Voluntary upfront property information is a tax on conscientiousness estate agents
Nobody wants to go first
Thought Leadership by Olivier Januiax Founder of Nestlink
โPicture this, you have invited two estate agents to carry out a market appraisal on your home, because you want to sell. The first agent into bat explains, with the earnestness of someone who has read the MHCLGโs June roadmap, that before the property goes to market the seller will want to commission searches, a condition report and a seller questionnaire, at a cost of several hundred pounds, so that buyers can see everything upfront and nothing falls over in week nine.
You freak out a little bit. You have had generations of being told that selling your house is basically free. The second agent comes in and says they can have it on Rightmove by Thursday and will list the property at ยฃ599,999 because โlots of 9โs confuses peopleโ. Guess who gets the instruction?
This is the problem with a voluntary upfront information regime, and it is not a technology problem. It is a game theory problem, and game theory does not care how good your market appraisal presentation is.
The Data is Ready-ish
In July, the Residential Logbook Association published a benchmarking survey of its own members and found that suppliers already provide 70% of the fourteen categories of sales pack information listed in Annex B of the governmentโs roadmap: 47% as standard, 23% on request, with a further 11% in development. โThe picture this survey paints is of a market that is ready,โ said the spokesperson.
It is a trade body and corporate entity asking its own members whether they are good at their jobs, so a pinch of salt is advisable, but the direction of travel is probably right. A week later Landmark launched Sales Pack Ready, a bundle of a personal local search, a drainage and water search and an environmental report, positioned squarely as โreform-readyโ.
Landmarkโs own data puts instruction to completion at 123 days, up 64% since 2007. Vendor data too, but it rhymes closely enough with the governmentโs own 120-day figure to be believed. And yes, a big issue lies with a handful of councils still refusing to digitise and innovate due to budget allocations, at a time where technological development has never been cheaper and more accessible.
So, fine, the packs can be built. The packs could be built in 2007, when they were called a HIP (Home Information Pack). Capability was never really the question. The questions are who pays, who goes first, and what should estate agents be doing right now?
England tried then ran away
The Home Information Pack (HIP) was promised in Labourโs 1997 manifesto, went live in 2007, and survived roughly as long as the average recent Prime Minister. On 21 May 2010 Eric Pickles suspended it, describing it as โexpensive and unnecessaryโ and blaming it for stifling a fragile market. The legislation was repealed in 2012.
The abolition impact assessment, which I have read so that you never have to, worked on the basis that one in five transactions failed, and noted with some regret that once searches moved back to the buyer, the searches in every failed sale would simply be thrown away. Sixteen years later the governmentโs own consultation puts the failure rate at around one in three.
Correlation is not causation, and I would not dream of suggesting otherwise. I would merely observe that we removed the thing designed to reduce wasted transactions and then had more wasted transactions.
Scotland, meanwhile, introduced the Home Report in December 2008, made the seller pay for it, kept it, and has now run seventeen years of a mandatory upfront pack that typically costs somewhere between ยฃ285 and ยฃ450. Scottish property still changes hands. Scottish agents still exist and do rather well.
The sky has remained in its accustomed position. The lesson is uncomfortable for the old guards of the English property industry. England is not being asked to innovate, it is being asked to stop flinching.
Andrew Stanton CEO Proptech-PR
If Rightmove is acquired what will the new business model be?
What would happen to Rightmove if it was bought?
Thought Leadership by Andrew Stanton CEO Proptech-PR
The latest activist move against Rightmove raises a much bigger question than whether the property portalโs share price has fallen too far: what would Rightmove actually look like if somebody bought it?
US activist investor Sachem Head has built a 6 per cent stake in Rightmove, with reports suggesting it believes the company has been oversold because of fears about artificial intelligence. The Sunday Times reports that Sachem has been encouraging the company to consider debt-funded share buybacks, while the market has interpreted its position as potentially signalling that Rightmove could become a takeover target.
That possibility is particularly interesting because Rightmove is not simply another technology company.
It is one of the most powerful pieces of digital infrastructure in the UK property market.
Rightmove reported revenue of ยฃ425.1 million for 2025, up 9 per cent, with underlying operating profit of ยฃ297.7 million and a 70 per cent underlying operating margin. Agency revenue alone reached ยฃ304.7 million.
It also remains extraordinarily dominant with consumers. Rightmove says more than 80 per cent of time spent on UK property portals in 2025 was spent on its platform, while total time spent on its website and apps reached 16.8 billion minutes.
