SingRank3 of 9 Property Agent Sites Show Both CEA Numbers
Contents13
- Key findings
- Why a registration number belongs on the page at all
- How many sites showed the salesperson's number?
- Where the number hid when it was not on the page
- The agency licence number was the bigger gap
- Only 1 of 10 said what it charges
- What these sites already do right
- Where the pages were slow
- What we would do this week
- What it costs
- Method and limits
- Want these checks run on your page?
- FAQ
A seller in Singapore types "property agent singapore commission", lands on an agent's own website, and wants two things before ringing anyone: proof this person is who they say they are, and some idea of what the job costs. We checked whether those two things are on the page.
Across 10 Singapore property agent and agency websites measured on 10 October 2026, 6 of the 9 individual salespersons' sites showed a CEA registration number in the visible page text, and 3 of the 9 showed both their own registration number and their agency's CEA licence number. One site put its registration number in the page title. One kept it only inside the page's structured data, where no reader will ever see it. One carried it only in the meta description.
The fee side was thinner. 1 of the 10 sites stated what it charges.
None of this means any site breaks a rule, and we are not saying it does. CEA's requirement is framed around property advertisements, and whether an agent's homepage counts as one is not ours to decide. What we can say is that the particulars a consumer is told to look for are missing from most of the first pages a seller lands on.
Key findings
Every number below comes from our own measurement run on the morning of 10 October 2026, Singapore time. Our tool logs record the search and audit calls between 23:11 and 23:21 UTC on 9 October 2026. Counts are always shown with their base.
| # | What we measured | The number |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Individual salespersons' sites showing a CEA registration number in visible page text | 6 of 9 |
| 2 | Sites showing both the salesperson's registration number and the agency's CEA licence number | 3 of 9 |
| 3 | All 10 sites showing an agency CEA licence number | 4 of 10 |
| 4 | Sites naming their agency in visible text | 7 of 10 |
| 5 | Sites stating a commission rate, fee or price for their own service | 1 of 10 |
| 6 | Sites with a question heading or an FAQ block | 9 of 10 |
| 7 | Sites declaring a RealEstateAgent entity in structured data | 7 of 10 |
| 8 | Sites with a WhatsApp link | 9 of 10 |
| 9 | Sites whose robots.txt blocks GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot or ClaudeBot | 0 of 10 |
| 10 | Sites scoring under 50 on PageSpeed mobile | 4 of 10 |
Row 5 is the one we would act on first. Rows 1 to 4 are cheaper to fix.
Why a registration number belongs on the page at all
Because the regulator tells consumers to look for it. CEA's own consumer page lists the details a property advertisement is required to carry: the "Property agent's name, CEA registration number, and phone number" and the "Property agency's name and CEA licence number". For newspaper classifieds and text messages the list is shorter: "only the property agent's name (in full or abbreviated) and phone number are required to be stated."
The same page tells a consumer what to do with those details. Search the Public Register by phone number, and if the search "does not lead to a property agent's profile page, it means that the phone number is not registered with CEA." CEA puts the warning more bluntly still: "It is likely a scam even though the property agent's name and registration number can be found" on the register.
So a seller arrives already primed to check a number. CEA's rules on advertising sit in PG 02-11: Ethical Advertising, dated 29 June 2011, one of six practice guidelines listed on CEA's regulatory page. This article is marketing guidance. It is not legal or professional advice, and an agent with a question about what applies to a given page should ask CEA or their key executive officer.
How many sites showed the salesperson's number?
6 of the 9 individual salespersons' sites showed a CEA registration number somewhere a reader could see it, per our reading of each homepage on 10 October 2026. The footer was the most common home for it, on four of the six. One of the nine labelled its own registration number "CEA Licence", which is the agency's word rather than the salesperson's.
One site put its registration number in the page title and again in the meta description, so the number appears in the search result itself, before anyone clicks. In our view that is the correct instinct. A buyer scanning ten blue links for someone to trust gets the proof in the snippet.
The tenth site in our sample belongs to an agency rather than an individual, so a salesperson's registration number does not apply to it. We have kept it separate in every count above where that matters.
Where the number hid when it was not on the page
Two of the three misses were not really absences. They were placements no human reads.
