Estate Agents: How to Protect Your Phone Number in 2027
Every board outside every house you’re selling has one thing on it that matters more than the price: your phone number. It’s on the sign, on Rightmove, on the flyer through the door, and in the memory of every vendor and buyer who’s ever called you. So what happens to that number when the UK’s old landline network switches off?
Why your number needs protecting
BT has confirmed the PSTN switch-off date: 31 January 2027. After that, the traditional phone lines that most estate agencies still rely on, whether that’s the office landline, a multi-line system across branches, or an old-style broadband and phone bundle, stop working. Openreach stopped selling new PSTN lines back in September 2023, so this has been coming for a while. The date itself isn’t up for debate. What’s still very much up for debate is whether your agency is ready for it.
Why this matters more for estate agents than most
Your number has a longer shelf life than your listings. A board can stay up for weeks. A flyer can sit in a drawer for months. A Rightmove listing can resurface in a search a year after it was taken down. Every one of those carries your number, and every one of those is a potential enquiry that goes nowhere if the line behind it has gone dead.
You depend on inbound calls in a way that many businesses don’t. A missed call to an estate agent isn’t a minor inconvenience. It’s a vendor calling three agencies to see who picks up first, or a buyer moving straight to the next listing on the page. If your number stops working, you don’t get a polite second chance.
Multi-branch agencies have more to lose, not less. If your number system routes calls across branches, or your head office line handles overflow from smaller sites, a switch-off that isn’t planned properly can take out more than one office at once.
What happens if you leave it
Nothing happens on 30 January 2027. Everything happens on the 31st. Businesses that leave their move until the last few months of 2026 tend to run into the same three problems: engineers are booked up, installs get rushed, and prices creep up as demand spikes. None of that is scare tactics. It’s simply what happens whenever an entire industry has to move by the same deadline.
The businesses that move early get to choose their own pace. The ones that leave it late get whatever slot is left.
What a smooth move actually looks like
Moving off the old network doesn’t have to mean losing anything, and it definitely doesn’t have to mean changing your number. Done properly, the process looks like this:
Your number moves with you. It’s ported across to the new service, so every board, flyer and listing still works exactly as before.
Your call handling stays familiar. Call queues, out-of-office routing and multi-branch transfers can all be rebuilt on the new system, often with more flexibility than the old lines ever offered.
The switch itself is quick. Most agencies can be fully migrated in under a day, with an engineer on hand throughout so nothing goes quiet mid-move.
Ready to move before the rush? Here’s what you get:
• Keep your number – every board, flyer and listing keeps working
• Live in under a day – most agencies are fully migrated in hours, not weeks
• UK-based support – a real person, on hand through the switch
• No price surprises – get your quote now, before 2027 demand pushes prices up
How to choose the right approach
Start with what you’ve got today: how many lines, how many branches, and what’s actually connected to each one (a lot of agencies find out they’re paying for lines nobody remembers setting up). Then find a provider who can talk you through the move, who supports you through the switch rather than just selling you a box, and who can prove they’ve done this before for businesses that depend on the phone as much as you do.
Ask what happens to your number specifically. Ask how long the move takes. Ask what support looks like if something doesn’t go to plan on day one. If a provider can’t answer those three questions clearly, that’s worth noting.
How we help
We’re TTNC. We move businesses off the old network every week, and we understand what a dropped call costs an estate agent that a lot of providers don’t. We handle the porting, the setup and the testing, with UK-based support if anything needs sorting once you’re live. Your number stays yours. Your calls keep coming in.
