The portal model only sees half the market
Trade Me, OneRoof, and realestate.co.nz are excellent at one thing: showing your listing to people actively searching property in your area right now. That's roughly half the buyers who'll eventually buy your home. The other half? Not searching yet. Not on the portals. Not visible to portal-only marketing.
Where the other half is
They're on Instagram between meetings. On Facebook reading the news. On YouTube watching renovation content. They're not searching for property — but they're open to the right one, if it's put in front of them at the right moment with the right pitch.
“One buyer was on holiday in Hawaii. He'd seen the listing once, weeks before he flew out. While he was overseas, Agentis kept retargeting him — Auckland property, on his Instagram feed, on his Facebook timeline, while he was on a beach in Maui. When he flew home he came to the open home, then to the next one, then to the auction.”
The Peary Road case study (read it in full here) is List & Find in action. The buyer wasn't searching when the campaign launched. He was created.
What List & Find actually means in practice
- Tailored angles on the same home — different framings for different buyers, tested simultaneously, so the campaign learns who's listening within days. (More on this in our 2026 marketing guide.)
- Audience compounding — every meaningful interaction is captured to the agent's account, reusable on every listing that follows. The agent's marketing reach gets bigger every month.
- Sustained presence — the buyers leaning in keep seeing the listing for as long as it takes to convert. No window closes early.
- A signal layer that learns — anonymised audience-response data across every Agentis campaign feeds back into targeting. Sharper every month.
Does this replace the portals?
No. Trade Me and OneRoof are still where active buyers go to compare and shortlist. The right play in 2026 is to run both: portals for the searching buyers, AI-driven targeting for the ones who'll buy if the right home finds them. Different tools for different halves of the market.
How to know if you're a List & Find or List & Wait agent
- Do the audiences from your last campaign sit on your account, or on the portal's?
- When you talk to a homeowner about marketing, are you talking about reach numbers or about who the buyer actually is?
- Can you show a live dashboard mid-campaign, or just an end-of-campaign report?
- Does your marketing layer get stronger with every listing, or start from zero each time?
If those questions feel uncomfortable, the Marketing Maturity Scorecard is a five-minute self-assessment. Or talk to us about a strategy preview — yours to keep, either way.