Portal fees keep climbing, and the relationship with your client increasingly runs through someone else’s platform. Meanwhile the tools to sell your own services directly, around the clock, have never been simpler. Here is the case for taking payments on your own website, and what you can realistically charge for.
Something is shifting in the Dutch market, and it is worth paying attention to even if you work elsewhere in Europe, because the pattern is the same everywhere.
In June, Funda announced a new pricing system starting in September. The basic listing stays free, but sellers and selling agents can now choose between three advertising packages: bronze, silver and gold. The more expensive the package, the more findable the property is and the more photos it shows. The gold package is set to cost 536 euro.
The reaction was immediate. Nineteen of the twenty-seven regional NVM departments signed a letter to Funda’s management demanding the packages and price increases be scrapped, calling the increases disproportionate for home sellers. One agent put it bluntly in the national press: the platform, he said, is increasingly being used as a cash cow where everything revolves around returns.
There is history behind this. The NVM founded Funda in 2001 and owned it for years. In 2024 the American investor General Atlantic acquired thirty percent of the shares, and dissatisfaction among agents has grown since.
We are not here to take sides in that dispute. But there is a strategic lesson in it that has nothing to do with who is right.
The lesson: you do not own the channel
When the majority of your visibility, your leads and increasingly your client contact runs through a platform you do not control, you are exposed to decisions you do not make. Prices change. Rules change. The relationship with the person who is selling their house can be routed around you.
That is not a reason to abandon portals. They work, and for most agencies they are indispensable. It is a reason to make sure they are not the only thing you have.
Your own website is the one channel nobody can reprice on you. And for years the problem was that a website could show your listings but not actually transact. That has changed.
What you can sell on your own site
This is the part most agencies underestimate. Once your website can take a payment, a surprising number of things you already do become products.
Paid property submissions. If you run a platform where other parties list properties, whether that is private sellers, landlords or other agencies, you can charge per listing.
Featured and highlighted placement. The same mechanism the big portals sell, on your own site. A seller who wants their property at the top of your results can simply pay for it.
Membership packages for professionals. Other agents, landlords or developers pay a monthly or yearly fee to list on your platform. That is recurring revenue that arrives without an invoice or a phone call.
Services you already deliver by hand. Valuation reports, viewing services, photography and floor plans, energy labels, contract checks, styling advice, a search subscription for buyers. Every one of these is something you already do and currently arrange over email and a bank transfer.
Advance payments and deposits. Instead of chasing a transfer, you send a link and it is done.
None of this requires a new business model. It requires the ability to accept money on your own site.
Why the timing is genuinely good
Three things have come together.
Portal costs are rising, which changes the maths on owning your own channel. Money you would otherwise spend on visibility you rent can go into visibility you own.
Buyers and sellers now expect to arrange things online. Not because it is modern, but because it is convenient. Someone who books a hotel, orders groceries and files their taxes online does not expect to phone an estate agent to pay for a valuation report.
And the technology stopped being hard. Adding payments to a property website used to mean a developer, a webshop platform underneath your site, and a stack of plugins to maintain. It no longer does.
The quiet advantage: you are open at three in the morning
An estate agency is open when its people are. A website with a payment function is open always.
That sounds like a small thing until you look at when people actually do this kind of admin. Evenings, after the children are in bed. Weekends. Lunch breaks. The moment they finish a viewing and want to move before someone else does.
A seller who decides at ten in the evening that they want the premium listing can have it live before they go to sleep. Under the old arrangement, that decision waits until Monday, and by Monday it has often cooled off.
Twenty-four hour availability is not about working more. It is about not being the bottleneck in your own sales process.
The other thing that changes is your administration. Payments arrive with an invoice attached, in your own name, without you writing anything. The chasing stops, and so does the awkward conversation about an overdue transfer.
What people actually need to see at your checkout
Here is where a lot of well-built websites still lose the sale. In Europe, the payment method matters as much as the price.
Around 71 percent of Dutch online payments go through iDEAL. In Belgium, Bancontact handles about 64 percent. Baymard Institute measures average cart abandonment at just over 70 percent, and roughly 13 percent of that abandonment traces directly to one cause: the buyer’s preferred payment method was not offered.
If your website takes cards only, a Dutch seller looking at a 536 euro decision will hesitate. Not because of the amount, but because the checkout does not look like the ones they trust.
How this works in practice
Most professional property websites in Europe run on the Houzez theme. Houzez already handles the hard part: listings, search, agent profiles, a built-in customer relationship manager and frontend submission, so other parties can add and manage their own listings without touching your admin.
What it does not include out of the box is European payment methods. Houzez supports Stripe and PayPal for its memberships and per-listing payments, and its own documentation notes that recurring billing works only with those two.
Mollie for Houzez closes that gap with a single plugin. It connects your site to Mollie and adds payments to the checkout you already have, with 30 payment methods including iDEAL, Bancontact, cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, SEPA Direct Debit and the local European options. You choose which appear, and your visitor only sees what fits them.
It handles recurring memberships itself, so professional listing packages renew automatically without a separate subscriptions extension and without WooCommerce running underneath your property site. Refunds, invoices and analytics are in your own WordPress admin.
Setup is an afternoon, not a project. Install the plugin, paste your Mollie API keys, choose your methods, run a test payment, and go live.
Where we would start
Do not try to sell everything at once. Pick the one thing your clients already ask for and currently pay for by bank transfer, and put it behind a payment button. For most agencies that is either a featured listing or a valuation report.
Watch what happens for a month. You will learn two things quickly: how much of that revenue was quietly leaking away in follow-up, and how many people buy at hours when your office is closed.
Then add the next one.
The bigger point is not about any single service. It is that the channel you own should be able to do more than look nice. When portal pricing changes again, and it will, the agencies with their own working storefront will have options that the others do not.
Explore Mollie for Houzez: https://blog.quantumaddons.com/mollie-for-houzez-european-payments-no-woocommerce/
Frequently asked questions
What can an estate agency actually sell online?
Featured and highlighted listings, paid property submissions, membership packages for other professionals, valuation reports, viewing services, photography and floor plans, energy labels, search subscriptions and advance payments. Anything you currently arrange by email and bank transfer.
Do I need a webshop to take payments on a property website?
No. A dedicated plugin adds payments to the checkout your theme already has. You do not need WooCommerce or an e-commerce platform running underneath your site.
Which payment methods should a Dutch agency offer?
iDEAL first, since it handles around 71 percent of Dutch online payments. Bancontact if you serve Belgian clients, plus cards, Apple Pay and Google Pay for international buyers. SEPA Direct Debit for anything recurring.
Can I charge other agents to list on my website?
Yes. Membership packages and per-listing payments are built into the Houzez theme, and with a payment plugin they can renew automatically and be paid with local methods.
How long does it take to set up?
Installing the plugin, connecting Mollie, choosing your methods and running a test payment is an afternoon rather than a project. No code and no theme files are changed.
What do I need to run it?
The Houzez theme 4.x, WordPress 6.0 or higher, PHP 8.1 or higher, a free Mollie account, and a site on HTTPS.
Learn more on the feature overview (https://blog.quantumaddons.com/mollie-for-houzez-features/), the pricing page (https://blog.quantumaddons.com/mollie-for-houzez-pricing/), or the documentation (https://blog.quantumaddons.com/docs/mollie-for-houzez-theme/).
Mollie for Houzez is a Quantum Add-ons product. Premium WordPress plugins, built with security and reliability. Made in the Netherlands.