99acres vs MagicBricks vs Housing.com: Which Portal Gives Better Leads in 2026?

What the three portals have in common

99acres, MagicBricks and Housing.com are three of the large property portals in India. Buyers and tenants search listings; brokers, builders and owners pay for packages to list properties and get visibility; enquiries reach you as calls, form leads or in-app messages.

Each portal changes its packages, lead products and listing features regularly. Any article that quotes a fixed price or lead count will be out of date within months. Always get current package details directly from each portal's sales team and compare them in writing.

What does not change is how you should judge them: by what happens after the enquiry arrives.

Why there is no single "best portal"

A broker selling resale 2 BHKs in Thane, a builder launching plots near Ahmedabad and a rental agent in Bengaluru are running different businesses. The same portal can work well for one and poorly for another.

Four things decide your results more than the portal brand:

• Your micro-market. Buyer behaviour differs by city and even by locality.
• Your segment. Resale, new launch, rental, plots and commercial all attract different searchers.
• Your listing quality. Real photos, correct price and carpet area, and a clear description pull better enquiries.
• Your response speed. A good lead answered late behaves like a bad lead.

That is why the only reliable answer comes from a controlled test with your own inventory.

Five criteria to compare property portals on

The table below lists what to compare and how to check it. Fill in your own findings for each portal during the test.

Criterion	What to look at	How to check it	Good sign
Listing type fit	Does the portal show your kind of property to the right searchers?	Compare enquiries per listing for the same unit on each portal	Steady enquiries on your core segment
Enquiry intent	Are buyers ready to visit, or just browsing prices?	Track % of reachable leads who agree to a visit	Many leads share budget and timeline on the first call
Response-time pressure	How many other sellers did the buyer also contact?	Ask on the first call: "How many people have called you?"	Buyers still open to a visit after your first call
Duplicate leads	Same buyer enquiring on several portals or listings	Count repeat phone numbers across sources	Most leads are unique buyers
Cost per site visit	What each actual visit costs you	Portal spend ÷ site visits done from that portal	Lowest figure among the three

Two more points are worth noting but harder to score: the quality of the portal's account support, and how easily its leads reach your CRM without manual downloads.

Listing type fit

Put the same property, with the same photos and price, on all three. If one portal sends many enquiries on rentals but few on your new-launch project, that is useful information, not a verdict on the portal overall.

Enquiry intent

Some enquiries are price checks. Others are buyers who already have a loan sanctioned. On every first call, ask three questions: budget, preferred location, and when they want to move. Log the answers on the lead, and you will see intent by source within two weeks.

Response-time pressure

Portal buyers often enquire on several listings within minutes. Whoever calls first and sounds informed usually wins the visit. If one portal's leads feel "already taken" when you call, your response time on that source needs fixing before you blame the portal. Our guide on how fast to respond to real estate leads covers the setup.

Want to see this on your own leads? Book a free Antoc demo.

Duplicate leads

When the same buyer enquires on two portals, both portals look like they produced a lead. Without merging, your comparison double-counts. Keep one lead record per phone number, note every source in the record, and credit the first source when you calculate results.

Cost per site visit

This is the number that decides renewals. Enquiry count flatters cheap packages that send unreachable or out-of-budget leads. Site visits cost you time and fuel, so only real buyers turn up.

The 30-day portal test, step by step

Run this once a year, or before any big renewal.

1. Pick one micro-market and budget band. For example, 2 BHK resale between ₹60 lakh and ₹90 lakh in one suburb. Mixing segments makes results noisy.
2. List the same inventory on all three portals. Same photos, same price, same carpet area, same description quality. Note the start date and spend for each.
3. Route every enquiry into one lead list with the source tagged. No leads should live only in a portal dashboard or an agent's inbox.
4. Apply the same response rule to every source. For example, first call within minutes and a WhatsApp if unanswered. Otherwise you are testing your team, not the portals.
5. Log outcomes on each lead. Contacted, qualified, visit scheduled, visit done, or lost with a reason (wrong number, budget mismatch, broker, already bought).
6. Check at day 15. If a portal is sending almost nothing, check the listing first: price, photos, locality tag. Fix it and continue.
7. Calculate at day 30. Unique buyers, qualified leads, visits done, cost per enquiry and cost per site visit for each portal.
8. Decide. Renew, renegotiate or drop. Bookings take longer than 30 days, so keep tracking the same leads for 90 days before final judgement.

