Using your portal

Every property has a story. This is where it lives.

One place for the whole of it, from the moment you book to the day it completes.

A property job normally lives in six places at once. The booking is in a sent email. The confirmation is in another. The photos came by a transfer link that expired last week. The floor plan is an attachment someone forwarded. The EPC is filed somewhere. And the question you asked about the annexe is halfway down a thread with four people on it.

Here it is one page. Booked, attended, delivered, invoiced, with every file and every word said about it, in order, against the property it belongs to.

Updates and messages

Every job has its own conversation. Ask a question there rather than by email and it stays with the property: whoever picks it up here can see the address, the services, the visit date and what has already been said, without you explaining any of it again.

You will also see our own updates as they happen, so the job tells you where it is rather than you asking.

Signing in

Your email address is your username. You choose your own password, and we never see it.

1. Open the link in your welcome email and set a password.
2. If that link has expired, go to the portal, choose Forgot password? and put in your email address. A fresh link arrives straight away.
3. After that, sign in at portal.legallez.co.uk with your email and password.

Booking a property in

About a minute, and the portal does most of the work.

1. Press + New instruction.
2. Type the postcode and pick the address from the list. That gives us the exact property rather than a best guess.
3. Choose a package, or tick individual services. The price updates as you go, so you always know what you are agreeing to before you send it.
4. Add anything we should know: access arrangements, the best time, who holds the key.
5. Send it. It appears in your list straight away and we take it from there.

A separate annexe

If the property has an annexe or a second dwelling, add it on the form. It becomes a property in its own right with its own EPC, because that is what the law requires, and you will see it priced separately.

Not ready to send it?

Press Save as draft and it waits for you. Drafts are kept against your login, so one started on the office computer is there on your phone.

Helping us find it

The single most useful thing you can do for a property with land, and it takes ten seconds.

When you pick the address we fill in a ///what3words location automatically, so whoever comes out has the front door rather than a rough pin in a postcode.

You can add as many more as you like, each with its own label. This is where a booking goes from good to excellent:

EPCs

The portal checks the register for you, while you are booking.

As soon as you confirm the address we look that property up on the national EPC register and tell you what we found:

• A current certificate with more than a year to run. Nothing to do, and you know before the vendor asks.
• Expired, expiring within twelve months, or never assessed. Worth adding an EPC to the booking while you are there.
• The register was unreachable. It never blocks a booking. We will check again our end.

An EPC we produce is lodged on the national register and the certificate appears on the job in your portal, so you always have a copy without hunting for the email.

What happens after you book

The job tells you where it is. You should not have to ring and ask.

From the moment you press send, the card in your list carries its own progress, and it moves as we do:

• Order received. It is with us and we will arrange the visit.
• Arranging. We are in touch with the owner to book a time. Small icons on the card show how we have tried to reach them, by call, voicemail, text or email, and when.
• Booked in. The card shows the confirmed day and time, so your office and the owner are working from the same appointment.
• Attending, then in progress. The visit has happened and the work is being produced. Each service carries its own state as well, so the photos can be finished while a floor plan is still being drawn.
• Delivered. Everything is on the job and ready to download. Partly delivered means some of it is there already and the rest is on its way.

When a set is released you get a message on the job and an email with a link straight to it, so nothing needs checking on the off chance.

Downloading photos

Two sizes, named for what you are about to do with them.

Just the ones you want

Press Select, tick the photos you need, and download only those. Handy when the window card needs six shots and you do not want the other forty.

Floor plans

Own your floor plan. Change it yourself, in seconds, with nothing to send back to us.

Everywhere else a floor plan is a finished picture. A room name needs changing and it becomes an email, a queue and a wait for somebody to open the file. Here the plan opens in your portal with the tools in your hands, and that request now takes about as long as the call it came in on. We have not found anyone else handing this over to the agent.

Press and hold Before / After to see the original at any point, and Start again puts everything back. When it looks right, download it as a JPEG, a PDF, or both; if your designer works in Illustrator or Affinity, there is an SVG too, the plan as a vector with every change you made in it. Your edits never touch our original, so the plan we hold is always there to come back to.

Video

A link that plays, not a file that fills your inbox.

When a video is finished it appears on the job as a watch link. Press it and it plays, on a phone or at a desk, with nothing to download and nothing to install.

A job can carry more than one. A main tour and a drone flythrough, for instance, each named so you can tell them apart at a glance. Where you have asked us to shoot both orientations, the landscape and the portrait cut are listed separately, so nobody has to crop anything by hand.

Landscape or portrait: please decide when you book

This is the one thing on this page worth reading twice. Photographs come in two sizes because one file is resized into another. Video does not work that way. A landscape reel for Rightmove and your website, and a portrait reel for Instagram, Reels, TikTok and Shorts, are two different shoots and two different edits. They are framed differently on the day, from different positions, because what fills a wide frame leaves a tall one half empty.

