For years, estate agents have followed the same playbook. Win an instruction, get the property onto Rightmove as quickly as possible and wait for the enquiries to come in.

There’s nothing wrong with that. Rightmove has transformed the way people search for property, and it’s hard to imagine the industry without it. But somewhere along the way, many agencies have become so reliant on the portals that they’ve stopped thinking about building their own audience.

Every valuation request, website registration and buyer enquiry represents a chance to strengthen your business. Yet too often, once the immediate transaction is over, that relationship simply ends.

Buyers disappear, sellers move on and valuable contacts sit quietly in a CRM, untouched for months or even years. At the same time, every new property listed on Rightmove helps keep buyers returning to the portal. Every enquiry, every search and every click adds value to a platform that doesn’t belong to the agent…that’s an uncomfortable thought.

If you’ve spent years investing in marketing, building local awareness and generating leads, shouldn’t more of that value stay with your business?

That’s the thinking behind Agent Drive.

We didn’t build it because portals are going away. We built it because we believe agents should have something that belongs to them as well: an engaged audience they can market to directly, traffic they can drive back to their own website, and a database that becomes more valuable with every enquiry.

The agencies that thrive over the next few years won’t necessarily be the ones spending the most on portals. They’ll be the ones building the strongest local audience, nurturing relationships long after the first enquiry and creating demand before a property ever reaches Rightmove.

We think that’s a future worth building. And that’s exactly what Agent Drive is designed to help agencies do.