28 September 2026 · 6 min read · Oscar Markham
Portal enquiries are not the same as your own leads
Every Irish estate agency pays the portals, and almost every Irish estate agency should. That is where buyers look. The mistake is concluding from a full inbox of portal enquiries that lead generation is handled, because portal enquiries are buyers and buyers are not what an agency is short of. Instructions are.
Buyers are abundant, vendors are not
In most Irish markets there are considerably more people trying to buy than there are houses to sell. Portal enquiries reflect that: a lot of them, easy to get, and they arrive attached to a property you already have.
They do not grow the business. The instruction did that, before the listing ever went up. An agency with a busy portal inbox and no vendor pipeline is fully dependent on a supply it is not generating.
The portal owns the relationship
A buyer who found the house on a portal associates the find with the portal. They did not choose you and frequently could not name you afterwards.
That is the structural problem with any marketplace: the intermediary accumulates the brand equity, and the fee it can charge rises because you have no alternative route to the customer.
What an independent pipeline actually looks like
Valuation requests generated by your own advertising and your own site. A list of people who asked about a valuation and are not ready yet. Sold boards concentrated in areas you have chosen. Local search results you rank in for your own towns.
None of that depends on a portal's pricing decisions, and all of it compounds.
- A valuation request page and ads pointed at it
- A retained list of not-yet-ready vendors, contacted quarterly
- Deliberate area farming rather than scattered instructions
- Local content: what sold here, what it means
- A Google Business Profile with recent reviews and photographs
Keep paying the portals
This is not an argument for leaving them. Buyers look there and a vendor will ask whether you list there, and the answer has to be yes.
It is an argument for not confusing a distribution channel with a lead source. The portal sells your listing. It does not win your next instruction, and nothing about a busy portal inbox suggests otherwise.
The test
If the portals doubled their price next year, what would happen to your instruction volume? For most Irish agencies the honest answer is that it would be unaffected, because the instructions were never coming from there.
And if that is true, the follow-up question is what is producing them — and whether anyone is deliberately working on it.
Written by Oscar Markham, founder of Dublin Growth Digital. We run lead generation for Irish estate agents and trades, reported every Friday in enquiries and booked work.