Share a property listingas one link

One link that holds photos, a floor plan and a video

A property is the awkward case for every file-sharing tool, because a listing is not one kind of thing. It is twenty JPEGs, a PDF floor plan, a brochure, an EPC, and increasingly a two-minute walkthrough video — four different formats that normally end up in four different places.

Here they go in one album and each one renders properly on the way out: photos open full size, the floor plan and brochure render in a PDF viewer rather than downloading, and the video streams with proper seeking so a buyer can scrub to the kitchen without waiting for a 300 MB download to finish. On a phone, outside the house, on mobile data, that difference is the whole experience.

Every file also has its own link inside the album, which is more useful than it sounds. A buyer's solicitor wants the floor plan and nothing else; you send them the floor plan's link. A buyer texts asking for the video again; you send the video's link. Neither of them has to be handed the whole pack.

A QR for the board and the window card

The for-sale board is the one advertising channel a portal cannot take away from you, and it is dead weight if all it does is show a phone number. A QR code on the board turns every passer-by into a viewing — they scan it standing on the pavement and they are inside the property on their phone before they have walked to the corner.

The reprint argument is the reason this beats printing a portal URL: the code points at your link, and you control what sits behind it. Re-shoot in better light, drop the price, add the EPC, swap the video — the boards already in the ground stay correct.

• Size it for the reading distance, roughly 1:10. A board code read from three or four metres away wants to be about 30 cm across. Almost every property board code in the wild is printed far too small to scan from the pavement.
• Keep a clear quiet zone — a blank margin around four modules wide. A code printed tight against the board's border fails on a surprising number of phones.
• Dark code on a light panel. Brand colours are where scan rates go to die.
• Print the short link underneath. Some people will not scan a code, and a readable address on a board gets typed into a phone later.
• Test the real board proof at final size, outdoors, in low light, with two different handsets.

Which buyers are actually warm

Portal statistics tell you about the listing. A link tells you about a person — and for an agent working a shortlist, that is the more useful number by a distance.

The trick is one link per buyer, or per introduction. It takes under a minute to upload the same pack again with a different name, and then your view log is a pipeline: the buyer who opened the pack four times over a weekend and watched the walkthrough twice is a viewing you should be booking, and the one who never opened it after a warm phone call is telling you something you would otherwise take three days and two voicemails to learn.

You get the fact of the open, the time, the count, and on Pro rough device and country. There is no per-photo dwell time and no 'they looked at the kitchen for 40 seconds'. It is a coarse signal, but it is a real one, and it arrives while the decision is still live.

Taking the listing down the day it goes under offer

Every listing has an end date, and a listing that outlives its sale is an active nuisance: enquiries you have to decline, a board that keeps generating calls, a WhatsApp forward that resurfaces in six months.

The one thing to be honest about: taking a link down stops future access, it does not recall the photos someone already saved or the screenshots in a WhatsApp thread. Nothing does. It is still far better than a listing that quietly stays live forever.

• Under offer: disable the link. It goes offline immediately and can be re-enabled if the sale falls through — which is exactly why disabling beats deleting.
• Sold and completed: leave it disabled, or delete it if you would rather the photos were gone entirely.
• Seasonal or short-campaign listings: set an expiry date (Pro) at the point you create the link and it closes itself.
• Withdrawn by the vendor: disable, and the board's QR stops working the same minute — a genuinely useful property of pointing signage at a link you control rather than at a portal page you do not.

Where this fits next to the portals

This does not replace Rightmove, Zillow, Zoopla, or whichever portal owns your market. Those are where buyers search, and no self-hosted link changes that. It complements them in three specific places where a portal listing is a bad fit.

It also gives you something a portal will never hand over: the raw fact of who opened what, attached to a person you know rather than to an anonymous impression count.

• Pre-launch. The pack you send to your hot list before the listing goes live, when there is no portal page yet.
• Off-market and discreet sales, where a portal listing is precisely what the vendor does not want.
• The board and the window card, where a short address-shaped link and a scannable code beat a portal search everyone has to type.
• The follow-up after a viewing — one message with everything they asked for, rather than four attachments.

What this is not

This is a way to distribute a listing pack, not a piece of estate-agency software, and the gaps are worth stating before you build a process on it.

• No CRM. Nothing syncs to your contacts, no lead is created, no follow-up task appears anywhere.
• No MLS or portal feed. Nothing is published to a portal from here and nothing is pulled back.
• No lead capture beyond one blunt tool: Pro links can require a viewer's email before showing the file. That gets you an address; it does not qualify anyone, and it costs you some casual viewers who will not type an email to see a house.
• No booking or calendar. Viewings are arranged the way you already arrange them.
• No branded microsite. Pro can hide our branding from the page; it cannot make the page look like your agency's website.