7 minute read posted by Some milestones are worth a proper pause.
Not to blow our own trumpet (okay, maybe a little), but to genuinely sit with a question. What actually got us here?
900 verified ESTAS reviews. 8 consecutive Gold awards. Entering year 9. Over the past nine years, Estate Apps has become one of the most reviewed estate agent suppliers in the UK through verified ESTAS reviews.
A 98.99% customer service rating that hasn't dipped, not once, across nearly a decade of real feedback from real independent estate and letting agents.
That number didn't land in our lap. And it isn't luck. It's a choice we make every single day, and it shows up in ways that are probably pretty mundane from the outside: picking up messages quickly, actually fixing things, staying on a problem until it's resolved. Nothing flashy. Just consistent.
Wait, what even are the ESTAS Awards?
Worth a quick explainer if you haven't come across them before.
The ESTAS Awards are the UK property industry's most respected customer service awards - running for over 21 years and hosted by Phil Spencer. What makes them different from most industry gongs is simple: there are no judges. No mystery shoppers. No panels of industry veterans in a room somewhere.
Every single award - and every single percentage point of that 98.99% - comes from verified reviews submitted by real clients. The estate and letting agents who actually use the platform, day in and day out.
You can't charm your way to an ESTAS Gold. You just have to be genuinely, consistently good. Every year. No flukes.
So what does 900 reviews actually tell you?
It tells you this isn't a snapshot.
One good year is a good year. Nine in a row is a culture. And 98.99% across 900 individual votes means that across nearly a decade of client feedback - from hundreds of different agencies, in markets of all sizes, through good times and harder ones - less than 1% of people said anything other than top marks.
We've written more about what that rating actually means and how it stacks up in context over in this post - but the short version is: it's not a marketing claim. It's an independently verified outcome from a third-party client feedback system.
Every review counts the same, whether it came in during a quiet January week or in the middle of completion chaos.
The bit nobody really talks about: great service costs something
Here's an honest truth: brilliant customer service isn't cheap.
It costs time. It costs having real people available - not a chatbot, not a ticketing system, not a virtual assistant that logs your query and promises a response within three to five business days. And right now, across the supplier landscape, that cost is being cut.
We see it happening. Suppliers who used to have dedicated account managers have replaced them with automated onboarding flows. Support teams have been swapped out for AI chat systems that are very good at appearing helpful while routing you gently in circles. The savings look great internally. The actual experience gets quietly worse.
We use automation ourselves - for the things that genuinely benefit from it. But we're not interested in using it as a substitute for a real person being accountable to you. That's a line we won't cross.
Because when you're running a two or three-branch independent agency, you don't want to feel like a ticket number. You want to speak to someone who knows your website, your setup, your market - and who'll stay on your problem until it's sorted.
That gap between being processed and being looked after is exactly what shows up in a 98.99% score. And it's exactly what disappears when service becomes a system rather than a relationship.
Being small isn't a weakness. It's how we do what we do.
There's a version of independent supplier life that involves a lot of "yes, we're smaller than X, but..." We've stopped doing that.
Being independent, founder-led, and deliberately not-massive isn't something we're working around. It's how we deliver what we deliver.
When you work with Estate Apps, you go straight to someone who knows your account. No contact centre routing, no request being escalated twice before the right person sees it. Just direct access to someone with context on your business who can actually do something about it.
That structure has produced:
- 8 consecutive Gold awards (Best in Sector: Digital Marketing Services) - every year we've entered
- 98.99% customer service rating across 900 verified ESTAS reviews
- Silver Supplier of the Year at ESTAS 2025 - competing against suppliers of all sizes
- Personal Achievement Award - awarded to Alex Evans at ESTAS 2024
- Consistently top-rated on Kerfuffle, one of the UK property industry’s best-known supplier comparison platforms
- Rated *excellent* on Verify Trusted, the UK's leading review aggregator
- 430+ five-star Google reviews - from a small, independent team
None of those came from scaling up. They came from choosing not to.
What 'obsessed with customer service' actually looks like day-to-day
It's a bold phrase. Fair enough. So let's be specific.
- No long tie-in contracts. We earn the renewal every year. If we're not delivering, you're not locked in. That accountability sharpens everything - for us as much as for anyone.
- You speak to someone who knows you. Not a different face every few months. The same people, the same relationship, built over time. Context matters, and it's hard to build context with a high-turnover account management model.
- Proactive, not just reactive. We're thinking about your business between the calls, not just when something breaks.
- Problems get owned, not logged. When something goes wrong, someone at Estate Apps is accountable for it being fixed. Not just for acknowledging it.
- Technology in the right places. We absolutely use automation and AI - for the behind-the-scenes efficiencies that free our team up to be more useful to you. Just not as a substitute for the actual conversation.
Why this matters more in 2026 than it did five years ago
The market for independent estate agents is tighter. There's more noise, more competition, and - as we've explored in a few recent posts - more pressure to demonstrate credibility quickly, both to clients and to search engines.
Online reviews and trust signals matter more than ever in 2026 - not just for your agency, but for every business in the property sector. And one of the things we've written about separately is why trust signals like reviews and awards carry increasing weight with both potential clients and the algorithms that decide who shows up first.
The same logic applies when you're choosing a supplier. In an environment where switching costs are real - time, momentum, the upheaval of moving to a new platform - you want to pick someone you can actually trust to deliver over the long term.
Nine years of verified client feedback is about as close to independent proof as this industry offers.
A few things our clients have actually said
Three that stuck with us:
"We get calls weekly from other providers but wouldn't dream of switching."
"Not just a website. A genuine partner who wants us to grow."
"You feel valued, not like just another account."
That last one. That's the one we come back to.
Because in an industry where it's genuinely easy to feel like a number on a spreadsheet, we want every client to feel like the only client.
Still here. Still at it.
The 2026 ESTAS Awards haven't happened yet - year 9's result comes in later this year although on 29th May we were officially announced as shortlisted for a 9th consecutive ESTAS Supplier 'Best in Sector' Award - and Alex Evans recognised in the People Awards too!
But we're not sitting around waiting for October to tell us who we are. We already know what we're going to keep doing between now and then.
900 reviews. 9 years. Still obsessed.
If you want to see what that looks like in practice - for your agency, your goals, your specific market - let's have a proper chat.
No hard sell, no jargon, just an honest conversation about whether we're the right fit.
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