How Seruya Works

Why Viewings Are Paid — And Where The Money Goes

5 June 2026 · 5 min read · Seruya Product

Charging for viewings sounds like a tax on house hunting. It is the opposite: it is what makes agents accountable and what stops owners paying for wasted trips.

The first question everybody asks about Seruya is why viewings cost money when other sites let you call an agent for free. The honest answer is that they were never free. You were paying in transport, in a day off work, and quite often in an informal "viewing fee" handed to someone in cash for a house that had already been let.

What a paid booking actually buys

• A confirmed time slot inside the rules the owner set — their days, their hours, their notice period.
• A verified agent who is named on the booking and whose payout depends on completing it.
• The owner notified and expecting you, so the door opens.
• A record, which is what makes a dispute possible if any of the above fails.

Where the money goes

On a typical viewing payment, the larger share goes into a pool paid out to the agents who do the work, and the remainder is the platform fee that funds verification, inspection and dispute handling. The owner pays nothing for viewings at all — a landlord’s cost of having their property shown is zero.

The agent’s share is not released all at once, and that is the important part. It unlocks in stages: a portion when the booking is accepted, a larger portion when the viewing is actually completed, more when an offer is submitted, and the largest share when the lease or sale closes. An agent who opens a door and disappears earns a fraction of what an agent who closes earns.

Pay for access and you get access. Pay for outcomes and you get outcomes.

The second-order effect

Once viewings are booked and paid, area hunting becomes possible. Instead of one property per trip, you book an area for a day and Seruya sequences your shortlist by location, traffic and viewing duration into a single route with one agent and a ready itinerary. Four homes in an afternoon, not four Saturdays.

That is worth more to you, worth more to the agent, and worth more to the owner whose property is being shown to someone who has already committed. Everyone in the transaction has skin in it — which was the whole point.