Where the businesses come from
Offices are ingested from OpenStreetMap
using the map's own tags: an estate agency is office=estate_agent, a managing
agent is office=property_management, a surveyor is office=surveyor.
OpenStreetMap data is licensed ODbL and is credited on every page of this site.
This has a consequence worth stating plainly: the index is as complete as the map is. An agency nobody has added to OpenStreetMap is not here. Coverage is good in some markets and patchy in others, and a market's count should be read as "what the map records", not "what exists".
Portals, proptech vendors, mortgage brokers and marketing agencies have almost no presence on the map at all. Those segments exist in the taxonomy and are filled in by hand rather than by the ingest, so treat their counts as a curated list, not a census.
An office is matched to the nearest indexed town within 45 km. Beyond that it belongs to no town page rather than to a misleading one.
What the website check establishes
Where a business publishes a website, we fetch its home page and record whether the site does each of a fixed list of things: lets you search properties, shows asking prices, offers an online valuation, addresses sellers, books viewings, publishes the energy label, offers virtual tours, calculates a mortgage, and so on.
Every one of these is objective and individually verifiable: open the site and look. Each is stamped with the date it was established, because a website can change the day after we check it.
The energy label check deserves a note. Advertising a property in the EU requires the energy performance indicator to be shown, with the details differing by country. Its absence from a listing site is therefore a real finding rather than nitpicking — though we check the home page, not every listing, so read it as "the site displays energy information somewhere", not as a compliance audit.
Counting agents
Where an agency's site has a team page, we follow it and count the people listed with their own contact details. That number is the size metric the trade runs on and no register publishes it, so it is one of the more useful things here.
Only named individuals count. A branch mailbox — helsinki@,
info@, ventas@ — is the company's address, not a person's, and
counting those would overstate every multi-branch firm. Where a page lists people by
direct phone line and no email at all, the distinct direct lines are the count.
Two limits. A firm with several branches often has a head-office page that lists the branches rather than the people, so the count can be lower than the firm employs; it is the number on the page we found, and we link that page so you can check. And a team page of photographs with no contact details yields no count rather than a guessed one.
We publish the number and never the people. "This agency lists twelve agents" is a fact about a business. The individuals' names, emails and phone numbers are personal data, they are not shown on this site, and they are not part of anything the site publishes or exports.
What we deliberately do not do
- No score, grade or ranking of agencies. These are findings about a website on a given day, not a verdict on a business. An agency with a plain site can be an excellent agency, and we have no basis to say otherwise.
- No ratings of our own. Where a rating appears it was collected by another platform, is labelled as such, and is never mixed into anything we publish or marked up as review data in our page metadata.
- No property data. This index is about the businesses, not about what homes are worth. We do not publish valuations, price indices or sold prices.
- No inferred ownership. An operator here means offices sharing one registered website domain. That is observable. Corporate ownership is not, and we do not assert it. Network membership is recorded only where the office's own map record, name or website says so.
How vendors are detected
Tools running on a site are identified from the page source, and only where the vendor's own code names itself. Anything looser produces false positives, and a false positive here puts a wrong claim on a public page.
Two limits follow. Detection is a floor, not a census — a site running a tool we have no fingerprint for counts as running nothing. And we read the HTML the server sends without executing the page's JavaScript, so a widget injected later by a tag manager is invisible to us. Where a market shows a very low figure, the honest reading is "we did not find it in the page source", not "it is not there".
Which pages exist
A town page is only created where the index holds at least three businesses of that kind in that town. Below three there is nothing to compare, and a directory full of pages listing one business is a well-known way to make a site worthless to everyone including its own readers. Pages below the threshold point search engines at the market page instead.
Correcting something
Location, address, phone and website come from OpenStreetMap and can be corrected there by anyone, including the business itself; the correction reaches this index on the next ingest. Website findings re-check periodically and update on their own. For anything else — a wrong operator attribution, a network we have wrong, a business that should not be listed — write to hello@serviceform.com.
Who publishes this
The index is built and maintained by Serviceform, which sells software to estate agencies. That is worth knowing when you read it. It is also why the method above is fixed and public: the findings are the same whether or not a business is a customer, no business can pay to change what appears here, and every figure is something you can check yourself by opening the site in question.