is owning first-party data worth more every year?
Because the data you own is the part that keeps paying off. A study by Boston Consulting Group and Google found that brands using first-party data for their key marketing functions achieved up to a 2.9x revenue uplift and 1.5x cost savings versus those that did not. That gap is widening as privacy rules tighten and third-party tracking is squeezed, which makes an audience you actually own more valuable, not less. An audience built for one development can be marketed to for the next, look-alike targeting gets sharper, and follow-up is based on the full conversation history rather than a single form fill. Each project makes the next one cheaper and faster, the opposite of the portal treadmill.
So should you stop using portals?
No, and that is not the argument. For a one-off resale with no follow-on, a portal listing can be the pragmatic choice, and even for a bigger launch a portal can sit alongside your own channel to catch the buyers who start there. The point is not to replace the portal but to stop letting it be your only channel. The calculus changes the moment you have a pipeline of projects, a brand to build, or margins worth protecting, which is exactly where developers and serious agencies sit.
What does a shared lead actually cost you?
When a portal sends the same enquiry to several agents at once, the buyer simply talks to whoever answers first, so you are no longer competing on your project, you are competing on response time against strangers. The research on this is blunt: a widely cited study by James Oldroyd at MIT with InsideSales found that replying within five minutes rather than thirty makes you around 100 times more likely to reach the lead. On a portal you rarely win that race, because the lead was never really yours. On your own channel an AI agent answers in seconds every time, so speed stops being a gamble and becomes the default, and the buyer has your project in front of them instead of five rivals.
How do you actually run your own channel per project?
You give each project its own destination and its own campaign: a site you control, ads you run across Meta, Google and AI search, and a pipeline that lands in your own CRM. Instead of renting attention, you build an asset, and every enquiry is qualified in seconds, around the clock, so it never goes cold. Picture a 20-unit development: instead of one crowded portal listing, it gets a branded microsite, a targeted campaign, and an agent that answers every buyer instantly and books the viewing. The buyers, the data and the audience are yours to keep and re-use on the next launch.
Why is running your own marketing finally practical now?
The reason most teams defaulted to portals is that running your own channel per project used to be too much work: a new site, a campaign, and someone answering leads at all hours. AI-run marketing removes that cost. Agents build the site, run the campaign and qualify every buyer around the clock, so owning your marketing is finally less effort than renting it, and it is the same shift that lets estate agents win more listings by showing sellers marketing a portal cannot match.