Notes · Luxury real estate
On the portal you rent visibility. Your website is yours.
Portals are useful, and they are getting more expensive. What the numbers of a listed portal show, the date almost nobody has in the diary, and where an agency builds something that stays.
Picture this: a buyer finds an apartment in Zug on a property portal, listed by your agency. She buys it. Three years later she wants to sell her old house. She remembers the apartment, the photos and the portal. She does not quite remember your agency’s name. So she searches the portal again.
The portal did its job. It brought you a buyer. But the relationship that counts for the next instruction stayed where it began. That is what this note is about, not whether portals cost too much.
What portals are worth.
In June 2024 the British fund Cinven bought 70% of idealista, the Spanish property portal, in a deal that valued the company at €2.9 billion, according to Xataka. To see how a portal earns its money from agencies, the most transparent case I know is in Switzerland, because SMG Swiss Marketplace Group, which owns Homegate and ImmoScout24, has been listed on the SIX Swiss Exchange since September 2025.
In 2025 its real estate division grew revenue by 12.5% to CHF 164.1 million, and adjusted EBITDA by 30.6% to CHF 98.9 million. Do the arithmetic and that is a margin of around 60%. Average revenue per agency rose 14.7%, and at the end of 2025 it counted 4,008 agencies as customers.
On 6 January 2026 the Swiss Price Supervisor reported that advertisers had repeatedly complained about the pricing models of the large listing platforms. In real estate it found high complexity and, in part, limited price transparency. The result was an amicable settlement: since 1 April 2026, SMG’s property portals have offered a package costing at most CHF 44 a month plus at most CHF 505 per sale listing or CHF 370 per rental listing, excluding VAT. SMG states that it sees no price abuse, and offers the package alongside its existing ones.
What you rent and what you own.
I do not think portals are the problem. They give a reach that a single agency rarely achieves on its own, and I would not cancel any of them. The problem is building the whole business on space you rent. On the portal you pay per listing and per month. When the listing ends, the page ends. The enquiry arrives through the portal’s system, and the buyer remembers the portal.
Your website works the other way round. Every page you write about a neighbourhood, a way of selling or a valuation stays and keeps working. Every enquiry lands in your own system. And whoever wants to sell a house three years later finds your name, not a list of agencies.
The blind spot.
The price of a listing is on every invoice. How many instructions come through your own website is on none. Without that second number there is no way to tell whether the portal is a tool or a landlord.
In Switzerland there is also a date almost nobody has in the diary. The settlement with the Price Supervisor expires on 31 March 2029, and the amounts in it are maximum prices. What applies afterwards is not written in any agreement. I am not turning that into a forecast. I am turning it into a deadline for knowing how dependent an agency is.
The portal brings today’s buyer. Your website brings tomorrow’s seller.
Where I stand.
Every year I would put a fixed share of what an agency spends on rented visibility into pages it owns: neighbourhoods, valuation, ways of selling, the questions owners ask. Not as a replacement for the portal, but as a counterweight. An agency that only rents negotiates from scratch every year. One that owns something negotiates from a different position.
What I would check.
- The source of every enquiry. Portal, website, referral or sign board, logged in the CRM from today.
- The cost per instruction. Not per listing, but per sale instruction won, split by source.
- What stays after the sale. Sold properties shown as references on your website, with the owners’ consent.
- The way back. In every reply to a portal enquiry, a link to a page on your website the buyer will want to keep.
- Your own deadline. A date in the diary to review what the agency has built on its own and how much it still depends on the portal.
Where to start.
- This week
Record the source
A mandatory field in the CRM for every new enquiry: where it came from.
- This month
Work out the cost per instruction
Portal invoices for the last twelve months, divided by the instructions that actually came from them.
- This quarter
Write three pages of your own
A neighbourhood, your valuation and your way of selling, in your clients’ languages.
- Every year
Check the ratio
How many instructions came through the portal and how many through your website, and whether the ratio is shifting.
Imagine the portal raises its fee again tomorrow, or changes the rules on who appears first. How many of last year’s instructions came through a route that is still yours: your website, your name, a recommendation?
If you do not know the figure, start there. If you know it and it is small, the question is no longer what the portal costs but something else: what is your agency building that nobody can rent to you?
If you would like me to review what your website does today and what only the portal does, start with the Strategic Diagnostic. Which portal contracts to keep or change is for you to decide with your figures, not a designer.