The Best Online Estate Agents 2024

We strive to provide the best and most useful ratings to help your decision making. The method we use may seem a little convoluted, but we think it provides the best results avoids common problems other ranking and rating systems based on reviews fall foul to.

• We intuitively know that an online estate agent with three perfect reviews should not be ranked ahead of an agent with 50 reviews averaging at 9.4/10, yet it's not uncommon to see the former rated higher (for example, products on Amazon!). Which estate agent would you trust more? We try to reflect this, and use volume more as a measure of confidence.
• It's not unknown for services to provide better service when they start out, and to eventually feel they have a cushion of a reputation and reviews to fall back on as they cut costs and so on. We want to be on the look-out for a 'going downhill' pattern in the quality of reviews.
• Similar to the above, is if a product's no longer getting many reviews, they can retain a rating even though we can no longer be as confident that they are maintaining the standard. Momentum is being lost.

The problems faced here are not new. The solution we have implemented uses the Bayesian Average and Bayesian Estimation. You may be familiar with the IMDB Top 250 ranking for films. We use effectively the same system, just with agents instead of films, and with more factors (e.g. time-sensitive factors).

In essence, the more reviews we have of an agent, the more we can have confidence in the accuracy of their rating. Another way to think of this is that all the estate agents start off with the same starting position, and only a strong indication of their quality (good or bad) will allow one to break from the pack. This methodology generally provides a nice and intuitive compromise between the true average rating and the number of ratings.

We currently acknowledge the ratings given by Trustpilot and allAgents, who've had a thankless task collecting reviews over the years. We are also considering acknowledging Google Reviews, reviews.co.uk, reviews.io and sitejabber.

The rankings are automated and are based on the reviews published on the review sources we use. There is no manual adjustment made for any agent.

There is some automated weighting given to sources based on their rating distribution, i.e. If, across all agents, 5-Star reviews make up 99% of the volume on a certain platform, then that platform's reviews may be devalued in comparison to a source where the rating distribution resembles a bell-curve peaking at 4 stars.

There is also a minor reward for consistency across platforms.

The ratings may change with new information. This is more likely for agents with only a few reviews. Established agents will likely only see gradual changes. If there are big changes, it may mean there has been a large influx or disappearance of reviews at one of the sources.

It's easier to digest! There are around 40 active online estate agents that we're tracking - please visit our comparison table for a more detailed comparison with all of the agents.