The thing customers praise you for is the thing you get found at fault for.
Customers praise agents most for communication. It is also what 79% of upheld Ombudsman cases come down to.
A letting agent expelled by The Property Ombudsman, after being ordered to pay a landlord £834 and not paying it, holds 4.7 stars on Google. Another, expelled for never responding to a formal complaint at all, holds 4.3 across 118 reviews.
I pulled the ratings for 2,624 estate and letting agent branches in July, across 223 towns and all four nations. The national average is 4.66. Both of those firms sit inside the normal range.
What customers actually praise
Then I read what people write, rather than what they score. Google aggregates the themes reviewers mention, so I pulled that too: 634 branches, 97,069 keyword mentions.
Strip out the generic praise, the helpful staff and the polite staff, and the thing customers name most is communication. Quick responses, regular updates, chasing the solicitor on someone’s behalf.
A fifth of all specific praise, and it is named at 82% of branches.
What agents get found at fault for
The Ombudsman upheld 1,988 findings against agents last year. Of the cases it publishes, 79% came down to information. Somebody not kept informed while something was ongoing, or never told something material at the start.
So the thing customers praise you for most is the same thing you get found at fault for.
Why the rating cannot tell you where you sit
It gets collected on the day it went right, usually because somebody in the office asked at that moment.
Nobody asks the landlord who spent three weeks wondering whether the boiler got sorted, or the seller who has heard nothing since the survey came back.
The gap is not effort
It is the piece between what has just happened and the next thing that needs to happen on that job, and in most setups that piece depends on somebody remembering.
That gap, between your best review and your worst complaint, is what I work on. Not by asking more of the team, but by changing how the work gets done so that it needs less effort and less remembering.
Where these numbers come from
Ratings. Public Google listings for 2,624 estate and letting agent branches across 223 towns in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, collected July 2026. National average 4.66.
Review themes. Google’s aggregated review keywords across 634 of those branches, 97,069 keyword mentions in total. Generic categories such as helpful staff and polite staff were set aside before ranking.
Ombudsman findings. 1,988 findings upheld against agents in the last reporting year. The 79% is drawn from the case studies TPO publishes, read and classified by hand. No agency is named here.
Two separate samples. The rated branches are not the firms in the cases. This compares two pictures of the same industry, not the same businesses.
Worth flagging. The Property Ombudsman’s 2025 Annual Review reprints the 2024 figures in both the lettings and sales “top issues” tables, against 2025’s renamed categories. There are no usable 2025 issue-level percentages as a result, which is why none appear above.