The 27th of January 2001 is not a date that most people have marked in their diaries. I remember it with genuine clarity. It was the day that Primelocation.com went live - a portal backed by a consortium of 1,237 estate agent branches who had concluded, correctly, that the internet was going to change everything about how people searched for a home.

There were six of us that were there pre-launch, all the way through to its sale to Daily Mail General Trust Group at the end of 2005. Though I’d only reached the ripe old age of 33 by then, the core lesson that I learned then became life-defining.

Collaboration.

These agents, many of whom competed fiercely at street level, came together at Board level to create something that I still hear mourned – a genuinely unique space where there was control regarding their content. They owned shares in the business, had access to cutting-edge technology as the world changed around them and learned, alongside us, what worked and what did not with this brand new thing called the internet.

In the quarter-century since then, agents’ control of content has evaporated. Rightmove has leveraged its consumer brand recognition into what has become an annual torture ritual, where its reps instruct its customers what they will pay and – regardless of the impact on agent profits, growth potential, staff incentives and innovation – report back to their bosses at RM HQ that cancellations are at an all-time low.

Seven years after the launch of Primelocation, on the 9th of December 2008, I found myself at the start of something again: Zoopla. Pre-revenue, pre-profile, pre-everything. I joined because I believed that agents – who were, understandably, deeply sceptical about another new portal asking them to list their properties for a fee – would benefit when we shook up the established portals. Rightmove had already gained dominance by then and the rest seemed comfortable in their various also-ran positions. I could see that, left to congeal in its then-state, this would permanently disfigure the industry. We set out to be bold and to take the fight to them.

This gave me my second big lesson in working in this industry – clarity.

We weren’t the first portal, or the biggest, or the richest – but we were different (and not just because of our silly name). We were all about the data – 27m properties in the UK, helping consumers to understand more about their areas, homes, communities, lives. In a world of over a dozen portals – many of which we subsequently took over, such as Propertyfinder, Findaproperty, HotProperty, Thinkproperty, Globrix, all the way up to my old firm Primelocation – we stood out. We captured attention of consumers and agents because of that. And we weren’t afraid to be so.

Ultimately, we didn’t get where we wanted. With the arrival of OnTheMarket in 2015 – a kind of Primelocation II, run by some of my Original Six colleagues at that very portal – support fragmented, the ‘one other portal rule’ that attempted to rattle Rightmove instead driving a stake through Zoopla’s attempts to topple them. Much has seemed lost ever since. Progress towards a fairer balance of power between RM and its customers drifted further.

Yet this was the third lesson of portals, the one that I have thought about most as I travelled the country – twice! – meeting agents first on the Rightmove Resistance Tour last summer then on the AI in EA Tour this year, each taking in 60 locations in 60 days.

Confidence.

It takes confidence – some might say wildly inappropriate levels of – to start your own estate agency, or to believe that you can take one over and make it better. To look team members in the eye each day and know that you’ll make payroll at the end of the month to reward them for their efforts.

It takes confidence to make decisions on where to allocate a dwindling pool of revenue and determine what to back and what to avoid.

And it takes confidence to look to the future and see reasons for optimism. To know that the fight is definitely on, but it’s one that you can win.

I’ve seen that confidence dwindle over the last twenty-five years, as the vice-like grip of Rightmove has emptied out agent coffers at ever-increasing speed.

That’s why, in two days' time, I'll be involved in a third – and final – portal launch: MyPorta.

Our team wants to bring back collaboration, clarity and confidence to an industry that’s been short on much of it. We’re harnessing brand new technology – AI – to enable agents to believe that Rightmove’s inappropriate annual increases aren’t inevitable. Consumer behaviour is changing. By working together towards a clear goal with belief in the endgame – removing reliance on the paid-for portals – over 4,000 agent branches are already starting to anticipate a different future.

On 27th January 2001, with 1,237 branches, we made a start. The Primelocation site, back then, was almost comedic in its lack of a search bar on the homepage, not to mention its spinning corner logo that was so large a file that it initially broke everyone’s dial-up internet connection as they tried to load it. What it became was significant – as was Zoopla! with its funky (though happily short-lived) exclamation mark at the end of its name.

This Tuesday, 31st March 2026, won’t live long in many other people’s memories in 25 years’ time either. But it will in mine, and in those of the amazing team that we’ve built here at MyPorta. Because – whilst this beta launch will almost certainly be as imperfect as Primelocation’s ‘death star’ logo and Zoopla’s wild grammar – it marks the start of something genuinely new.

Twenty-five years is a long time to spend in an industry. Back then I marvelled at how consumer behaviour changed with the arrival of new ways of doing things, technology breaking decades of newspaper-reading habits and creating a new world of opportunities for agents brave enough to take them.

It’s happening again. The question was never whether it would. It was always when. And who is going to be part of it, collaborating with confidence and clarity, when it does.

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