Rightmove in the Dock

Any business that finds itself being sued by its paying customers can’t be feeling wholly chipper about life.

When that company’s market cap is off 50% from highs just eight months ago and its CEO is panic-buying its own shares to try and stave off a drop out of the prestigious FTSE 100, there must be at the very least a sense of foreboding back at HQ.

And yet … Rightmove continues to do pretty much exactly the same as it’s always done from a strategic perspective. Grind out even more cash from its captive, long-suffering customers. Is it going to be forced to change its ways? Or is this just another false moment in a long list of false moments where people believed it was on the slide?

Let’s look at the facts - and what history tells us about how these things play out.

In November 2025, Rightmove received a pre-action letter. In April 2026, the claim landed at the Competition Appeal Tribunal. It accuses Rightmove of abusing a dominant market position under Section 18 of the Competition Act 1998. The core argument: Rightmove commands over 80% of consumer time on UK property portals, operates at a 70% profit margin – the highest in the FTSE 100 – and has used that stranglehold to charge estate agents “excessive and unfair” subscription fees for years.

The numbers tell the story. Average revenue per agent (ARPA) climbed 8.9% in 2023, a year when house prices actually fell 1.7%. In 2024, ARPA rose another 6.5% while house prices nudged up just 1.3%. By 2025, full-year ARPA had hit £1,631 per month – that’s nearly £19,600 per agent per year – with some agents reporting individual fee hikes of 17–18%.

Research published in December 2025 confirmed that Rightmove’s annual fee increases had outpaced growth in inflation in every year since its float in 2006, apart from 2009 (when the Global Financial Crisis forced it to leave its charges unchanged for the only time) and COVID (when it finally capitulated to pressure from Rob Sargent and the 'Say No To Rightmove Campaign' and dropped by 28% ... only to whack them up by 53% the year after).

Meanwhile, the company returned £219.7 million in dividends to shareholders from £425.1 million in revenue. Revenue up 9%. Margin at 70%. You can see why agents might feel they’re funding someone else’s lifestyle.

This isn’t a ragtag bunch of frustrated agents with a grievance and a GoFundMe page, however. The claim is led by Jeremy Newman, a former panel member of the Competition and Markets Authority – someone who’s sat on the other side of the table in exactly these assessments. Scott+Scott UK LLP, a global litigation firm with serious form in competition class actions, is providing the legal firepower. Kieron Beal KC of Blackstone Chambers is on counsel and Kairos Economics is handling the economic analysis.

Bankrolling the whole thing? Innsworth Capital – owned by US hedge fund Elliott. Innsworth doesn’t back long shots. More on that shortly.

Crucially, this is structured as an opt-out collective action. Any estate agency that has paid Rightmove fees in the past six years is automatically included unless they actively step out. Over 250 agencies expressed support before formal filing. The agents themselves don’t pay a penny towards litigation costs.

Innsworth’s involvement is telling. This is the same funder behind two of the UK’s highest-profile competition actions.

The first is Merricks v Mastercard, brought by Walter Hugh Merricks CBE on behalf of 46 million UK consumers. The allegation: Mastercard charged excessive interchange fees on card transactions between 1992 and 2008, ultimately inflating prices for everyone. The original claim was valued at a staggering £14.1 billion. It became the UK’s first certified opt-out competition class action and, after years of procedural warfare that went all the way to the Supreme Court, settled in February 2025 for £200 million. That’s roughly 1.4% of the original claim – the CAT itself called it “a very disappointing outcome” – but it was still real money extracted from a dominant platform, and it established critical legal infrastructure for everything that followed.

The second is the ongoing £2.7 billion claim against Amazon, brought by Professor Andreas Stephan of the University of East Anglia on behalf of over 200,000 UK third-party sellers. The allegation: Amazon abused its dominant marketplace position by favouring its own retail products over third-party sellers, and by effectively forcing sellers to use its Fulfilled by Amazon logistics service to access Prime customers. The CAT certified the claim and it’s proceeding to trial. Sound familiar? Dominant platform. Captive customers. No realistic alternative.

Innsworth picks its fights carefully, backs them properly, and plays the long game. That should give Rightmove pause.

Two recent CAT rulings form the bookends for predicting where this goes.

Le Patourel v BT (December 2024) was the first opt-out collective action to reach full trial. BT’s prices for standalone voice services were found to be 25–50% above competitive benchmarks. Dominant? Yes. Excessive? Yes. But – and this is the kicker – not unfair. The claim was dismissed. The tribunal drew a crucial distinction: being expensive is not the same as being abusive. The claimants couldn’t demonstrate sufficient exploitative behaviour beyond the mere fact of high prices.

Then came Kent v Apple (October 2025) – and the landscape shifted. This was the first competition class action to actually succeed at trial in the UK. The CAT found Apple had abused its dominant position through its 30% App Store commission, ruling the fair rate was closer to 17.5% on apps and 10% on in-app purchases. Apple was ordered to pay up to £1.5 billion. The parallels with Rightmove are hard to miss: a dominant platform, captive customers, fees well above any reasonable competitive benchmark, and structural barriers that make switching functionally impossible.

Apple is appealing. But the signal is unmistakable: the CAT is now prepared to intervene where platform economics have tilted too far.

For Rightmove, the risk is existential in shape if not quite in substance. Even if the final figure lands well below £1.5 billion, a finding of abuse would fundamentally reset the commercial relationship between portal and agent. Pricing power would be constrained. Fee structures would be scrutinised. The 70% margin – a margin most SaaS businesses would weep with joy to achieve – would come under sustained, structural pressure.

For estate agents, this is the first credible legal mechanism through which the industry has collectively pushed back against what many have privately described as a “tax on doing business.” As Scott+Scott’s James Hain-Cole put it: “For years, thousands of businesses have been captive customers of Rightmove, which faces no effective competition.”

For the wider property industry, this is a test case for platform accountability. If a portal with 80%+ market share, 70% margins, and above-inflation fee increases year after year doesn’t constitute an abuse of dominance, it’s hard to imagine what would.

Rightmove has said it “strongly rejects the allegations” and will “defend the case vigorously.” The BT precedent gives them something to cling to – the excessive-but-not-unfair argument is a real one. But the Apple ruling has materially shifted the landscape, and Rightmove’s factual profile looks closer to Apple’s than BT’s.

The smart money says this settles. Often it will land around 40% of the initial claim. Merricks v Mastercard proved that even a heavily discounted settlement extracts real concessions from dominant players. Litigation of this scale, with this funding, and these precedents, creates enormous pressure to negotiate. A protracted trial would expose Rightmove’s internal pricing data to public scrutiny – something no company with a 70% margin wants.

But even a settlement would represent a seismic shift. The days of unchallenged annual fee hikes may be numbered. The question is no longer whether agents push back, but what happens when they do – and this time, they’ve brought heavily-incentivised lawyers ...