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.