Google reviews for estate agents: ask before they leave

Estate agency is the only trade where the customer relationship has a hard end date. Once a vendor completes, they have moved, often out of the area, and will never need you again. That single fact should decide when you ask for the review.

BY CHRIS EVANS · UPDATED 21 SEPTEMBER 2026 · 7 MIN READ

The relationship has an end date

Nearly every business that asks for reviews is asking somebody who will be back. A garage sees the same driver next year. A salon sees the same client in six weeks. If the ask does not land today, it lands next time.

You get one attempt. Completion is not a lull in the relationship, it is the end of it. The vendor has moved, frequently to another town, and has no further use for your agency. The buyer has what they came for. Within a fortnight both of them are somebody else’s customer.

That does not change how you ask. It changes when, and the window is much narrower than most agencies treat it.

Why the post-completion email does not work

Three things work against it, and they compound.

It arrives in the worst week of their year

Moving house is consistently ranked among the most stressful things people do. The week after completion is boxes, broadband, schools and a missing kettle. Your email is not being ignored on merit, it is being ignored alongside everything else.

The goodwill has already moved house

On completion day the feeling is relief, and somebody from your office is standing in the middle of it. A week later that feeling has attached itself to the property rather than to the agency that sold it. People do not write warm reviews from a cold memory.

You are in a queue of senders

Solicitors’ final statements, utility switches, insurance, the freeholder, the council. Your request is competing for attention with paperwork that has consequences attached. Yours does not.

None of that is fixable with a better subject line, and it is why review requests from agencies convert so much worse than the same request from a trade whose customers walk back through the door.

The two moments that do work

Sales: the key handover

Keys change hands at your counter on completion day, and for two minutes the buyer is as pleased with you as they will ever be. They are standing still, there is a phone in their hand, and a member of your staff is directly in front of them. Everything the ask needs is already in place.

Lettings: the move-in appointment

A tenant sits down, signs, pays a deposit, works through the inventory and takes the keys. It is the longest seated appointment anybody has with an estate agency, and unlike a sales completion it happens in your office on nearly every let.

If sales is where your value is, lettings is where your review volume is.

Why lettings carries this

A branch doing twenty tenancies a month has twenty in-person handovers a month. A sales-only agency doing eight completions, most of them settled remotely through solicitors, has a handful of chances at best.

Google does not label reviews by department. A vendor comparing three agencies sees one star rating and one total per branch, and recent reviews signal an active business rather than a dormant listing. Lettings supplies a steady flow of both, and the wording tends to name the branch rather than the department it came from.

Which matters, because a vendor deciding who should sell the most valuable thing they own builds their shortlist on Google weeks before booking a single valuation. For how that shortlist gets made, see how many Google reviews you need to rank.

What to say at the counter

One sentence, said while something else is happening. The paperwork pause is what makes it easy: nobody has to stop what they are doing to hear it.

Three things that sentence does. It makes the request conditional on the experience having been good, which keeps you inside Google’s rules. It tells them exactly how long it takes, which removes the main objection. And it says why it matters, which is the part most people drop and the part that makes it land.

Staff mentioning it out loud is most of the difference. A stand sitting silently on a counter gets a fraction of the taps that the same stand gets when somebody says the line.

What you cannot do

Google’s policy is not advisory, and agencies get caught on two of these more than most trades.

• No incentives. No prize draw, no discount, no waived fee in exchange for a review. This includes offering anything off a tenancy renewal.
• No review gating. You cannot ask only the clients you expect to be positive, and you cannot run people through an internal survey first and send only the happy ones to Google.
• No reviews from staff or from branch devices. Reviews from anybody with a connection to the business breach the policy, and removals can take honest reviews down alongside them.
• Nothing during a dispute. Asking a tenant for a review while a deposit deduction is being argued is a bad idea for reasons that have nothing to do with Google.

The full set of rules, and the wording that stays inside them, is in how to ask for a Google review without breaking the rules. If a review already on your listing is unfair, replying properly does more for the next vendor reading it than getting it removed.

Setting it up in a branch

• Reception counter, facing the chairs. Everybody who collects keys stops here, and staff can mention it out loud. Worth more than every other placement combined.
• The lettings desk, with the move-in pack. The strongest second position, because signing a tenancy is a seated appointment with a natural pause in it.
• The property management desk. For landlords coming in about a renewal or a repair that went well.
• Not the window display. It looks like the obvious spot, but nobody taps a phone on the outside of your glass and it will sit in direct sun all day.

You will need your branch’s review link to programme anything. That takes two minutes: how to find your Google review link.

Common questions