Should you list on your own website before Rightmove?

Plenty of agencies want their own website, not Rightmove, to be where new instructions appear first. The idea is simple: buyers who registered with you see a property before the rest of the market, which gives them a reason to register with you, and gives you a database the portals do not own. It comes up in the trade press too: in November 2025 Property Industry Eye reported a new agent owned site built to “create an early listing at the point a contract is signed”, whose backers said the gap gives “serious buyers a crucial period to get their house in order”.

It can work, within limits. Our view, which the rest of this guide explains:

• hold the portals back for a day or two at most, not a week;
• do it only with the seller’s written agreement, after explaining what they gain and what they risk;
• treat the listing on your website as the start of marketing, with every rule that comes with it;
• judge it by how many buyers register with you, not by how often a property sells before Rightmove sees it.

Nothing in Rightmove’s general membership terms requires a member to put every property on Rightmove, or to put it there first. Where a property appears first is your decision and the seller’s.

Rightmove’s own guide for agents on pricing explains where a listing’s interest comes from: “Most of a property’s interest comes in the first few days. Why? It gets sent out as a new listing in our instant alert emails. The keenest buyers and tenants are searching on Rightmove every day and most will sort by ‘newest listed’ first.” It adds that, in its research, properties that sell typically generate at least 40% more interest than comparable properties over their first three weeks on the market.

That is the case against a long head start. Every day a property spends only on your website is a day of its freshest marketing shown only to the buyers who registered with you instead of the whole portal audience. If an offer comes in during that window, the seller has no way of knowing what the wider market would have paid.

You also only get one launch. Rightmove told agents in 2019 that it has rules “to stop agents relisting properties in an attempt to make the ‘added on’ date more recent”: a property for sale added again within 14 weeks is listed with its original date (two weeks in lettings). It also said a price reduction of 2% or more sends the property out again in its instant alerts. So once a property is on Rightmove, a price cut is the only routine way back into those alerts, and nobody wants to start there. Holding a property back for a day or two and then listing it is a first listing, not a relisting, so the launch is not lost. A long delay and a vague “new to market” banner are another matter (see the rules below).

Nor does a head start fix an inflated price. Rightmove’s guide says a vendor whose property is priced correctly from day one is 40% more likely to end up selling through that agent.

For the agency, the benefit is the register. A buyer who knows your properties appear on your website before the portals has a reason to sign up for your alerts and to keep your site bookmarked. Our guide to what an agency website should include already makes the case for an alerts sign up, so a buyer who finds nothing today hears from you, not from a portal, when something comes up. Early listings give that sign up a promise to make.

For the seller, the benefit is smaller and less certain. Sometimes a registered buyer who is ready to proceed makes a strong offer early. The backers of the agent owned site above told Property Industry Eye that they now regularly receive strong offers that stop homes from reaching the open market. That can suit a seller who wants speed and privacy. It can just as easily mean they accepted before the people who would have paid most had seen it.

For buyers, the benefit is real but easy to overstate. When someone floated an early access service on a UK small business forum in June 2025, asking whether buyers would register with local agents to see properties before the portals, several replied that Rightmove, Zoopla and OnTheMarket alerts already tell them quickly when something comes on, and that “early” means less as more buyers sign up. The portals sell the same idea themselves: OnTheMarket’s Only With Us scheme shows new listings to its users “24 hours or more” before Rightmove or Zoopla, with the agent choosing how long, and it says over 4,000 new properties a month were listed that way between January and August 2024. Our guide to which portals to pay for covers that scheme alongside the others.

A listing on your own website is marketing, so everything that applies on Rightmove applies there first. The Property Ombudsman’s code of practice for estate agents, and the law it points to, set out the main points:

• Permission and an EPC. You “must not put any property on the market for sale without permission from the seller and without a valid EPC” (paragraph 7a). The Energy Performance of Buildings Regulations 2012 say that before marketing a building, a person acting for the seller “must be satisfied that an energy performance certificate has been commissioned” (regulation 7(3)), and that the energy performance rating must be stated “in any advertisement of the sale or rental in commercial media” (regulation 11(2)). The early listing is an advertisement: show the rating.
• Agreed particulars. Before marketing starts, the sales particulars must be agreed with the seller; details they have not agreed must be marked “draft”, “subject to approval” or similar (paragraph 7j). An early listing put together from half the photographs is still marketing.
• Complete, accurate information. The CMA’s guidance on unfair commercial practices treats land as a product and viewing a property as a transactional decision, and says the material information a consumer needs must be given “clearly, in a timely way and in a way that the consumer is likely to see it”. Tenure, price and the rest belong on the early listing, not added when it reaches the portals.
• New to the market. The code says “manipulating internet portals (and other channels of marketing) to give the impression a property is new to the market, when it is not” is misleading (paragraph 7n). A day’s head start is not that. A property that has sat on your website for weeks, then appears on Rightmove with a “brand new” banner, is much closer to it.
• Every offer goes to the seller. By law you must tell sellers as soon as reasonably possible about all offers until exchange, unless they have told you in writing not to pass on offers of that amount or type, and confirm each in writing within two working days (paragraph 9a). An offer from a registered buyer in the early window is no exception.

1. Explain it at the valuation. The code says the “potential benefits and disadvantages of any recommended method of sale must be explained in clear terms” (paragraph 4a). Tell the seller what the head start is for and what it costs them, and record their agreement in writing. Offer them the choice of going straight to the portals.
2. Set the length in advance. Pick a number of hours or days, put the portal date in the seller’s marketing plan and keep to it. The code expects you to keep the marketing strategy under regular review with the client (paragraph 4d), so if an early offer arrives, that is a conversation, not a reason to cancel the launch quietly.
3. Make the register worth joining. A clear sign up on every listing and search page, alerts that go out as soon as a property is live, and a short promise of what buyers will get. Check that your CRM can publish to your website before it sends the same property to the portals; if it cannot, the plan fails on day one.
4. Use one set of details everywhere. The same price, tenure, EPC rating and photographs on your website and on the portals, so no buyer sees two versions.
5. Measure the right thing. Count new registrations, and how many of your sales went to a buyer who registered with you first. If the register is not growing, the head start is not earning its delay.

The early listing only works if your own website is somewhere a buyer is glad to come back to: fast on a phone, with a property search that matches the office and listings as complete as the portals’. Those are what we build into every bespoke estate agent website, with the search fed by your CRM, for one agency per patch, and the pricing page sets out what it costs.

• Rightmove: Getting your price right (agent guide, 2019)
• Rightmove Hub: 5 things every agent on Rightmove needs to know (6 August 2019)
• Rightmove: General Membership Terms and Conditions
• OnTheMarket: Only With Us
• The Property Ombudsman: Code of Practice for Residential Estate Agents (England, Wales and Northern Ireland)
• legislation.gov.uk: Energy Performance of Buildings (England and Wales) Regulations 2012, regulation 7
• legislation.gov.uk: Energy Performance of Buildings (England and Wales) Regulations 2012, regulation 11
• CMA (GOV.UK): Unfair commercial practices, CMA207 (updated 18 November 2025)
• Property Industry Eye: Agency leader urges agents to back new free agent-owned portal (17 November 2025)
• UK Business Forums: Estate agents and finding your next home! (June 2025)

More guides for agency owners are on the guides page.