Why Estate Agents Need to Stop Relying on Rightmove

In 2024, Rightmove reported £280 million in profits, up 7% on 2023; a figure that reflects the platform’s continued success but also raises questions about who’s really benefiting. The portal’s dominance in the UK property search market has given it immense pricing power and many agencies now pay thousands of pounds a month just to stay visible on the platform, even as the value they receive in return continues to shrink. 

With millions of monthly visitors and dominant market share, Rightmove, and the property portals in general, promise a powerful platform for reaching huge numbers of buyers and sellers. But high visibility often comes at the expense of something even more valuable: control.

As fees continue to climb and competition grows fiercer, a growing number of agents are beginning to question the long-term sustainability of relying so heavily on these platforms. What once felt like the safest bet in property marketing is starting to look more like a costly habit, one that’s difficult to break, but increasingly hard to justify.

Estate agents may get their listings in front of large audiences, but they rarely own the relationship with those potential clients. Enquiries are routed through third-party systems, branded portals take centre stage, and agents are left with little ability to personalise the customer experience or even capture meaningful data.

In essence, the more reliant agents become on portals for leads, the further they move from owning their own marketing strategy.

When the Portal Becomes the Brand, Yours Inevitably Disappears

This isn’t just about cost, it’s about identity. The more estate agents lean on portals like Rightmove, the less visible their own brand becomes.

To the average buyer or seller scrolling through listings, the platform is what stands out, not the agency. Most people aren’t paying attention to which estate agent is behind the property; they’re engaging with Rightmove. Your listings become just another entry in Rightmove’s online “inventory”, not your own.

This presents a serious long-term risk. Agencies with strong local reputations and years of experience are being reduced to just a logo and a phone number tucked beneath a Rightmove header. There’s no meaningful space to showcase values, local knowledge or expertise, the things that actually build trust and drive instructions.

Worse still, agents get none of the long-term benefits of owning the customer journey. No email capture. No remarketing. No audience insights. No opportunity to differentiate.

Over time, this erodes brand recognition and makes it harder to compete without constantly spending on visibility. You’re no longer building equity, you’re just borrowing reach. This is the nature of all paid media but the problem seems particularly acute in the independent estate agency space. As Paul Smith, CEO of Spicerhaart, warned as long ago as 2016, “we [estate agents] are all guilty of handing over the responsibility for our web leads, traffic and our inventory to the portals, and as a result we have created the duopoly which exists today.”

Breaking the Cycle

Portals like Rightmove have full autonomy over how listings are displayed, who sees what, and which agents get prioritised. As paid listing tiers become more prominent, smaller independents risk being drowned out by larger corporate agencies with bigger budgets.

This isn’t just speculation; we’ve seen this dynamic unfold in short term lets where Airbnb hosts have faced increasingly steep service fees and shrinking visibility unless they conform to the platform’s preferred model. 

One of our clients, a short-let property manager in Bristol, managed to reduce their reliance on Airbnb by investing in their own website and SEO strategy. The result was direct bookings increased significantly, Airbnb fees dropped to almost zero, and the company made an additional £700k in short term lettings revenue over a single year as a result.

Whilst it may take a while longer to drop Rightmove completely in the same way, it is totally possible to break the cycle by investing savvily into your own digital presence and brand.

One agent who recently left Rightmove described the move as “a financial relief,” telling Estate Agent Today “we were paying a fortune just to be part of the system, but our lead quality wasn’t improving.”

Instead of continuing to invest in portal fees, they redirected their marketing budget into organic SEO and targeted Google Ads and saw no drop in enquiries.

This experience isn’t unique. As costs rise and control slips further away, the real issue becomes clear: agents aren’t just paying for visibility, they’re paying to stay in a game where the rules are increasingly stacked against them.

How Estate Agents Can Invest in Their Own Digital Strategy

Portals may deliver leads, but they also control the entire customer journey. That means you’re constantly paying to be found and that visibility disappears the moment you stop paying.

A smart digital strategy changes that. By building and optimising your own website, the foundation of your owned digital presence, you’re creating a marketing asset that works for you long after the initial investment. With good content and a strong local SEO foundation, your agency will start showing up when people search for properties or agents in your area, immediately reducing your reliance on third-party platforms to get noticed.

But it’s not just about traffic, it’s about control and this also comes back to your website. There isn’t another digital asset you will own that you can craft and control as much as your website and it should become the ultimate destination for most of your digital marketing activity. 

Your website should be where potential vendors and landlords, buyers and renters, experience your brand, understand your expertise, and decide to get in touch directly. It’s the difference between being seen on someone else’s terms and being remembered on your own.

Estate agents who build their own marketing infrastructure own their data, own their customer relationships, and own their brand presence. Portals treat estate agents as interchangeable service providers, whereas an agency investing in its own visibility can build trust, recognition, and direct client engagement.

As the industry evolves, we are seeing forward-thinking agencies shifting away from portal dependence, ensuring that their online presence is not dictated by external platforms. Those who fail to act will find themselves increasingly at the mercy of a system that prioritises its own profits over theirs.

Are you thinking of reducing your reliance on portals like Rightmove to grow your estate agency online? We work with many independent estate agencies, helping them get their website optimised and creating the online growth that puts more money in your pocket and not tech companies like Rightmove. Meaning all the profit goes back into your own continued growth. Book a call today and let’s have a chat.