FT评论Rightmove面临约15亿英镑反垄断索赔和AI投入压力

Is Rightmove taking us for a ride?
Browsing Rightmove inspires visceral responses. Good old greed and fear are high in the mix when we visit the property website. Vendors like me want to make a packet on their sale. Buyers (me again) worry a desirable new home will cost too much.
Not many of us fret that Rightmove might be overcharging for listing our mansion in Sevenoaks or semi in Sheffield. Like so many websites, from Facebook to Compare the Market, Rightmove is “free” to users, albeit with a toll paid in data.
However, there are reasonable grounds to believe vendors ultimately foot the bill financially. There are also important counter-arguments.
For sellers, a critical view of Rightmove needs two underpinnings. First, evidence that dominance allows the company to charge fees persistently higher than a more competitive market would permit. That rule was good enough for the great economist Adam Smith, so it is good enough for me.
The second requirement is proof that estate agents pass on some or all of these listing costs to clients.
On the first point, there is strong circumstantial evidence in the form of Rightmove’s long history of remarkably high profits. When I first started writing about the business in the 2010s, I assumed, poor sap, that growing competition would reduce these.
I had not reckoned with the extraordinary power of “network effects” — the ability of aggregators with the most data to repel smaller rivals.
Operating margins are a key measure of profitability for mature businesses. The figure for Rightmove has hovered between 64 and 74 per cent since 2010. This is much steeper than at peers such as Germany’s Scout24 or REA of Australia. It is also better than anything achieved by Meta, a textbook example of network advantages.
Fees charged to estate agents for posting listings generate the vast bulk of Rightmove’s profits — and huge acrimony. “The agents are balking at strangulation,” says Trevor Abrahmsohn, boss of high-end estate agency Glentree. “Without the data and the money the agents provide, Rightmove would be no more than an idea.”
In 2015, Abrahmsohn played a pivotal role in setting up OnTheMarket, an agent-owned rival to Rightmove, and smaller portal Zoopla. The business struggled and was acquired by a US bidder in 2023. Thousands of estate agents and housing developers are now bringing a legal claim for just under £1.5bn against Rightmove for allegedly abusing a dominant market position.
Zoopla and OnTheMarket still compete with Rightmove. The question is whether this has much effect. Rightmove attracts an estimated 80 per cent of search traffic. It does not disclose fee schedules. Small independent estate agencies can pay between £2,000 and £3,000 per branch per month, while members of big networks pay rather less, according to estate agent gossip.
I could not find any reliable data on the cost per property. These numbers would matter if agents and developers were passing on charges to customers via commissions paid by successful vendors. I therefore calculated a rough proxy. I divided Rightmove’s annual revenues from agents and developers by the number of homes sold in the UK. I then adjusted for the fact that a minority of these are not listed on Rightmove.
The resulting revenue-per-property estimate has been rising steadily. Even so, the average figure of £440 in 2025 is not steep compared with stamp duty, for example. Rightmove disseminates data supplied by you and your agent to help sell your property. HM Revenue & Customs brings nothing to the party directly.
The resentment of estate agents could, meanwhile, be a sign that they cannot pass on charges. In theory, businesses should always be able to do this, given sufficient demand. But there are plenty of real-world examples of costs they cannot transfer.
One of these involves estate agents themselves. In 2019, English lettings agents were banned from charging letting fees to tenants they placed. Research by Jan David Bakker and Nikhil Datta suggests that afterwards agents were unable to lumber landlords with correspondingly higher costs.
“The demand curve showed that [agents] were not able to pass on this shock,” says Datta, an economics professor at Warwick University. “If Rightmove fees were taken away, would that saving be passed on to sellers? My thinking is no.”
My own conclusions are twofold. First, people smarter than me should determine whether estate agents ultimately lumber customers with listing fees. Perhaps this intellectual feat will be achieved by the Competition Appeal Tribunal, the body that will hear the £1.5bn compensation claim.
Second, it appears obvious to me that competition for UK residential property listings is weak because of Rightmove’s formidable network advantages. C’mon! Margins of 64 to 74 per cent for 15 years! That’s mind-bending profitability.
I sent Rightmove some questions and my charts. It replied with background material and a statement. Here is a pertinent line: “Rightmove has helped make the process of buying and selling homes significantly more transparent by dramatically reducing search costs, connecting buyers and sellers at scale, and giving consumers unprecedented access to information.”
Ironically, the estate agents’ legal claim is arriving just when Rightmove’s glory days may be ending. Its shares have almost halved since hitting an all-time high last August. The company has warned that profitability will fall because it needs to invest more in artificial intelligence.
That need, I should add, reflects the threat that big tech’s own chatbots will make specialised property search websites obsolete. Business historians would then wonder who ultimately paid Rightmove’s escalating fees, not folks like me who are trying to sell a house.
Jonathan Guthrie is a journalist, adviser and the author of ‘The Truth About Investing’. [email protected]