For the last decade, the agent with the most instructions won. Or at least it felt that way. Secure the vendor. Bag the listing. Get it onto the paid-for portals. Voilà! Let the market do the rest.
In the steamy summer of 2026, that logic is looking increasingly lethargic.
Zoopla says buyer demand was down 10% year-on-year in the four weeks to mid-May. Rightmove says buyer choice is at its highest for this time of year since 2015. You don't need a PhD in econometrics to translate that: fewer buyers, more stock and a public that's learnt to negotiate again. They'll offer less, ask for more - and if you don't play ball they won't have a domestic wobble about it. They'll simply click the next one.
For years, stock was the scarce commodity. Now it's the committed, finance-ready, emotionally-intact buyer that's in short supply. We haven't seen demand this flat since 2008 to 2010 and a lot of agents who lived through that have spent the years since relentlessly focused on supply.
Training is seller-first. Meetings are instruction-first. KPIs are listing-first. Buyers, meanwhile, are often treated like portal spam: the communal inbox as responsibility-shirker, leading buyers to look on archly while properties lie unsold.
And, as with many things in this crazy year, the paid-for portals' presence in the process doesn't really help. Because if Rightmove is guilty of making all estate agents look the same - and it is - then it's also guilty of making every buyer look the same too.
The periodic pantomime pearl-clutching, shrieking that agents respond to barely a third of their leads, buries this fact. Take it from someone who helped launch a couple of paid-for portals: Rightmove and the like deal in lead volume, so they don't want anything getting in the way of the searcher pressing 'send'.
Leads are their currency. The fewer fields the user has to fill in, the better. The wider they can fire one person's requirements across multiple agents, the more successful they look. There is no differentiation between tyre-kickers and high-intent. No wonder agents tire of responding to them all.
So treating buyer leads the way you always have is not going to cut it in the sweltering summer of 2026. The agents I've met on my 40-location tour who are doing well right now aren't waiting for Rightmove enquiries like Victorian fishermen scanning the horizon.
They know their buyers. Not "we've got applicants". Actual, specific humans: the one holding out for an Acton three-bed semi under £700k; the relocation with a deadline; the buyer who's been gazumped twice and is only moving with a mortgage offer and a spine of steel.
When a suitable property is coming, those agents don't "market" it. They match it. They call. They pre-qualify. They tee up viewings before the listing has even finished its little portal warm-up routine.
I spoke to one agent this week who has recorded their calls for over ten years. They've now transcribed the lot using AI and they can go back to a prospect from years ago - someone who mentioned a passion for cars and wanted a big garden - and call to say a property with a pit in the garage and a 20-metre lawn has just come in. That isn't glamorous. It won't win applause in the WhatsApp groups. But it wins deals, because it reduces choice paralysis and builds confidence. A buyer who feels understood doesn't scroll for sport. They offer.
There's another pressure building too: discovery is leaking out of the paid-for portals. Consumers are already asking ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews and MyPorta things like: "Gay couple, want somewhere welcoming and progressive, vibrant scene, good coffee, under £300k, where do you suggest?" Paid-for portals don't want to answer that - because it will decrease lead volume significantly and they'll not be able to charge you as much.
If an agency business still largely rests on "list it on Rightmove and wait", it's being built on sand. The future belongs to agencies with proprietary buyer intelligence, properly captured, properly used, and scaled with tech that doesn't treat buyers as an inbox notification.
You don't need to boil the ocean to start. Pick your ten most active buyers this week and write down what each one actually wants, in specifics, in one place your whole team can see. That's the first brick.
By all means, keep Rightmove for the next couple of years. But recognise that they're strafing your entire competitive environment with identical-looking buyer-bullets. In this market, the winner is the agent working hardest to identify the most progressible applicants - and the discipline to treat them like clients, not clicks.