One site carried its registration number only inside the page's JSON-LD structured data. Open the page and the visible text says the agent is a "CEA REGISTERED Salesperson" without the number. The number is in the source.
A second site carried the number only in its meta description, which is the grey line under a search result. Useful in the search result, invisible once someone is on the page.
The third site named neither a number nor an agency. It said the agent was "certified with CEA" and left it there.
The two placements do different jobs. Structured data helps a machine resolve who you are. A footer line helps a person who is one tab away from the Public Register. You want both, and each costs one line of text.
The agency licence number was the bigger gap
4 of the 10 sites showed an agency CEA licence number. 7 of 10 named their agency in visible text at all. On the other three, the agency appeared only in a logo's alt text, only in structured data, or not at all.
Of the three sites that did not name an agency in words, two sit under large-agency brands a Singapore seller already recognises. The brand is doing trust work the page declines to state. A machine reading the page has the same problem: an assistant asked whether an agent is registered can only answer from what the page says. We measured licence display in other licensed trades and got different answers: 6 of 8 maid agency sites showed their MOM licence and 1 of 10 pest control sites named the NEA licence. Property agents sit between the two.
Only 1 of 10 said what it charges
One site stated a rate for its own work: "My quoted fee for a full-service sale is 2%." No other site in the sample gave a figure for its service.
Seven of the ten did show dollar amounts, but for other things: listing prices, median resale prices, an estimated valuation range, a cash-proceeds figure in a testimonial. Two quoted an additional buyer's stamp duty percentage. A seller scanning for "what will this cost me" finds numbers that answer a different question.
This is worth more than a tick on a checklist, because of what the searches were. Two of the four searches we used to find these sites were fee searches. In the results for "property agent fee singapore" on 10 October 2026, three of the fifteen slots were held by pages advertising a flat fee in the title or snippet, two of them with the figure in the title. Agents who price in public are already holding those slots.
We have measured price display across Singapore service websites before: 99 of 211 showed a price. Property agents are far below that, and there is an obvious reason. Commission is negotiable and depends on the deal, so a single number misleads. Fine. A range with the conditions attached is not a single number, and it beats silence.
What these sites already do right
Three things, and they are not small.
9 of 10 had a question heading or an FAQ block, and four of the ten declared that FAQ in structured data. The pages are already shaped the way buyers ask and the way a machine wants to quote.
0 of 10 blocked GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot or ClaudeBot. Nine served a robots.txt and none of the nine blocked those crawlers. One served no robots.txt at all, which also leaves them unblocked. One site went further and named each AI crawler with an explicit Allow. That matches our wider robots.txt census of 207 Singapore sites where blocking was rare.
9 of 10 had a WhatsApp link. That fits how Singapore enquires. The weaker half of the enquiry picture: 5 of 10 had a tap-to-call link, 4 of 10 had a contact form on the homepage, and 3 of 10 showed a phone number that did not dial when tapped, because it was plain text or pointed at WhatsApp instead.
7 of 10 declared a RealEstateAgent entity in structured data, the schema.org type for this trade. One more declared only a generic Organization. Two declared no business entity at all.
Where the pages were slow
PageSpeed mobile scores across the 10 sites ran from 20 to 97, median 60, with four sites under 50. The two slowest lab readings were a largest contentful paint of 30.9 seconds and 21.3 seconds, measured by PageSpeed Insights on 10 October 2026. One site also failed on real-user data, with a field largest contentful paint of 4.3 seconds, which is what visitors actually waited rather than a throttled lab estimate.
Image weight explains part of it. One homepage carried 110 images, another 94 with 84 of them missing alt text. A page built from a photo gallery loads like a photo gallery.
What we would do this week
In this order, on the one page that should win your name or your fee search:
- Put both numbers in the footer, in words. Your CEA registration number and your agency's CEA licence number, labelled correctly. Ten minutes. It also means an assistant asked whether you are registered can answer from your page.
- Put your registration number in the page title or meta description. One site in our sample does this. It is free proof in the search result.
- Add a fee section with a range and its conditions. Not a single rate. What you charge for an HDB resale, what changes it, when it is payable, and whether GST applies. Say it is negotiable if it is.
- Make the phone number dial. Three of ten did not. Check it on a real phone, not a desktop browser.
- Only then look at speed. Four of ten need it, and it is the expensive one.