It matters in both directions. Rightmove and your own website are built around horizontal media, so a portrait video sent there displays with heavy black bars down both sides, or cropped awkwardly to fit the space. It stops looking like the property and starts looking like a mistake. The social apps do the same thing to a landscape film, in the other direction. There is also a reason the property portals settled on horizontal: a wide frame shows the proportions of a room, how it runs away from you and what it opens onto, which is the thing a buyer is trying to judge.

When it arrives, and why the portrait one is silent

Video comes back within five working days of the shoot. That is longer than the 48 hours you are used to for photographs, floor plans and EPCs, and the difference is the edit: a reel is assembled shot by shot rather than exported.

A landscape reel comes to you with a music track already on it, ready to post. A portrait reel is delivered silent, and that is deliberate rather than an oversight. Instagram and TikTok push a post harder when the sound is one of their own trending tracks picked at upload, and a reel with our music baked in cannot use one. Silent leaves that choice with whoever posts it.

If you would rather we cut to a particular track, send it to us before the shoot date and we will edit to it. Editing to music means matching the moves to the beat, so it has to be chosen before we cut rather than after.

Saving the file to your computer or phone

The watch link streams the video, which is the right thing for sharing: send that link and it plays anywhere without anyone downloading a thing. When you need the file itself, to upload to Rightmove, drop into your website or post from a phone, it comes from Vimeo:

1. On the job, press the video's name with the arrow (↗) beside the Watch button. It opens the video on Vimeo in a new tab. The pop-up player carries that Vimeo link under the picture too.
2. Beneath the video on Vimeo, press Download.
3. Choose the largest size offered (usually 1080p or 4K). Rightmove and social media make their own smaller copies, so start from the best one.
4. The file lands in your Downloads folder (on a phone, in Files or Photos). Upload it from there.

Portrait reels download the same way. Post the file to Instagram, Reels or TikTok from your phone and add one of their tracks, which is why the portrait cut arrives silent.

If we recut a video, the job carries the new cut. Share it from the job again and your vendor gets the current one.

Sharing with your vendor

Two kinds of link, and the difference matters.

Both are created from the job itself, so there is nothing to upload, no address to mistype and no attachment to go astray.

This is the end of WeTransfer

No upload, no wait, no seven day clock. A link you make here works for 120 days, so the vendor who comes back to it a month later still finds the photos where you left them, and the reply that says "sorry, the link has expired" stops happening.

You stay in control of it. Turn a link off the moment you want it gone and it dies instantly, on every device it was ever sent to. If it turns out you need it again, or it has run its 120 days, make a fresh one from the same job in a couple of seconds. Each link is listed on the job with the date it stops working and a note you can label it with, so you always know what is out there and who it went to.

However you send it

A link is only text, so it goes wherever your vendor already is. Copy it once and send it whichever way they answer fastest.

There is no app for them to install and nothing for them to sign up to. They press the link and the photos are there.

Your price list

The rates that apply to your office, not a general price list.

Click your name or logo at the top right and choose Price list. What you see there is what you are charged, including anything agreed specifically with you. It is also what the booking form uses when it shows you a price.

Combined rates are in there too, so an EPC and a floor plan ordered together show at the rate agreed for the pair rather than as two separate jobs added up. If something you order regularly is not showing the figure you expect, tell us and we will look at it with you.

Sharing the cost with a vendor

One job, two invoices, decided when you book it.

Every booking has an Invoice section near the bottom, and it asks one question: who is paying. There are three answers.

Setting a split

Choose Split branch / vendor and three more boxes appear:

1. The vendor's name and email. Their half of the invoice goes straight to them, so we need somewhere to send it.
2. The vendor's share, excluding VAT. You type a figure in pounds. Whatever is left of the job total invoices to your office. VAT is added to both halves afterwards, so put in the net figure and nothing else.
3. A short note saying what the split is for, such as "EPC to vendor, rest to branch". It is required, and it is the line that stops a conversation in three weeks about which half was which. It comes through onto the paperwork.

If it changes after you have sent it

Invoice details are not edited from the booking form once a job is placed. Post a message on the job and we will adjust it before anything is raised. Nothing goes out until the work is delivered, so there is normally plenty of time.

Purchase orders

Only if your office works with PO numbers. If you do not, you will never see this.

Where an office needs a purchase order number against every job, we set that on your account, and each new job then carries a purchase order card.

While the number is missing the card is amber and says Purchase order needed, with a box to type it into. Put the number in and the card goes quiet, with a Change button in case it has to be corrected later.

Entering it does two jobs at once. It stamps the number onto the job so it comes through onto the invoice, and it posts a note on the job so we know it has been done. Nobody has to email anybody.

Your team

More people in your office can have their own login.

Everyone gets their own email address and password rather than sharing one. It means jobs, drafts and share links are attributed properly, and someone leaving does not mean changing a password everyone knows.

