Website check for letting and estate agents in Watford

Your listings are on the portals. Your firm is a different question, and it is the one a landlord asks before handing over a property.

Who the local authority is, and why it is on this page

Watford is in Watford Borough Council’s area, covering WD17, WD18, WD19, WD24 and WD25. This one is local enforcement. Trading Standards for this area is the body that checks fee display, client money protection and redress scheme membership on agents' websites, and the body that acts when they are missing.

Trading Standards here is not run by the council. It is Hertfordshire County Council — which is not obvious, and is worth knowing before you need it.

The postcode matters more than it sounds. Your Google listing carries an address and a postcode, your website carries them again, and the directories that answer local searches match the two against each other. When they disagree — an old address, a missing postcode, a unit number on one and not the other — the listing and the site stop reinforcing each other, and a business drops out of searches for its own town without anything visibly breaking. That is one of the first things we check.

What a search in Watford actually looks like

Somebody near Watford High Street with a landlord comparing three agencies on a phone does not open ten tabs. They ask, they get two or three names, and they ring the first one. When the search widens to Bushey, Rickmansworth, Croxley Green and Garston, you are competing with every agency in those areas on whatever a phone shows first.

So the work splits in two. Half of it is your website: whether it works on a phone, how fast it loads, whether an enquiry can reach you at all. The other half is everywhere else, and for letting and estate agents it is usually the half that decides it.

What Trading Standards already asks of your website

Your fee list, your client money protection certificate and your redress scheme membership must be displayed on the website. It is checked from outside, by anyone, in about a minute, and Trading Standards run co-ordinated sweeps on exactly this.

The registers that count for letting and estate agents

These are the sources an answer about a letting agent in Watford is assembled from. We check every one and tell you which you are missing from:

What the free check covers

Your website, and everywhere else your agency should appear. You get the findings either way — if there is nothing wrong we tell you that, and it has cost you an email.

InSite Scan › letting and estate agents › Watford