Vantage was renting its pipeline from Rightmove and Zoopla. Six months later it owned one, at £18 a landlord against £95 through the portals.
Vantage Lettings is a letting agency in the Midlands. Almost every landlord lead it got came from Rightmove or Zoopla, and every one carried a referral cost. That model works until you want to grow. Expanding into a new town meant buying more portal exposure in that town, so the cost of growth scaled in step with the growth itself. Every new landlord was £95. They wanted a channel they owned.
Five steps across six months. The goal was one outcome: landlord enquiries that arrive without a referral fee attached.
We audited search visibility in each of the four towns Vantage wanted to expand into: technical SEO, local pack presence, and how the agency appeared in AI-generated search answers. Each city had different competitive dynamics. The content and GBP plan was built city by city, not as a generic rollout.
A letting agency site typically ranks for tenant searches because that’s where the volume is. Landlord searches are lower volume and different in character — they’re evaluating agents, not looking for properties. We identified the specific searches landlords run when they’re weighing up whether to change agent, and built the content plan around those terms exclusively.
We published dedicated landing pages for each target city, written around landlord-intent searches. Google Business Profiles were optimised in every target location, with category, service area, and Q&A sections updated to reflect the landlord audience. Local pack visibility improved in three of four cities within the first two months.
A rental yield calculator gave landlords a reason to hand over an email address months before they were ready to change agent. Landlords planning a purchase or reviewing portfolio performance used it regularly. It became the front door to Vantage’s owned audience, capturing contacts at the top of the funnel rather than only at the point of active intent.
Every enquiry was tracked from first organic search through to signed management agreement. That tracking is what makes the £18 organic CAC directly comparable to the £95 portal cost — both are measured at the same endpoint, using the same definition of acquisition.
Every number is verified from client reporting and attribution data, not estimated or projected.
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