Rightmove's Ratchet Racket

Rightmove reaffirming 8–10% revenue growth on Friday 8 May had the air of a man reading out the bus timetable while the street behind him is on fire. 6 weeks before: a £1.5bn claim lands at the Competition Appeal Tribunal from a group of its own paying agents, alleging systematic market abuse. Rightmove’s message to the City is essentially: all good here, carry on.

And that, frankly, is the whole scandal in miniature. Because if you can put out a bullish growth number while your customer base is trying to sue your face off, you’re not selling a service in any normal sense. You’re charging a toll.

We all know how this film goes because we’ve been watching it for years. The portal fee goes up. The justification is wafty. The product doesn’t suddenly become twice as useful. There isn’t some iPhone-moment of breakthrough that explains the uplift. The fee goes up because it can, because the market has been trained to behave as if Rightmove is not a marketing channel but the public square itself.

Buyers start there. Vendors expect to be there. And agents – even the ones who loathe paying that invoice every month, that is almost all of them – have to be there because the first agent to try life without it becomes the local cautionary tale. “They’re not on Rightmove, you know?” gets said in valuations with the same tone of voice you’d use for “They’re in a Satanist cult, you know?”.

This is why I’ve always been allergic to the way the RM debate is often framed as a “value for money” argument. It isn’t a value-for-money discussion when you can’t credibly leave. When your money is taken from you to put into the pockets of shareholders far away from you, with no interest in the property ecosystem or your competitiveness.

It’s a dependency discussion. A ratchet: one direction only. Pay more, or become commercially invisible to the majority of the buying public.

The legal claim itself matters less for the headline number (£1.5bn is a nice round grenade to throw) and more for what it’s trying to formalise: that this is not just a dominant brand doing well. It’s a dominant brand extracting escalating fees from suppliers who can’t coordinate an exit without someone breaking ranks for a quick win. That’s not being melodramatic; it’s basically the playbook of every marketplace that’s successfully captured demand. Once you own the audience, you can lean on the people who need access to it - heavily.

"Nice estate agency you've got here. Wouldn't it be a shame if something happened to it?"

The asymmetry is the bit agents still don’t say plainly enough, often enough, perhaps because we’ve all become so used to it we can’t hear how mad it sounds. Agents pay loads to create the stock. Every listing, every photo, every floorplan, every price reduction, every “back on the market”, every inch of compliance and admin that turns a house into a marketable product.

Rightmove doesn’t create that. Their agent 'customers' do.

Rightmove does, however, own the habit. It owns that first click in the evening when someone thinks, “Shall we move?” It owns the moment of highest intent. And then it charges the people supplying the inventory for access to that moment. Again: toll.

What’s changed in recent years is that the tollbooth is no longer just at “lead generation”. Rightmove has been busy building out into the transaction corridor – mortgages, referrals, financial products, the monetisation of intent beyond the listing. From a platform perspective it’s clever: if you already have the consumer when they’re most motivated, why wouldn’t you try to keep them on-platform for the next step too? From an agent perspective, it feels like watching someone build a shop inside your shop, then start nicking your stock to flog themselves.

And then there’s data, which is where the whole thing starts to feel almost taking-the-piss brutal. The industry’s listings generate the dataset; the portal aggregates it; the portal packages it; the portal sells “insight” back into the market. Some of that insight is genuinely useful. Some of it is simply the industry buying back a refined version of its own exhaust fumes. Either way, it deepens the dependency, because now you’re not just paying to be seen; you’re paying to understand what’s happening in the market you operate in.

So yes, the lawsuit will take ages. Rightmove will defend it with the institutional patience of a business that knows its customers can’t really down tools mid-case. But the very existence of a serious, well-resourced claim is a signal that the old, resigned grumble is hardening into something else. And if the legal theory lands – even partially – it threatens the foundational assumption that ARPA can just keep climbing because agents will always swallow it.

Agents didn’t create this bind through stupidity. They created it through rational self-preservation, branch by branch, valuation by valuation. Nobody wants to be first off the pier. That’s exactly why competition law exists: to deal with markets where individually rational decisions add up to collectively terrible outcomes.

Now, that same rational self-preservation - branch by branch - is starting to push agents toward alternatives, ones made credible for the first time by AI and shifting consumer behaviour.

Rightmove can calmly reaffirm 8-10% growth while a £1.5bn claim sits on the desk because the ratchet still turns. The only real question is how long it takes for the industry to jam it – and whether that comes from a legal case, a credible alternative or both.

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