Portals like 99acres, MagicBricks and Housing.com do something genuinely useful. They put your listing in front of a large number of people who are actively looking for property, and they do it from the first day. For many brokers they are the main source of enquiries, and there is nothing wrong with that.
But the figure on the invoice is not what those enquiries cost you. If you want to decide sensibly how much to spend on portals, and how much effort to put into anything else, you need the full number.
The costs that do not appear on the invoice
The package price is the part you see. The rest is spread across your week, which is why it rarely gets counted.
- Time spent posting, refreshing and editing listings
- Time spent calling enquiries that were never serious
- Enquiries the buyer also sent to other advertisers
- Visibility that stops the day the package ends
None of this is a complaint about any particular portal. It is simply how a marketplace works. Understanding it is what lets you use one well.
You are rarely the only one they called
A buyer on a portal sees many similar listings on one screen. It is natural for them to enquire on several in a single sitting. So when your phone rings, you may well be one of a few people that buyer contacted in the last ten minutes.
That changes the economics. The enquiry is not yours until you win it, usually by replying fastest and being the most useful. This is why the five-minute rule for enquiries matters so much for portal leads, and why a slow week on the phone costs more than it seems.
Your time is a real cost
Say you spend an hour a day on portal work: posting, answering, chasing, and calling back people who turn out to be browsing for next year. Over a month, that adds up to roughly three full working days. If you think about what those days could earn you in site visits or closings, they become part of the price.
This is not a reason to stop. It is a reason to be deliberate: spend that hour on the listings and leads that actually convert, and drop the rest.
Renting visibility versus owning it
The biggest hidden cost is what you are left with. When you stop paying a portal, your listings come down. That is fair; you were renting space on someone else's platform. But it means none of the effort builds up in your name.
Buyers also tend to remember where they found a flat, not who listed it. "I saw it on a portal" is a common answer, and your firm's name is easily forgotten.
Work you put into your own website, your Google Business Profile and pages about the localities you know is different. It builds up over time, and it keeps working after a given month's budget is spent. We cover the wider trade-off in your own website versus portals.
Work out your real cost per site visit
Here is a simple exercise for the next three months. It needs a notebook or a spreadsheet, nothing more.
Each month, write down what you paid the portal, plus a rough value for the hours you spent on portal work. Then count what came from it: not enquiries, but site visits and closed deals. Divide the total cost by the number of site visits.
Take a made-up month. The package and your time together come to ₹30,000, and portal enquiries led to six site visits. Each visit cost you ₹5,000. If one of those became a deal, you can set that against your commission and see whether the channel pays.
Do the same for every other source: referrals, walk-ins, your website, your Google profile. Some will be cheap but slow, so they will not all compare neatly at first. That is exactly the information you need. For how to record the source of each lead reliably, see knowing which lead came from where.
What to do with the answer
Many businesses end up keeping portals as one channel among several, rather than the only one. A sensible pattern is to keep the portal spend that clearly pays for itself, trim what does not, and put the saved time into something you own.
Be realistic about the timing of that second part. A new website can start showing up for your own business name within weeks. Showing up for a competitive search such as "2 BHK in Powai" takes six months to a year, and needs you to keep adding useful pages. That is slow, which is exactly why it is worth starting before you need it. If you want to see what that involves, here is how we approach getting found.
This week, pull last month's portal invoice and your call log, and do the division. Even a rough number is more honest than the one on the invoice.
