RightMove - Estate Agents' thoughts...

kittyclaws

Hi, I'm looking to get an opinion on the RightMove website from Estate Agents, seeing as they are their primary customers...

• What are the good things about this site and their service?
• How could they improve the site or their service?
• RightMove vs everyone else: What are their pros and cons compared to other websites like PropertyFinder, FindAProperty, PrimeLocation, etc etc?
• Any opinions on dealing with RightMove with properties abroad as well at UK properties?

I'm not from RightMove, but I want to get a general feel for the company if possible. Please air your views!

not_loaded

Maybe you’re only looking for EAs views here? I’m an end user only, but fwiw:

What are the good things about this site and their service?
It has to be one of the most well-known, and just lately they’ve added features like the ‘view on a map’ tab, which lets you get to grips very quickly with say, eight properties in the area you’ve specified and see precisely where they’re grouped.

How could they improve the site or their service?
I don’t know really. I feel they’ve fine tuned it well over the years.

RightMove vs everyone else: What are their pros and cons compared to other websites like PropertyFinder, FindAProperty, PrimeLocation, etc etc?
I find it easier to use than the others.

Any opinions on dealing with RightMove with properties abroad as well at UK properties?
I’ve used it to look abroad and it seems that maybe they don’t pull in that much business of that type, in the sense that you find very few properties come up.

hth

chris_m

not_loaded wrote: »

just lately they’ve added features like the ‘view on a map’ tab, which lets you get to grips very quickly with say, eight properties in the area you’ve specified and see precisely where they’re grouped.

Personally, I think the best recent (ish) addition is the Streetview links. Once you manage to identify the property in question (because SV starts at the postcode centre) it can tell you all sorts of things that the estate agent's pics/words don't.

Were I actually in a posisition to buy now, quite a few properties would have been rejected although the EA photos looked really nice, For example that the driveway is shared not sole access, the front bay is badly cracked or the next-door neighbours like collecting ancient 4-wheeled rustbuckets all down their drive, all over the front garden and in the shared parking bay in front of the houses - I counted seven cars, two trailers and a caravan all around a two-bed semi !!! Mind you, there was another place I saw with loads of cars, all Morris Minors, but they did at least look as if they were doing something with them, at least two of the five are runners by the look of them.

Conversely, Streetview has also shown me useful things which the EAs pictures didn't and could tipthe balance the other way for me - like the fact that the whole street looks nice, or that the drive will easily accommodate two or more cars, or the front garden is rather nicely done.

An extremely useful addition, especially for someone looking from 300 miles away ;-)

flimsier

When I was buying at the back end of last year, I wanted to know how long a property had been on the market AND I was frustrated by the same property appearing 6 times with different prices because it was on with different agents (or the vendor had changed agents but it hadn't been removed from the site). Properties also appeared to still appear for a while after being under offer.

not_loaded

flimsier wrote: »

When I was buying at the back end of last year, I wanted to know how long a property had been on the market AND I was frustrated by the same property appearing 6 times with different prices because it was on with different agents (or the vendor had changed agents but it hadn't been removed from the site). Properties also appeared to still appear for a while after being under offer.

Yes, I recall that recently there was a poster here saying that they’d owned for two years, and had now come to sell, and their property was still on there as sstc from when they bought it!

chris_m wrote: »

Personally, I think the best recent (ish) addition is the Streetview links. Once you manage to identify the property in question (because SV starts at the postcode centre) it can tell you all sorts of things that the estate agent's pics/words don't…
…the next-door neighbours like collecting ancient 4-wheeled rustbuckets all down their drive, all over the front garden and in the shared parking bay in front of the houses - I counted seven cars, two trailers and a caravan all around a two-bed semi !!!…
…An extremely useful addition, especially for someone looking from 300 miles away ;-)

I think you need to use Streetview carefully, and interpret what you see. Looking at our area, the photos are a good eighteen months to two years old. So the neighbours ‘rustbuckets’ could be long gone. Equally, what looked great THEN may well NOW be deteriorated.

A weird neighbour like that could move in a week or two before you complete on yours. :eek:

Overall, I’m guessing, kittyclaws, that you may find some useful EA responses this morning, as presumably they’ll be back at their desks now.

MrsManda

flimsier wrote: »

Properties also appeared to still appear for a while after being under offer.

We made it a condition of the offer when we bought our house that if the sellers accepted our offer they instructed their EA to remove the property from their website and Rightmove as we didn't want someone popping up with a higher offer after we went through all the expense of getting surveys etc... done.

Seeing the same house under different EAs for different prices was frustrating when we were looking but I wouldn't have thought Rightmove could do anything about that. Streetview is great, not for looking at the details of the neighbours as like not_loaded said, they're not updated and things change. But it's useful for seeing the layout of the area which doesn't generally get shown in the EA information and makes it easier to work out if it's worth the hassle of travelling a distance to view in person.

princessamy86

I like it, there's a lot of good features like the reports we can pull up from rightmove plus. To improve it: I would make changes upload automatically. We currently have an automatic upload and it only uploads once every 24 hours, so I would prefer it to change straight away when we change something on our system (ie price, pictures etc). The street view addition is definitely a good thing, like other posters have said it gives more information about a property. I also feel it's quite inflexible in terms of the structure of the listing. We currently have 5 bullet points on the main search page with a picture, and these are limited in terms of number of characters we can use.

Owain_Moneysaver

Satellite view is also pretty useful - especially when it reveals a sewage farm lurking behind a row of trees.

not_loaded

What are the good things about this site and their service?
It has to be one of the most well-known, and just lately they’ve added features like the ‘view on a map’ tab, which lets you get to grips very quickly with say, eight properties in the area you’ve specified and see precisely where they’re grouped.

I forgot to mention above that they’ve included a very useful function on the map that allows you to spot the Primary and/or Secondary schools. Useful if you’d rather leave the car at home than join in the school gate scrum for parking!

kittyclaws

Wow, this is great. Thanks to everyone who has replied!

It's great to get the buyer's opinion as well as the EA's angle, as rightmove seems to have a two-tiered customer base: the EAs getting more exposure for properties, and the buyers who use the site to search for their next home!

This is some great information!

Particular thanks to princessamy86 for the info on uploads and restrictions with the sight, and everyone else for giving me some great 'buyer's angle' info!
Cheers everyone!! :beer:

peppa-pig

From another end user POV (this time someone in the rental market) to me it would have been very useful to have extra search criteria eg - garden, garage, parking etc.

Slightly off the original questions, but I wish the estate agents would learn how to take decent photos of the properties they are trying to market!!!