I'm selling a one-bed flat on Wake Green Park in Moseley, Birmingham — still on the market on Rightmove right now, offers in the region of £82,000. Watching my own listing go through has taught me more about Rightmove than any research pass could have.
Two things stood out.
The first is cost. Every viewing, every enquiry, every version of my listing a buyer sees runs through a company that charges my agent for the privilege — an average of 7.2% of a UK agent's monthly commission, more in some cities, rising most years well ahead of inflation. That cost doesn't come from nowhere. It's baked into what my agent can spend marketing my flat, and ultimately into what buyers and sellers get.
The second is friction. Look at my own listing and you won't find a link to my agent's own website anywhere on it. Rightmove gives you "Call agent," "Email agent," "More properties from this agent" — all of it keeping you inside Rightmove. Nothing points you off the portal, even though my agent has their own site, with their own contact form, their own details about the flat. Rightmove decides you don't get to see it.
It's not just the agent's site, either. A Rightmove page is a thin summary of a much richer listing — a floorplan, a virtual tour, an EPC certificate, whatever local detail the agent or seller actually has. Right now none of that has anywhere to go. I'm planning to add several of those links to my own flat's Rigove page myself, once I've gathered them — not just the agent's site, but everything a buyer would find genuinely useful and that Rightmove has no interest in surfacing.
Neither of those is a conspiracy theory. It's just how the product works, and once you notice it as a seller you can't un-notice it. I'm not the only one who has — over 250 UK estate agencies are now backing a £1.5bn claim against Rightmove over exactly the fee side of this.
Rigove is the small, practical answer to the second problem. Paste a Rightmove link — mine, if you want to try it — and see every other place that property is actually listed: the agent's own site, a floorplan, a virtual tour, whatever else someone's added. It doesn't touch what Rightmove shows you. It just refuses to accept that Rightmove's page has to be the only one you ever see.
— Ed