Rightmove to Crack Down on Non-Payment After One Branch Gets 15 Year Free Ride

British portal market leader Rightmove is to step up its efforts to stop non-paying agency branches from listing on its website.

The news, first reported on Property Industry Eye, comes after one Rightmove customer revealed to the portal that one of its competitors had been listing without paying subscription fees for 15 years.

Rightmove’s legal counsel, Sam Al-Ani reportedly told the whistleblowing agency that the portal would be taking legal action against the perpetrator and would be implementing "new steps and initiatives" to "crack down on agents not declaring all of their offices".

Rightmove charges its customers a subscription fee on an office-by-office basis or a geographical model with many agencies having multiple offices that use the same brand and often some of the same staff. It is thought that the branch that got away with posting its listings on Rightmove without paying took advantage of this.

A Rightmove spokesperson told Property Industry Eye that currently its team carries out "regular detection in multiple ways" but the portal admitted that it can't effectively police every branch listing on its portal through due diligence alone.

In other Rightmove news this week, a survey of more than 500 British agents has revealed that the portal remains the most widely used portal for lead generation in the country and is perceived as the most effective by agencies. 92% of respondents indicated that the Milton Keynes-based portal was the best source of portal leads.

The Voice of the Agent survey also revealed that 88% of agencies use social media such as Instagram, Facebook and TikTok to generate leads while only 17% use newspaper advertising.