The jobs belong to the office rather than to a person, so anybody signed in can pick one up when a colleague is out. Drafts are the exception: a half finished booking stays with whoever started it, on whichever device they sign in from.

Ask us to add a colleague and we will send them the same welcome you had. Ask us to remove one and their access stops that day, with nobody else having to change a password.

Brochure Designer

In Beta, and switched on for some offices.

It builds a property brochure from what is already on the job: the photos, the floor plan and the EPC. You choose a layout, adjust what you want, and export a PDF ready for screen or for the printer.

If it is on for your office you will see it on the job, ready to use on a real property. It is being shaped by the offices using it, so tell us how you get on and what you would like it to do next. That is what decides where it goes.

If you wish to explore the Brochure Designer for your office, contact us and we will place you on the waiting list for brochure onboarding. While it is in Beta we take offices on a few at a time, so that everyone joining gets a proper walk through rather than a login and good luck.

The property brief, in your voice

A brochure starts with the write-up, and there are three ways to get yours into the portal. Type it straight in. Dictate it: press the microphone and talk, which is usually quicker and often better, because it is how you would describe the house to a buyer standing in the hall. Or import what you have already written, a Word document, a PDF or a text file, and it reads it in.

From there the AI drafts every field a brochure needs, from the strapline down to the tenure, and it does three things worth knowing about.

• It restyles rather than rewrites. Your narrative comes back as brochure prose in your agency's tone of voice, not a generic one. The words are still yours, sitting the way your office writes them.
• It prompts you for what is missing. Council Tax band, EPC rating, tenure, distances, viewing arrangements: if you did not say it, it will not make it up. The field comes back flagged, with Not in the write-up, add it or leave it out, so a brochure never goes to print quietly missing something you meant to include.
• It remembers what you changed. Edit a field and it is pinned. Add a paragraph to the write-up, run it again, and your own wording stays exactly as you left it.

The tone of voice is not something we invent for you. When your office is set up we ask for up to ten of your recent brochures as PDFs, and your house style is taken from those: the length you write to, the words you use for a room, how much you say about the village, where you stay factual and where you let the property speak. It is your own back catalogue teaching it. The first draft should read like your office wrote it, because in every way that matters your office did.

Free for the first three months

For the first three months after it is switched on for your office, the Brochure Designer is free to use. That is not a gimmick, it is us finding out what it costs. Every brochure it builds runs on AI, and those tokens are a real bill at our end. How much any one office will use it is genuinely an unknown: everyone works differently, and some will decide it is not for them.

So have a go with it on real properties, tell us how you get on, and see whether it adds value. We think it does. It is the clearest example of Working Smarter we have built, saving time and keeping the detail accurate. At the end of the three months we will look at what it has actually cost and work out the pricing from there.

Security and your data

Your properties, your vendors, your links. Here is exactly who can see what.

Your password is yours

You choose it and we never see it. It is not stored anywhere we can read, so nobody here can look it up or tell you what it is, and nobody here can be talked into handing it over. If you forget it, the portal sends you a fresh link to set a new one.

Your office sees your office

An office sees its own properties and nothing else. That is not a filter on the screen, it is enforced in the database itself, on every single request, from the login onwards. There is no version of this where another agency's jobs appear in your list, and no address bar anybody can edit to get at them.

Everyone in your office gets their own named login rather than sharing one. It means a booking, a draft or a share link is attributable to a person, and when somebody leaves you tell us and their access stops that day, without anyone else having to change a password they all knew.

Links you send out

A share link is the one thing that leaves the building, so it is built to be controlled:

• The address is unguessable, a long random token rather than a number somebody could count up from to find the next property.
• It carries the passcode you set, and the person opening it has to enter it.
• It shows the date it stops working, on the job, before you send it.
• You can turn it off from the job at any moment, and it dies instantly on every device it ever reached.
• The job records whether it has been opened, and how many times.

Where it all lives

Everything is held in the European Union, on managed infrastructure in Ireland, not on an office machine or a hard drive in a car. Every connection to the portal is encrypted, and the browser is instructed never to use an unencrypted one.

The record is permanent and keyed to the address, so a property from two years ago is still there with everything said about it. The only thing with a clock on it is the full-resolution print files, which come off the online store after 120 days to keep everything else quick. They are not deleted, and we put them back on request.

Quick and reliable, because that is part of it too

Pages are kept light so your list opens straight away, on a laptop at the desk or a phone in a lay-by with two bars of signal. There is no app to install and nothing to keep updated.

Coming soon

What we are building next, and how to change the order of it.

Suggestions

This list is not fixed, and offices move it around more than we do. If there is something you do by hand every week that the portal could be doing for you, tell us. Press the same round help button at the bottom left of any page, it takes a picture of the screen you are on, and your idea reaches us with the context already attached.

Getting help

The fastest way to get an answer is from the screen you are looking at.

There is a round help button at the bottom left of every page. This is the one to look for: