Has Proptech found a way to let tenants jump the PRS Queue?
Thought Leadership by Adam Pigott CEO of Openbrix/tlyfe
How tenant readiness, digital verification and a new approach to the rental application process could change the way people compete for a home.
โThe Private Rental Sector (PRS) market has a queue, even if tenants cannot see it. And the next generation of property technology could change the way that queue works.
Paying to skip a queue is hardly a new concept. Airlines have turned it into a familiar part of modern travel, with passengers paying for priority boarding so they can avoid standing in line, secure space for their luggage and get settled before the rest of the aircraft fills up. The arrangement is generally accepted because everyone still has the opportunity to board. The difference is that some passengers have paid to make the process quicker and more convenient.
Until recently, the idea of applying the same principle to the rental market would have seemed rather more controversial. Finding somewhere to live is not the same as catching a flight, and the allocation of a home carries far greater personal and financial consequences. Yet the underlying problem is remarkably similar. Where demand exceeds supply, people compete for a limited number of places, and the ability to move through the process quickly can make a significant difference to the outcome.
The question is whether proptech can help tenants become better prepared for that competition without undermining fairness or creating a system in which access to a home increasingly depends on the ability to pay.
The invisible queue in the rental market
In competitive parts of the UK rental market, a single property can attract dozens of enquiries. For letting agents, this creates an operational challenge that extends well beyond arranging viewings. Every prospective tenant represents a potential application that may need to be assessed, with identity documents, proof of income, references and, where applicable, guarantor information all requiring attention.
These checks take time, and the information does not always arrive together. One applicant may have their documents ready immediately, while another is still trying to obtain a reference from a previous landlord or waiting for an employer to respond. An agent managing multiple properties and numerous applicants cannot process every application simultaneously, so the practical reality is that some applications become ready for consideration before others.
Andrew Stanton CEO Proptech-PR
Property portals are a love-hate relationship
Thought leadership by Olivier Jauniaux Founder of NestLink
โIt takes about forty minutes to find a house on Rightmove according to the portalโs own disclosure. You set the filters, you scroll, you save three, you send one to your partner with the word โthis?โ, a couple to your mum for balance, and the search is, for practical purposes, over. Thatโs what they claim at least. But the reality is closer to ten days, and it does not happen on Rightmove at all.
That is not a guess. Rightmove likes to tell investors that people spent 16.8 billion minutes on its platform last year. The sales market completed 1.2 million transactions in the same year. Divide one by the other, allow generously for renters, daydreamers and people checking what the neighbours got, and you still land somewhere near ten full days of portal time for every house that actually changed hands.
Nobody spends ten days stuck behind a computer trying to find a house. Daydreaming on properties twice the budge and lifeโs other distractions aside, genuine buyers spend approximately ten days trying to work out whether the property they found is a sensible idea. And the diligent ones do it in seven browser tabs, a planning portal, a crime map, a ChatGPT window and a phone call to a cousin who owns two buy-to-let flats and therefore knows everything.
Agents and, in turn, sellers paid for that forty-minute property find service. Nobody paid for ten days. A claim now sitting in the Competition Appeal Tribunal is about to establish, in some detail, exactly how much the forty minutes was worth.
Rightmove had a very bad week
The story starts with one genuinely terrible seven days last November. On the Friday, Rightmove told investors it would spend ยฃ60 million over three years on AI and would therefore make rather less profit in 2026 than promised. The market took this about as well as a dropped chain. Shares fell 28% at the open, closed 12.5% down, and more than a billion pounds of value evaporated in a single session over an announcement that amounted to โwe are going to improve the productโ.
Six days later, the same company told the stock exchange something rather different: it had received a pre-action letter from Jeremy Newman, a former Competition and Markets Authority panel member, alleging that it had spent the previous six years charging its customers too much. Too generous with shareholdersโ money on the Friday, too greedy with agentsโ money by the following Thursday. Some say itโs well deserved and about time.
The Newman Argument
The letter became a claim on 1 April, filed at the Competition Appeal Tribunal on behalf of roughly 7,200 estate agents, letting agents and new home developers who paid to list residential property between April 2020 and April 2026. Damages are pleaded at around ยฃ1.5 billion, funded by a specialist litigation funder, which is how claims of this size get off the ground and also why a chunk of any winnings would never reach an agent.
Two arguments are being run, and only one of them has had any coverage. The first is excessive pricing: that Rightmove charged agents materially more than it could have done in a functioning market, roughly ยฃ1,600 a month per branch and rising around 8% a year, without much in the way of justification. That is the number everyone has written about.
But the second argument is the interesting one.
It is exclusionary conduct: the allegation that Rightmove behaved in ways that kept rival portals weak, so that the competitive market against which its prices might be judged never really got going. Excessive pricing cases are notoriously hard to win on their own because someone has to prove what the โfairโ price would have been. Bolting an exclusionary limb onto it is what turns a grumble about invoices into a claim about the shape of the market itself.
The timetable is short and public.
Newmanโs reply to Rightmoveโs defence was due on 25 September. Skeleton arguments land in late October, and on 2 and 3 November the Tribunal hears the certification question: not whether Rightmove did anything wrong, but whether these 7,200 businesses can sue as a single opt-out class rather than individually, which in practice is the difference between a claim existing and not existing.
Andrew Stanton CEO Proptech-PR
In conversation with Pragati Dhingra, founder of Genifea
Last week Sourced Living began rolling out Genifea across its branches, the platformโs first commercial CRM integration.
By Author Andrew Stanton CEO Proptech-PR
Andrew Stanton spoke to founder Pragati Dhingra about what the Genifea platform actually does, where AI fits in an estate agency, the build-or-buy question facing larger groups, why agents need to adopt AI now, and how.
Congratulations on the Sourced Living launch Pragati. (Q) For readers meeting Genifea for the first time, what is it?
Thank you. Sourced Living is a forward-thinking group, and going live with them has been a proud moment for us.
Genifea is a multichannel AI platform that runs across an agencyโs front office, day, and night. It is easiest to explain by what it does.
It answers every enquiry, on every channel. Genifea takes phone calls in a natural voice, holds real conversations on WhatsApp, and picks up portal leads from email. When a Rightmove or Zoopla lead lands, Genifea sends a personal WhatsApp reply in under a minute, while the applicant is still looking at the listing, evenings and weekends included.
It qualifies, books, and finds new business. It works out what the customer wants and qualifies them against the agencyโs own criteria, whether that is budget, timing, cash offers or, in lettings, income against rent. It books the viewing or valuation on the spot, offering real slots that fit the diary and optimize the travel time between appointments. The buyer who also has a home to sell is offered a valuation, and mortgage and conveyancing referrals are surfaced to the branch.
It remembers every relationship. A returning contact is recognised the moment they call or message, even if the last conversation happened on a different channel. Each conversation picks up where the last one ended, so customers are never asked for the same information twice and the relationship keeps moving forward.
It keeps the CRM and the diary in order. It writes the lead, the notes, and the appointment straight into the CRM, and picks up the notes and edits the team makes by hand, so Genifea and the negotiators work from the same memory. It manages the whole officeโs diary across negotiators, spreading appointments across the day and the team and planning around real travel times.
It takes instructions like a colleague. The branch runs Genifea from an ordinary WhatsApp chat. To reschedule an open house, send one message and Genifea contacts every confirmed attendee and moves them to the new slot. If a staff member has to take a day off, tell Genifea and it moves their appointments to colleagues in line with your working preferences. Where an appointment canโt be moved, it contacts the customer and agrees a new time.
Andrew Stanton CEO Proptech-PR
