Why we're backing 250 founding agents

Home.co.uk has been part of the UK's property market for thirty years. That is long enough to have watched the relationship between portals and agents curdle. We are rebuilding the platform now, and one decision shapes everything else: we are not building it for agents, we are building it with them. The Founder 250 is how we start.

The deal the portals forgot

Somewhere along the way the big portals stopped feeling like partners and started feeling like landlords. The rent goes up every year, the value does not, and the agent who knows the street becomes a line item to be squeezed. The fees have grown large enough that a £1.5bn class action is now heading to the Competition Appeal Tribunal over them, which we covered in what the Rightmove lawsuit means for agents.

We think the model is backwards. A portal should grow by making its agents stronger, not by charging them more for being found. That is why we made listings free for every agent: not as a promotion, as the default.

What the Founder 250 is

The Founder 250 is a first cohort of agents we are building the product around. In practice that means:

• A featured place in our public agent directory, on a thirty-year-old domain now carrying 1,249,531 live UK listings.
• Branded tools to win and serve instructions: a valuation widget for your own site, and branded market intelligence reports you can hand a vendor to win the pitch.
• A direct line into how we build, and a real say in what comes next.

In return, founding agents give us the one thing we cannot buy: honest frontline feedback while the product is still soft enough to change. We would rather ship the right thing slowly with fifty agents in the room than the wrong thing quickly to nobody. Buyers and sellers already reach these agents through Find My Agent; the Founder 250 decides what that experience becomes.

Why 250, and why now

Small enough that every one of them can have our number. Large enough to cover real variety: city and rural, sales and lettings, independents and small networks. We are doing this now because we are rebuilding home.co.uk from scratch rather than patching the old site, and foundations are the cheapest thing to get right early. The agents who help us lay them should get the best of what we build on top.

This is the start of a longer bet: that a portal grows by making agents stronger, not by taxing them. The Founder 250 is who we prove it with.

If that is the kind of partner you have been waiting for, come and join us.