Does an estate agency need a website if it is on Rightmove?

Nobody sensible argues an agency should leave Rightmove to make its website work harder. The buyers are there. Rightmove’s results for 2025 say well over 80% of all time spent on UK property portals was spent on Rightmove (89% in December 2025, by Comscore’s measure), and that people spent 16.8 billion minutes on the platform during the year. It also says Google reported that more people begin their property search with “Rightmove” than with “property”. For a buyer, the search starts and mostly stays on the portal.

That is exactly why the portal cannot do the other job. A buyer on Rightmove is looking at houses. Your listing sits in a results page alongside everyone else’s, and at the end of 2025 Rightmove counted 16,385 agency branches advertising. The format is the same for all of them, so on the portal an agency is mostly a logo in the corner of a photograph.

The person who pays your fee, the vendor, is doing something different. They are not searching for a house. They are choosing between three or four agents, and that choice is made about the agency, not the stock.

It would be wrong to pretend the portal is only for buyers. Rightmove’s 2025 results say its products delivered “7 out of 10 vendor instructions within resale”, citing data from an agency CRM. In October 2025 it launched Online Agent Valuation, which gives a vendor an instant estimate and, in its words, helps consumers and agents “build early relationships”, and it describes AI models in its Opportunity Manager product that aim to predict potential vendors from how they use the site. Rightmove plainly sees vendor leads as its business as well as buyers.

Three things about that are worth weighing before you decide the website does not matter.

• You rent those leads. They come through the portal you pay for each month. Rightmove’s average agency advertiser paid £1,530 a month in 2025, up from £1,440 in 2024, and it says 52% of agents spent above their monthly commitment on extra products. When the payments stop, so does the flow.
• Your rivals can rent them too. The same products are for sale to every other branch in your town. A lead that any agency can buy does not set yours apart.
• The vendor still checks you out. In our view, however a vendor first hears your name, a portal alert, a board, a neighbour, they look you up before they let anyone into their house. The portal can make the introduction. It cannot make your case.

Rightmove’s own guide for sellers, “How to choose the right estate agent”, updated in May 2026, tells vendors to “consider first impressions when looking at an agent’s website, photography and property descriptions”, because that is the experience their buyers will have. It also points them to review sites including Google. The largest portal in the country is telling your future clients to judge you partly on your website.

Where that judging happens matters too. Ofcom’s Online Nation 2025 report found UK adults spend an average of four and a half hours online a day, and that smartphones accounted for 77% of all time spent online in May 2025. The same report found 82% of UK online adults used Google Search that month. So the likely picture is a vendor with your name typed into Google on a phone, comparing you with the agent down the road.

What they find at that moment is either something you control or something you do not. Without a website, the answer to “who are these people?” is a set of portal listings and a review score, laid out by someone else next to your competitors. With a website that is built for vendors, it is your record, your people, your patch and a way to book. If your current site is the usual search bar, stock grid and Free Valuation form, the template problem explains why it books so little.

On a portal, the rules are the portal’s. The layout, the order of results, what a listing may contain and what it costs are all decided by the platform, and they change. A concrete example: in 2019 Rightmove began automatically removing any web links, email addresses and phone numbers written into the text of new and updated listings, so that each home had a single set of contact details routed through the portal. Rightmove’s reason was to make things clearer for home hunters. Whatever you think of it, it shows who decides.

Your own website is the opposite case. You choose what a vendor sees first, what they are asked, and how a valuation gets into the diary. Nothing sits beside it from a rival agency. And if it is built so that the domain and the site are yours, it stays yours whatever happens to portal prices or packages. Before you commission anything, check who owns your website: a site you rent on a licence has some of the same weakness as a portal listing.

The website also does work for your name in local search that a portal listing does not. Google’s own guidance says local results are mainly based on relevance, distance and popularity, and that a business’s prominence is based partly on “how many websites link to your business and how many reviews you have”. Links from the local paper, the school fair sponsorship page or a community group need somewhere lasting to point. In our view, a portal listing that disappears when the house sells is not that place; your own site is.

The sensible split is a division of labour, not a choice between the two.

• Rightmove: puts your stock in front of buyers, and sells you vendor leads if you choose to pay for them.
• Your website: wins the vendor’s decision once they have your name, and turns it into a booked valuation.

For the website to hold up its half, it needs to do a few things well. These are our view of the minimum:

1. Answer “why you” in the first screen, for someone thinking of selling, not only for someone looking to buy.
2. Show your record in your patch: homes you have sold, what vendors said, and the streets you know.
3. Let a valuation be booked on a phone without a call back or a long form. A day and a time, not a promise to be in touch.
4. Load quickly on a phone, since that is where most time online is spent.
5. Be yours, on your domain, so the effort you put into it builds up rather than resets.

Is there a case for spending little? Yes. If almost all your instructions come by referral and repeat business, and vendors already know you before they search, a simple site that proves you exist may be enough, and the money may do more elsewhere. But if you are trying to win vendors who have never met you, the website is where that is decided, and it is the one part of your marketing you do not rent.

That is the work we do: bespoke websites for estate agencies, from £10,000 plus VAT, for one agency per patch, and the website is yours. How we design estate agent websites shows what goes into one, and the pricing page has the detail.

• Rightmove plc: Full year results for the year ended 31 December 2025
• Rightmove: How to choose the right estate agent
• Ofcom: Online Nation 2025 report
• Ofcom: From apps to AI search, how the UK goes online in 2025
• Google Business Profile Help: Tips to improve your local ranking on Google
• Property Industry Eye: Rightmove clamps down hard on agents' own contact details in listings

More guides for agency owners are on the guides page.