Annoying though that rightmove have become seen now as synonymous with house hunting in the UK. They are massively abusing that position and there is a £1.5bn claim against them in the courts right now.
I really hope they lose that claim but in the mean time I am doing my bit to try to get traffic back to estate agents from rightmove.
If you take out "htm" from the domain name while browsing a rightmove listing it will take you to a page where you can (in some instances) find a link to the same property on the estate agent's site.
The success of rigove will depend on getting a snowball effect going and right now I'm doing everything I can to build on the initial momentum.
That might help a little, but surely the fundamental problem is RightMove's market consolidation. With competitors like Zoopla and OnTheMarket offering essentially the same product but getting a fraction of the traffic, I suspect RM is engaging in some sort of anti-competitive practise to maintain market dominance. There is a recent lawsuit against them [0], in which the plaintiff pleads that RM employs "exclusionary conduct – behaviour said to weaken rival portals" [1].
Personally, I would hate to go back to the days of trawling individual estate agents and manually comparing prices, floorplans, locations etc... from websites with different formats and UIs. House market aggregators are massively valuable to buyers and sellers, we just need to regulate the industry to be competitive.
I put my flat in the UK on the market recently and it has given me a lot of insights into how broken the real estate market is!
One thing I found particularly annoying is how dominant rightmove is and how much of the traffic for house hunting they control.
As a small way of standing up to them I created https://rigove.co.uk/ (rightmove without htm - the hidden toll machine ;)
If you change rightmove to rigove while browsing a property for sale you get a page which shows where else that property is listed.
It is only a few days old so it is currently more miss than hit but I plan to reach out to estate agents to increase coverage as quick as I can.
I suggest considering a different domain name before this gets too popular. Rightmove might call it trademark violation for the name being too close, if they get annoyed at the competition.
Annoying though that rightmove have become seen now as synonymous with house hunting in the UK. They are massively abusing that position and there is a £1.5bn claim against them in the courts right now.
I really hope they lose that claim but in the mean time I am doing my bit to try to get traffic back to estate agents from rightmove.
If you take out "htm" from the domain name while browsing a rightmove listing it will take you to a page where you can (in some instances) find a link to the same property on the estate agent's site.
The success of rigove will depend on getting a snowball effect going and right now I'm doing everything I can to build on the initial momentum.