Key facts
- £1 a day + VAT for most agency websites; very large portfolios quoted
- Scheduled property feed imports run by cron and monitored
- Image-heavy listings cached and served through Cloudflare
- National Trading Standards guidance sets out material information for property listings, such as price, council tax and tenure
- Letting agents must publish their fees, redress scheme and client money protection status on their website
- Daily backups and free SSL
Property feeds that keep running
Your website listings usually come from your agency CRM. The CRM pushes or exposes a feed, and a plugin or script on your website imports it on a schedule, adding new properties, updating prices and status, and removing sold or let ones. When that import fails, your website shows stale stock and buyers ring about properties that went under offer last week.
On our hosting the import runs as a proper cron job rather than relying on site visits to trigger it. We set PHP memory and execution limits high enough for large imports, watch for failures, and make sure the image downloads don't time out.
Image-heavy listings, served fast
- Every property has a gallery, floorplans and sometimes video. That's a lot of images.
- We cache images at the edge through Cloudflare so search results and galleries load quickly.
- Images should be resized and compressed on import, with modern formats such as WebP where your plugin supports them.
- Old images from long-sold properties should be cleared out so the disk doesn't fill with stock you no longer have.
Material information and portals
National Trading Standards' Estate and Letting Agency Team has published guidance on the material information that should appear in property listings, starting with price, council tax band or rate, and tenure, with further parts covering things like utilities, flood risk, restrictions and rights. The major portals have added fields to their data feeds to support it. Your CRM is normally where you enter this. The website's job is to display it accurately, which means your feed import must carry the new fields through and your templates must show them.
Letting agent fees pages
Under section 83 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015, letting agents must publish their fees on their website, along with a statement of which redress scheme they belong to and whether they're a member of a client money protection scheme. These pages should never go missing in a redesign or migration. When we migrate your site, we check they're intact.
Getting started
Most agency sites suit dijitul Complete Hosting at £1 a day + VAT. Multi-branch groups with very large stock volumes or bespoke search may need a managed VPS, which we quote. Order at clients.dijitul.uk/order or call 01623 650333.
Frequently asked questions
Why are sold properties still showing on my estate agent website?
Usually the CRM feed import has failed or stopped running. Many plugins rely on site visits to trigger imports. Running the import as a real cron job and monitoring it fixes this. dijitul sets this up on its £1 a day + VAT hosting.
What material information must estate agents show on listings?
National Trading Standards guidance starts with price, council tax band or rate, and tenure, then covers further information such as utilities, parking, flood risk, building safety, restrictions and rights where relevant. Check the current NTSELAT guidance.
What must a letting agent show on its website?
Under the Consumer Rights Act 2015, letting agents must publish their fees, the name of their redress scheme, and whether they belong to a client money protection scheme. These should be easy to find on the website.
Why is my property website so slow?
Common causes are large unoptimised photos, too many images loading at once, slow searches over a big database, and feed imports running during busy times. Image compression, caching and scheduled imports help. dijitul reviews this when hosting agency sites.
What is the best hosting for an estate agent website?
A managed host that runs feed imports reliably, handles large image libraries and caches pages for speed. dijitul hosts estate and letting agent websites for £1 a day + VAT, with larger portfolios quoted.
Can my website get listings from my agency CRM automatically?
Yes. Most agency CRMs provide a feed or API, and website plugins import it on a schedule. The hosting needs cron, enough PHP memory and reliable outbound connections. dijitul configures these on its hosting.
Related
Set it up and forget about it
Managed hosting, Plesk, Cloudflare DNS, daily backups and your domain for £1 a day + VAT. We move your site for you.