It used to be very simple. We had 2 prices on each property - a numeric price that was hidden from the public but was used for matching and ordering data in lists plus a "price text" field that showed everywhere.

If only Rightmove had adopted this approach, life would be easy.

Sadly, they didn't. They (and therefore all the portals that followed suit) used a numeric field. Once they started working with lots of agents, they realised they needed a prefix and/or a suffix. So, the complicated process that now exists was born.

Here's the Price Change form in Expert Agent - right click in a Property Record and you'll see it

To make it as easy as possible, leave the Prefix dropdown (1) set to Asking Price, put a numeric price in (2) and Expert Agent will complete the Price Text field (3). That's the field that shows on your website, in correspondence, brochures etc. The Lowest Acceptable Offer field (4) is filled in automatically. That's the price that gets used in matching - nobody sees it. So, if in this case your vendor would take £145,000, put that in the Lowest Acceptable Offer and, when you match, it will include applicants with a maximum price or perhaps £150,000 who would otherwise miss out.

Rightmove and other portals will show Price Prefix + ' £'+ numeric price - in this example Offers in the region of £155,000

There's a dropdown list of Price Prefix optiions (shown 1 above). A couple do special things that you need to be aware of.

Here are the options:

 Most just add a prefix in front of the numeric price on Rightmove (and because everyone started off using Rightmove's feed format, the other sites work in the same way) but there are two exceptions:

Price on Application: this is SUPPOSED to remove the numeric price from view on Rightmove and the other portals but you should check. That's particularly easy with the Rightmove live feed - harder with others that still do an overnight feed. We're aware of support tickets where Price on Application has still shown the price. There's nothing we can do here - we still have to send a numeric price so that the portals can stick the property into the right place in a list. We send the prefix and they are supposed to have the logic worked out to hide the numbers. We're worried about this one and that's why we've not fixed a bug that puts the numeric price after the words "Price On Application" in our price text field (3) - just to make you stop and think

Guide Price: If you choose this, the form changes as below. It shows 2 extra fields - upper guide price and lower guide price (5) below. Don't get them the wrong way round!  You'll see that we manually set up the price text field (3) to match in this example - Expert Agent doesn't do this for you.

Did you know that Expert Agent's price change form can automatically generate a price change letter or email? See Event Template Triggers

You can buy 500 credits for £60.50 (each credit buys 160 characters of text to a single recipient) by going to tools>Configure>SMS Configuration and Purchase Text Credits. Your messages will get applied immediately - the idea being that it gets you out of trouble at a weekend.

However, if you are prepared to spend more, we can reduce the price.

Here are the bundles on offer:

To buy these bundles, please fill out the form below and our Account Managers will action your request. If you are about to run out over a weekend or evening, order a 500 credit bundle in tools>Configure>SMS Configuration, tell us in an email to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and we'll sort everything out at the bundle rate

How many Text Messages do I need to buy?

Text messages get straight to the recipient. No searching through email spam, little chance of missing them. Our members get great results from them. If you fully embrace text messages including getting details to hot applicants, we think you'll need about 2700 per month. 

If you just confirm appointments and send general "please call me" texts, you'll need about 500 per month

here's our assumptions behind all this:

Let's assume you send text messages to your proceedable buyers and those with a local property to sell (your potential vendors) when you take on a new instruction.

Generally, across the board, you should have 200 applicants for each property, 20% of which (40) fall into one of the proceedable categories

So, assuming 3 new instructions per week, 1 back on the market and a couple of price changes, that's 240 text messages for matching. However, unless you are very clever and very concise, you'll need 2 credits of 160 characters per message so that's 480 text credits per week - call it 2000 per month.

Then, if you send viewing confirmations, you'll need 2 credits per viewing - 20 viewings per week = 40 credits - call it 160 credits per month.

If you send the automatic "2-hours before the appointment" text message - that will be another 160 credits per month

You can also send yourself a text message reminder for each appointment - so 10 accompanied viewings, 10 valuations = 40 credits per week - 160 credits per month

Finally, you'll want to send general "please ring me" or " your rent is due" messages. 50 per week? You'll probably only need 1 credit for these - that's 200 credits per month

I get free messages with my mobile phone contract - why do you charge so much?

With text messages bundled in mobile phone contracts these days, it might seem strange that we charge you for text messages sent via Expert Agent.

The mobile phone companies pay each other about 1p per message sent. They can therefore afford to bundle lots in their average £15 per month mobile contracts - some subscribers will use the full allocation, others won't use any. So, they play a "numbers game".

Sadly, we can't just buy an "unlimited texts" SIM and use a device attached to our servers to send direct to the networks. Such devices exist - click here for details - but they wouldn't cope with our throughput. Also, the problem here for us is that "unlimited texts" isn't unlimited texts - the networks have a fair usage policy and we'd get cut off within a minutes of use.

 If anyone fancies buying one and installing it in their office, keep us in the loop - we'd love to know how you get on with it. Maybe we could write an interface to it.

So, we have to send text message through "internet gateways" to the mobile phone networks

The networks resell vast bundles of message credits to 3rd party SMS Wholesalers. If we bought from them, we'd have to build our own infrastructure and manage connections to the networks ourselves. We therefore buy from a reseller on a managed contract - they provide the infrastructure, do the software development and generally manage the whole process. We add a small profit on top of their charges and pass the cost on to you. 

So, we could sell you text messages at a cheaper rate but we'd have to employ extra developers and support people, put in extra hardware etc and then we'd have to increase our subscriptions. We think the way we do it is fair. If you use text messages, you pay for the message and the services needed to get it to its recipient. If you don't use text messages, you don't pay any extra.

The Tenant Portal is a feature that was added in early 2016.  

This page will only be active once the Applicant is added to a Pending Tenancy.  

For more information, see the Tenant Portal (Beta) section of the manual.