The Situation
The agency website was essentially a brochure with agent headshots and a contact form. They had no content strategy, no local landing pages, and their blog had three posts from 2020. Meanwhile, portal fees kept rising and lead quality kept declining as sellers contacted multiple agencies simultaneously.
The Turning Point
When Funda raised premium listing fees by 15% for the second year running, Pieter calculated that portal dependency was costing the agency over €50K annually in fees alone — not counting the business lost to competing offers.
What We Did — And Why
We focused on the seller journey. Homeowners researching their property value are the highest-intent leads in real estate. We built neighborhood guides that became genuine local resources — covering market trends, recent sales data, school districts, and transport links. The home valuation tool captured email addresses for nurturing. Monthly market reports positioned the agency as data-driven experts and earned backlinks from local news outlets.
Our Approach
- 1.Created 15 hyper-local neighborhood guides covering Amsterdam's districts with market data, school ratings, and lifestyle information — targeting sellers searching for 'huis verkopen [neighborhood]'.
- 2.Built a free home valuation tool landing page optimized for 'waarde huis Amsterdam' and related valuation queries, capturing seller intent at the earliest stage.
- 3.Implemented property listing schema markup and optimized the blog with monthly market reports that earned backlinks from Dutch property news sites.
The Results
Direct seller leads tripled from 12 to 34 per month. More importantly, these leads converted at 28% versus 14% from portal leads. The agency reduced its Funda premium spend by €4,200 per month while growing total listings. Two agents who previously handled portal leads were reassigned to service the organic pipeline.
In Their Own Words
“Pieter said: 'We always knew we had deeper local knowledge than the portals could convey. Now our website proves it before we ever meet a seller.'”