Our full guide to SEO for property agents in Singapore covers the structure around those pages.
What it costs
Steps 1, 2 and 4 cost under an hour and nothing in cash. Step 3 costs you negotiating room, and that is a real cost, not a rhetorical one. Publish a range and some sellers will open at your floor. Agents who hold their fee back do so for a reason.
Our own concession: a missing registration number in a footer is probably costing you very few enquiries today. If you have one hour and one page, the fee section earns more than the footer. We are telling you to do both because the footer is ten minutes, not because we think it is the bigger lever.
And the harder one. If your problem is that nobody is finding you at all, none of this fixes it. There are situations where search is the wrong thing to buy and a tidier footer will not change them.
Method and limits
Read these before quoting anything above.
- How we found the sites. Four searches on 10 October 2026 through SingRank's self-hosted SearXNG metasearch: "property agent singapore commission", "hdb resale property agent singapore", "best property agent singapore" and "property agent fee singapore". That is blended metasearch ordering, not Google's ranking and not its Maps pack.
- How we chose the 10. From the 50 results we kept the websites of Singapore businesses doing property agency work, in the order they appeared, and dropped portals, best-of lists, finance and comparison sites, news, forums, video platforms and overseas pages. No business SingRank works for appeared in the sample.
- Homepage only. We read each site's homepage. A registration number on a separate About or Contact page would not be counted. That makes our counts a floor, not a ceiling.
- Nine plus one. Nine sites belonged to individual salespersons and one to an agency. Salesperson-number counts use the base of 9; whole-sample counts use 10.
- We did not score the opening paragraph. On these pages the hero line, the first heading and the first paragraph blur into each other, and we could not apply our usual answer-first rule consistently. Rather than publish a number we do not trust, we left it out.
- No compliance verdict. CEA's advertising requirements are framed around property advertisements. We did not determine whether any page is one, and nothing here is a finding of non-compliance.
- Small sample, one morning. Ten sites, one day. Treat it as a description of 10 October 2026.
- Names no business. This page identifies nobody and rates nobody.
Our method page sets out how we separate findings from assumptions.
Want these checks run on your page?
Send us the one page that should win your fee search. We will run the same checks on it and tell you what to fix first, in order. It starts as a free visibility check through our contact page, and our SEO, AEO and GEO programme starts from S$500/month if you want us to do the work.
What we will not do is promise a ranking or an AI citation. AI platforms choose their own answers.
Figures describe 10 websites sampled on 10 October 2026 through metasearch and read by hand. This page names no business and is not a rating of any company.
FAQ
What must a Singapore property agent's advertisement show?
CEA's consumer page lists the property agent's name, CEA registration number and phone number, plus the property agency's name and CEA licence number. For newspaper classifieds and text message advertising, only the agent's name, in full or abbreviated, and the phone number are required.
How do I check whether a property agent is registered?
Search CEA's Public Register using the phone number of the person you are dealing with, or the number in the advertisement. CEA says that if the search does not reach an agent's profile page, the number is not registered with it, and warns that this is likely a scam.
Should a property agent put their CEA number on their website?
In our view yes, in visible text in the footer and ideally in the page title too. 6 of the 9 salesperson sites we measured on 10 October 2026 showed it in visible text. One put it in the title, where it appears in the search result before anyone clicks.
Why does structured data not count as showing the number?
Because a reader cannot see it. One site in our sample carried its registration number only in JSON-LD, so a seller checking the Public Register has nothing to copy. Structured data helps machines resolve who you are. It does not do the job a footer line does for a person.
Should property agents publish their commission rate?
A range with its conditions, not a single rate. 1 of the 10 sites we measured stated a fee for its own work. Three of fifteen slots on "property agent fee singapore" were held by pages advertising a flat fee, so the searches are being answered by someone.
Does blocking AI crawlers hurt a property agent's website?
If you want to appear in assistants' search features, yes. None of the sites we measured blocked GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot or ClaudeBot. One named each crawler with an explicit Allow, which is belt and braces rather than a requirement.
Can I cite these numbers?
Yes. Cite "SingRank, Singapore property agent website study, 10 October 2026" with a link to this page. Quote each count with its base, such as 6 of 9, and keep the metasearch caveat. Challenges to a number are welcome through our contact page.