Portals display and rank partly on completeness, and buyers read an incomplete listing as a signal about the agent. The gaps are remarkably consistent across the industry: a missing floor plan, a short description, and an empty virtual tour field.

Before a listing goes liveAround 10 photographs, best-lit room firstFloor plan with room dimensionsDescription of 200 to 300 wordsVirtual tour or video URLValid EPC and ratingCouncil tax bandTenure, and lease detail if leaseholdMaterial information: parking, rights, risksTransport links and schools namedPrice set just under a search band
The four marked items are the ones most often incomplete, and they are the ones a buyer notices. The rest are largely obligations rather than choices.

Photographs

Around ten is the working number: enough to cover the property, few enough that each one earns its place. Lead with the best-lit main room rather than the front elevation, because the first image is the only one that appears in search results.

Cover every room, including the ones that are hard to photograph. A listing that shows four rooms of a six-room house reads as concealment. The shot list is here.

Floor plan

The item buyers most actively look for and the one most often absent. It answers the layout question photographs answer worst, and its absence generates phone calls that a drawing would have prevented.

Description

Around 200 to 300 words. Name the specifics people filter and search on: the station and how long the walk is, the school, the parking arrangement, which way the garden faces. Adjectives do very little work here; nouns do most of it.

Material information

UK listings are expected to carry the material facts that would affect a decision: tenure, lease length and service charge where leasehold, council tax band, parking, rights of way, and known risks such as flooding. Getting this in at listing rather than at conveyancing is what stops a sale falling through in week six.

The virtual tour field

Present on both major portals and empty on most listings, because filling it depends on something being produced first. That dependency is the whole reason the field stays blank, not any doubt about whether tours help.

It is the one gap on this list that has recently become cheap to close. Spatia builds the tour from the photographs you already took for the listing, so filling the field costs no extra visit and no equipment: £62 to £99 per listing with hosting included, and it can be live the same day. That turns the tour from a decision per property into part of the checklist.

Rightmove and Zoopla each take a plain URL, and embedding the same link on your own site is one line of HTML.

The test worth running

Open five of your own live listings and score them against the ten items above. The pattern is usually not that one listing is poor; it is that the same two or three fields are empty on all five, which makes it a process problem rather than an effort problem, and process problems are the cheap kind to fix. The coverage argument is here.