So what would a new owner actually be buying?
The answer is much bigger than a property-listing website.
The data opportunity
For years, Rightmove has been described primarily as a portal: somewhere consumers go to look at houses and somewhere agents pay to advertise them.
But the underlying asset is the enormous amount of property-market information passing through the platform.
Listings, asking prices, property types, geographical demand, agent activity, new-build supply, consumer behaviour and the relationship between properties and the professionals marketing them all create a potentially valuable data ecosystem.
A new owner could therefore view Rightmove less as a classified advertising business and more as a property intelligence company with the UKโs largest consumer audience attached to it.
That could change the strategic emphasis.
Rather than simply charging agents increasingly higher subscription prices, an owner could attempt to build a much broader property-information infrastructure around the portal.
That could include mortgages, conveyancing, valuations, insurance, utilities, moving services, property management and increasingly sophisticated AI-powered transaction services.
Rightmove is already moving in that direction. Its โOtherโ businesses, including Mortgages, Commercial and Rental Services, grew 11 per cent in 2025.
AI could become an opportunity rather than a threat
The irony of the current situation is that AI is simultaneously being blamed for Rightmoveโs falling valuation and potentially making the company more strategically valuable.
The fear is obvious.
If consumers stop searching manually through property portals and instead ask an AI agent to find them a house, the traditional portal interface becomes less important.
But there is another interpretation.
If AI becomes the new interface for property search, the companies possessing the best underlying property data become extremely important.
An AI agent still needs to know which homes are available, what they cost, where they are, who is selling them and how they compare with alternatives.
That makes Rightmoveโs underlying data potentially more valuable, not less.
The strategic question for a buyer would therefore be whether to defend the traditional portal model or accelerate Rightmove into becoming the data and transaction layer behind the next generation of property search.
Andrew Stanton CEO Proptech-PR
Commercial Real estate always had the data now AI is finally making it usable
CRE firms have years of data so Why canโt anyone answer a simple question?
The promise of the CRE CRM was simple. Put relationships, transactions and intelligence into one system and nobody would have to guess what a client needed. When the broker asked a question, the answer would be sitting there in the data.
The reality has turned out rather differently. Relationship history may sit in one system. Deal and commission information may be somewhere else. Comparable transactions can live inside a specialist research tool that nobody opens often enough. And the most valuable context of all may be buried inside an email thread from six months ago.
Ask a broker what they know about a particular tenant and, remarkably often, they are answering from memory rather than from the data their organisation already possesses.
That is the central issue explored in a recent episode of Ascendix Technologiesโ The AI Brief: CRE Intelligence, where CEO Wes Snow and CTO Todd Terry sit down with Rob Ward to examine why this problem has persisted for twenty years โ and what AI has actually changed. The answer is potentially much bigger than another new piece of proptech.
The data was never necessarily the problem. Accessing and using it was. The 20-year CRM promise.
The traditional CRM was supposed to eliminate information silos. Instead, many CRE businesses have accumulated more technology, more databases and more information silos. The fundamental difficulty is that CRM systems depend upon people continually putting information into them.
Every relationship, conversation, meeting, transaction and piece of market intelligence creates another potential data-entry requirement. Someone has to open the system, find the appropriate record, complete the fields, categorise the information and save it. It is a hidden cost of using technology โ what the Ascendix discussion describes as the data-entry tax.
And it is particularly problematic in an industry where the people generating the most valuable information are often the least interested in spending their time entering it into software. The result is predictable. The company owns the data, but the data is incomplete. Information exists, but nobody can easily find it. The CRM becomes a database that contains some of the corporate memory rather than all of it.
AI changes the equation
This is where AI potentially represents a fundamental change. AI does not necessarily need people to behave differently before it can become useful. Instead of asking a broker to stop what they are doing and complete another form, AI can potentially capture information from emails, documents, meetings and conversations and turn it into usable intelligence.
That changes the relationship between the individual and the CRM. Historically, the user had to understand the technology. They needed to know which system contained the information, where to look, which fields had been completed and which report might produce the answer. The emerging model is almost the reverse.
The user asks a question. The technology works out where the relevant information resides. Imagine a broker asking: How does this lease compare with comparable properties within five miles?
That question could require several systems, an internal database, external market information, research tools and perhaps a spreadsheet. An AI-enabled environment can potentially bring those sources together and provide a single response. The significance is not simply that the answer arrives faster. It is that the user no longer needs to understand the architecture of the technology before getting to the answer.
Andrew Stanton CEO Proptech-PR
