In a recent interview, Rightmove’s director of data services, Tim Bannister, revealed that the property portal can now predict when the best time to sell is and when there might be a crash.
Rightmove currently has over 17m property records and attracts over 1.6bn page views a month. Talking to Estates Gazette about how Rightmove uses the vast amount of property data it collects, Bannister said that the portal can analyse this intelligence down to a local level, and predict both house prices and transaction levels with some accuracy”. This means that Rightmove can now provide insight into where a particular neighbourhood might be heading.
If made available to consumers – although it is not clear if Rightmove has any plans to do so – people will be able to use Rightmove to help sell their homes at the best possible time. As the data also predicts when there will be a crash, it will be of enormous value to property investors.
If exploited by the property sector, agents, conveyancers, surveyors and other property businesses will be able to identify trends and deploy resources where they are most likely to see a return on investment.
Talking to Property Industry Eye, a Rightmove spokesperson: “Since 2005 Rightmove’s data services have been using aggregated data and algorithms to provide products including an automated valuation model for lenders, a surveyor’s comparable tool for surveyors and bespoke data packages for estate agents and new homes developers.
“Agents have access to local market data as part of their membership in RightmovePlus, including tools such as the Best Price Guide and Marketing Report.”
However, it’s not all plain-sailing for Rightmove as property experts predict that agents could leave the portal for competitor portal OnTheMarket (OTM).
Owned 70% by the agents who supply the listings, OTM is “vastly cheaper” than Rightmove, and as the challenger seeks greater market share to be able to fund further growth, estate agents may look to make the switch to help secure much-needed cost savings.
