Every day, an agent in the UK opens a Rightmove renewal and has the same private moment: that little internal recalculation where you wonder which member of staff you’re not replacing, which bit of marketing you’re not doing, which branch refurb you’re not funding - because the portal has decided it’s time for another bite.
This week, someone finally put the feeling into words. “Less an invoice for advertising and more a ransom note,” Trevor Abrahmsohm of Glentree Estates said, via The Negotiator. And that matters, because the whole Rightmove model - the bit agents grumble about over coffee and then pay anyway - depends on two things: dominance, and silence.
The number attached to this year’s ‘note’ in the piece was £40,000. One agency. One year. One portal. You can almost hear the usual shrug from parts of the industry: that’s just the cost of doing business. Except it isn’t, is it? It’s the cost of doing business when the market isn’t properly functioning.
Because if this were a normal media relationship, agents would do what they used to do with the local paper. They’d negotiate. They’d leave. They’d come back on a discount. They’d spread budget around. They’d treat the supplier like a supplier.
Instead, most agents treat Rightmove like oxygen. Not because the leads are always pristine (they’re often not), nor because the portal is doing much innovation that tangibly helps branches (it mostly isn’t), but because the threat of not being on Rightmove is weaponised by competitors at valuation stage. That’s the nasty genius of the thing: Rightmove doesn’t need to prove value every month; it only needs to preserve fear once a year.
Which brings us to the courtroom.
On 22 July the Competition Appeal Tribunal held the first hearing in Jeremy Newman’s £1.5bn class action against Rightmove. It alleges abuse of dominance and “excessive” and “unfair” fees. Put the headline figure to one side for a second - the detail that should make every portal exec and agent principal sit up straight is this: lawyers told the tribunal that a “significant number” of agents are afraid to give evidence, worried about “adverse commercial consequences”.
Afraid.
Not unsure. Not hedging. Afraid that if they’re named on the wrong side of this, the relationship gets … complicated. Rightmove “completely rejects” any suggestion of retaliatory conduct and their barrister says it would be “shooting itself in the foot”, relentlessly referring to its subscribers as ‘partners’. Yet we all know agents who came off the portal and then had to go back on at higher fees, punished for the temerity of leaving. Those scars, the ‘blood on the walls’, that’s what drives the fear, the dependency.
And it’s dependency, not partnership, doing the heavy lifting here. Partnerships don’t come with whispered warnings about what happens if you speak up. Partnerships don’t produce an industry where customers feel they must keep their heads down to protect their supply.
So what changes it?
Historically, nothing. Agents have tried boycotts, WhatsApp crusades, industry tantrums - and there’s always one who stays on, then uses everyone else’s absence as a cudgel in valuations. Rightmove knows this. It’s why the flywheel keeps spinning.
But we are at a different moment, and not just because this week even the Financial Times asked whether sellers are “being taken for a ride” and ultimately paying for Rightmove’s 70% margin. The bigger shift is that AI is starting to prise apart the traditional, paid-for portals’ true advantage: data density.
These legacy portals won because they aggregated stock and traffic in the early 2000s. Consumers realised that their best chance of finding their dream home was online, not a scattergun through local agent registration and scans of the local Courier newspaper. And this change in behaviour is happening again now. Consumers are trying to ask very specifically for their dream homes via AI – they can find great Italian restaurants and things to do with the kids at the weekend that way, so why not property?
And that’s the change that’s coming. Rightmove and its paid-for peers can’t answer it the way AI can, because they charge agents for visibility - so the results have to be skewed towards high-pay ‘featured’ properties that the consumer hasn’t asked for. This conflict between what the homeseeker wants to see and what the paid-for portal wants to show will end up being the issue that holes Rightmove in the end. It literally can’t change it – so competitors will rise up in its place that do cater to these evolved consumer needs.
That doesn’t mean Rightmove disappears overnight – it’s going to try and defend its court case by talking about its agent 'partners', it’s going to shrug off FT and other criticism by talking about consumer demand and it’s going to keep on gouging at 12%+ per year for as long as it can. But – and this week has been important for this – it’s finally starting to have to adopt a somewhat defensive posture, for the first time ever.
This Friday, 31st July at 7am, Rightmove will proudly tell the City how much it has been able to grab in the last 6 months from its aggressive price increases. It is likely to be high. But make no mistake – the industry is turning on it. The next private moment between an agent and their Rightmove 'ransom' renewal might be the last to make them wince.