Open the lettings section of most UK agency websites and you will find the sales template with the price relabelled. Same fields, same layout, same emphasis.
It is an understandable shortcut and it costs both audiences. A tenant and a buyer want almost nothing in common, and the landlord, who is the person actually paying you, often has no page at all.
What a tenant is actually working out
A buyer is assessing an asset. A tenant is assessing whether they can move in, afford it, and live there for a year.
The questions are practical and mostly missing from listings. What is the deposit and when is it due. What is the minimum term. Are pets considered, and is that a flat no or a conversation. Is it furnished, and what does furnished mean here. Which bills are included. When is it available. Is there parking, and is it a permit.
Every one of those is a field, and every one of them is a reason someone does or does not enquire. A listing that says "available now, six week deposit, pets considered, unfurnished, EPC C" filters far better than three paragraphs of description.
Availability date deserves calling out. It is the single most time-sensitive thing on a rental listing and the thing most likely to be stale, because it usually lives in prose that nobody goes back to edit.
Fee transparency is not optional and reads badly when hidden
Permitted payments have to be clear, and tenants have become good at looking for them. A fees page that is hard to find, or a listing that refers vaguely to "fees may apply", creates exactly the suspicion you do not want at the point of enquiry.
Put the permitted payments on the listing, not only on a separate page. Holding deposit, security deposit, and anything else that can lawfully be charged. Being straightforward here is a competitive advantage, because plenty of your competitors are not.
Your redress scheme membership and client money protection belong somewhere obvious too. They are trust signals a tenant may not consciously look for but will notice the absence of if anything goes wrong.
The landlord page nobody builds
Here is the commercial point. Tenants generate transactions. Landlords generate income, repeatedly, for years.
A landlord choosing an agent wants to know your management fee and what it covers, the difference between your service levels, how you handle arrears, how tenant referencing works, what happens when something breaks at eleven at night, and how quickly you fill a property.
Most agency websites answer none of that. They have a lettings listing grid and a contact form. The agency that publishes its fee structure and explains its process clearly wins landlords from the ones that make people ring to find out.
Average void period and time to let, if your numbers are good, are the most persuasive figures you can publish. If they are not good, work on them before publishing them.
Common questions
Should lettings have a separate template from sales?
Yes. The fields differ enough that reusing the sales template means either empty sections or missing information. It is not a large piece of work and it visibly improves both.
Do we have to show permitted payments on every listing?
Fee information needs to be clear and accessible to tenants. Putting it on the listing rather than only on a separate page is the safer and more persuasive choice. Check the current requirements for your circumstances.
Is a landlord page really worth building?
It is usually the highest-value page in a lettings business, because a landlord relationship lasts years and a tenancy is one transaction. Most agencies underinvest in it by a wide margin.
Should we publish our management fees?
If they are competitive, yes, and it will save your team a great deal of time. If you would rather not, at least publish what each service level includes so a landlord can compare something.
How do we stop availability dates going stale?
Make it a date field rather than a sentence, and have the listing display it from that field. Anything stored in prose gets forgotten.
If your lettings section is the sales template in disguise
Most are. Send us a link and we will tell you which fields tenants are looking for and which landlord questions your site leaves unanswered.
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