Illustrative example: comparing portals by cost per site visit (₹)

The figures below are an illustrative example for a broker team in Pune. They are not real portal prices or lead volumes; they only show how the maths works.

30-day result	Portal A	Portal B	Portal C
Spend	₹45,000	₹30,000	₹25,000
Enquiries received	150	80	90
Unique buyers after merging duplicates	120	70	60
Site visits done	9	8	4
Cost per enquiry	₹300	₹375	₹278
Cost per site visit	₹5,000	₹3,750	₹6,250

Portal C looks cheapest per enquiry, but each visit costs ₹6,250. Portal B sends fewer enquiries, yet each visit costs ₹3,750, the lowest of the three.

In this example, the sensible move is to shift budget towards Portal B, renegotiate with Portal A, and either fix listings on Portal C or reduce spend there. Your own numbers may point the other way, which is exactly why you test.

How to track portal leads by source in a CRM

The test only works if every enquiry from every portal lands in one place with its source attached. Downloading leads from three dashboards into Excel breaks within a week.

A CRM connected to your portal and ad integrations does this automatically. In Antoc's lead management, leads from 99acres, MagicBricks, Housing.com, Meta ads, website forms and walk-ins come into one list as enabled for your account, with source, campaign and listing context kept on the lead.

New leads are auto-assigned, so no portal's enquiries wait for someone to notice them. Reports then show leads by source and pipeline stage, and a daily CRM report goes to the owner on WhatsApp and email.

For portal-specific setup, see how to capture 99acres leads automatically and the full list of CRM integrations for portals and ads.

Handling duplicate buyers across portals

Duplicates are normal; ignoring them is the mistake. A simple rule set keeps your data clean:

• Search by phone number before creating a new lead manually.
• If the buyer already exists, add the new source and listing as a note instead of creating a second lead.
• Keep the original owner unless they have not touched the lead. Two agents calling the same buyer looks unprofessional.
• When reporting, count the buyer once, credited to the first source, and note the assisting sources.

Questions to ask each portal before you renew

Portal sales teams will show you their best numbers. Bring your own data to the meeting and ask questions that tie their offer to your results:

• Which listing positions or lead products are included, and for how long?
• Are leads shared with other advertisers, or exclusive to my listing?
• How do enquiries reach me: call, form lead, chat, or all three?
• Can leads be delivered to my CRM automatically, and with which fields (name, phone, listing, enquiry time)?
• What happens to unused credits or listings at the end of the term?
• Can I pause or shift spend between projects or localities mid-term?

Get answers in writing. When you renew, compare the new offer against your own cost per site visit from the test, not against the portal's headline figures.

What to ask on the first call to judge intent

Intent is the hardest criterion to measure, so make every agent ask the same three questions on the first call and log the answers on the lead:

1. "What budget range are you looking at, including loan?"
2. "Which areas are you open to, and which are a definite no?"
3. "When are you planning to move or buy?"

A buyer who answers all three clearly is a qualified lead. One who will not share a budget or says "just checking prices" goes into a slower nurture list. After two weeks, the share of qualified leads per portal tells you more than any dashboard. For more on cleaning up bad enquiries, see our guide to Housing.com lead conversion.

Common mistakes

• Comparing portals on enquiry count. Cheap enquiries that never visit are the most expensive kind.
• Different listing quality on each portal. If one portal gets old photos, you are testing your listings, not the portal.
• Slow response on one source. Leads checked once a day from a portal dashboard will always "perform badly".
• Not merging duplicates. The same buyer counted three times inflates every portal's results.
• Judging after one week. Visits take time to schedule; give the test 30 days and track bookings for 90.
• No lost reasons. Without them you cannot tell whether a source sends junk or your team dropped the lead.
• Renewing on habit. Renew because the cost per site visit justifies it, not because the package came up for renewal.

So which portal should you choose in 2026?

Choose with data, not opinion. Run all three for 30 days in one segment, keep every enquiry in one CRM with its source, merge duplicates, and compare cost per site visit. Put most of your next budget where visits are cheapest, and repeat the test each year because markets and packages change.