The 2026 ESTAS Awards are done, and over 1,000 of the best in property have gone back to work feeling ten feet tall.
Which is exactly when the award starts working hardest.
Ask anyone who has won one. The applause does not fade when the music stops. It echoes, in the team the following Monday, in the customers who hear about it, and in every ESTAS Review that keeps arriving long after the day.
The moments you are not in the room for
Think about where your next instruction actually gets decided. Rarely at the valuation. Usually before it. On a sofa, on a phone, somewhere between your website and two competitors’ websites, while someone you have never met decides who to call.
That moment is where an ESTAS Award works hardest. It cannot be entered, bought or influenced. It is decided entirely by verified ESTAS Reviews from real customers, and potential clients can feel that difference even when they cannot name it. In a market where every agent claims great service, an award your customers decided is the difference between saying it and proving it.
And the people deciding are reading. According to BrightLocal’s 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey, 97% of consumers read reviews for local businesses, and 85% say positive reviews make them more likely to use one. The proof is being checked, whether you are showing it or not.
Put it everywhere your next customer looks
Sellers researching before a valuation. Landlords comparing agents between tenancies. Buyers checking who they can trust. They are all looking, every week, and the strongest winners make sure the award is waiting wherever they land.
An ESTAS Award is not something you won. It is something you own. So put it front and centre, everywhere your name goes. Your website, next to the verified reviews that earned it. Your window, catching every passing homeowner. Your brochures and valuation packs, where it speaks before you do. Your ESTAS profile, where it sits alongside your reviews and AI Reviews Summary, telling the full story to everyone who finds you.
The work that earned it is done. Letting it be seen costs nothing at all.
The part that never stops
Here is the thing the trophy represents but the reviews deliver. Trust, renewed constantly.
An award is handed out once a year. ESTAS Reviews work every single day, because your reputation is being read far more often than it is being celebrated. Every new review strengthens the story. Every month of collecting keeps it current, which matters, because potential clients trust recent feedback most.
The award opens the conversation. The reviews keep winning it.
And for your team
There is a particular look on the face of someone whose name has just been read out at Grosvenor House. Part shock, part pride, all earned. That look does not come from hitting a target. It comes from finding out, publicly, that the people you looked after noticed.
An ESTAS Award is proof from the outside that the way your team works is worth celebrating. And people who get that kind of proof tend to go and earn it again.
The recognition does not just mark great service. It helps sustain it.
Why 2027 could be your year
Plenty of brilliant agencies left Grosvenor House without a trophy, and brilliant is the right word. Nothing is missing from the service. What decides next year is simply how much of it your customers get to say.
Keep delivering exactly as you are. Let your customers do the talking. Just 15 verified reviews by the end of February puts you in the running for the 2027 awards, and from there, every review across the year builds your case, written by the only judges there are. Your customers.
The win is just the start
One trophy, handed over in seconds. Then a year of your award winning instructions, your reviews building trust, and your team walking a little taller for it.
That is what an ESTAS really is. Not the end of a great year. The beginning of an amazing one.
