Property portals a love-hate relationship
Thought leadership by Olivier Jauniaux Founder of NestLink
‘It takes about forty minutes to find a house on Rightmove according to the portal’s own disclosure. You set the filters, you scroll, you save three, you send one to your partner with the word “this?”, a couple to your mum for balance, and the search is, for practical purposes, over. That’s 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 life’s 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 £60 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 “we are going to improve the product”.
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 shareholders’ money on the Friday, too greedy with agents’ money by the following Thursday. Some say it’s 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 £1.5 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 £1,600 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 “fair” 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.
Newman’s reply to Rightmove’s 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.
The Tribunal’s own directions order also records, almost in passing, that Newman’s legal team is aware of another law firm considering a similar action, and that if it is filed the parties must write in and say whether November should still go ahead.
Nothing focuses a defendant’s mind like a queue forming. Of course, Rightmove says the claim is without merit, and it will defend it vigorously.
It probably will, and it may well win.
Certification is a comparatively low bar, trial is not, and a 69% operating margin buys a great deal of King’s Counsel. But there is a reason the company has set aside several million pounds for legal costs this year and flagged the case to its own shareholders as an uncertainty. If it is certified and runs, Rightmove will have to disclose how it decides what an agent pays: how packages are tiered, how much each price rise was modelled to cost in cancellations, and what its internal documents say about the phrase “must-have”.
Nobody outside that building has ever seen the reasoning. I suspect it would make gripping reading for agents. But to homeowners this is all extremely dull. The ten days or forty minutes will not appear in it anywhere.
A love-late relationship
Here is the part I find quietly hilarious. In the same months that more than 250 agencies were putting their names to the legal action, Rightmove reported its highest first-half retention rate in more than a decade.
Ninety-six percent of agents stayed and paid more.
The claimant’s lawyers describe agents as “captive customers”. Rightmove’s results describe record loyalty. They are describing precisely the same thing in different tones of voice, and the Tribunal will eventually have to decide whether that is a market working or a market that has stopped.
What it tells the rest of us is simpler. Agents are not paying Rightmove for a great buyer experience. They are paying because every other agent is on there, and because leaving means explaining to a vendor why their house is not where everybody looks.
It is a subscription to not being absent. The buyer’s ten days never enter the pricing conversation, because the buyer is not the customer. The buyer is the audience being sold, and audiences do not get invoices. They get adverts, which is arguably worse.
Where does the value live?
If you want to know whether the forty minutes is still where the value lives, do not ask the claimants. Ask Rightmove. That same November update, the one that cost it a billion pounds, committed the company to moving faster on what it called opportunities “beyond Find”. It is building a conversational search tool with Google and plans to put a Rightmove app inside ChatGPT, which is a polite way of saying that the country’s front door for property is renting shelf space inside somebody else’s front door.
It still likes to point out that more people begin a property search by typing “Rightmove” into Google than by typing “property”. That is a lovely brand statistic. It is not a moat, and the company’s own strategy says as much. They are hiding behind this 40-minute manipulation.
Now someone needs to figure out how to get the real 10 days back down to a real 40-minutes.
I have spent the last two years building NestLink’s KnowYourNest into that ten-day gap, and I am plainly not the only one who has noticed the gap. The highest tension moment in a property transaction is not when a buyer finds the house. It is when they decide whether to commit to it, and that decision is currently made with worse information than almost any other significant purchase.
People will genuinely research toasters more than properties.
But that’s for good reason. Properties contain complex elements they don’t understand: a lease nobody has explained, an EPC that contradicts the agent’s adjectives, a planning application three doors down that nobody mentioned. A development that will put pressure on schools, GPs, and shops.
This toaster will make bread crispy in 20 seconds or less is a much easier concept to research.
The forty minutes of search is where the Rightmove invoice goes towards. The ten-day gap is where Rightmove is seeing the true value.
“Beyond Find” is Rightmove admitting it knows this.
So, whatever happens in November, follow the ten days story rather than the money.
If the agents win, they get some fees back and then, presumably, renew.
If Rightmove wins, it keeps the fees and the agents renew anyway.
In neither outcome does the person actually buying the house get a better answer to the only question they had, which was never “where is it?” but “should I?”. That question should have been a portal’s job, but it isn’t. Somebody should probably make it theirs, and ideally before the second law firm turns up.’
Check out NestLink! founded by Olivier Jauniaux, an ARB-registered architect and author on Proptech-X, who we endorse. Olivier comments, “As an architect, I often see how much buyers cannot tell from a listing, and never quite understand even once they complete a sale. A NestScore gives everyone a starting point, like a credit-score, and the full report shows what sits behind it.”
Check a home’s NestScore today for free using this LINK or go to https://www.nestlink.io/.
