UK portal fees: a briefing for journalists

How UK portal fees have grown

Rightmove was founded in 2000 and listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2006; it is a FTSE 100 company and describes itself as the UK's largest property portal. Its own headline pricing metric is average revenue per advertiser (ARPA): revenue from agency and new-homes advertisers in a given month divided by the number of advertisers, averaged over the year. Because Rightmove publishes ARPA in every set of results, it is the cleanest public record of what a typical member branch pays.

The published trajectory below runs from 2009 to FY2025 — roughly a five-fold increase over sixteen years. Rightmove attributes recent growth predominantly to product uptake rather than price rises; the figures are its own reported numbers either way, each linked to the publication it appears in.

What agents pay per branch: the published figures

These are portal-published averages, not rate cards: actual bills vary by package, branch count and negotiation. Rightmove's FY2025 results break out what the average agency branch pays per month and how many branches pay it. For contrast, the challenger portal OnTheMarket — in its last full year as a listed company before the CoStar acquisition — reported a per-agent average several times lower than Rightmove's in the overlapping period. The published figures:

International comparison

Direct international comparison is harder than it looks, because portals report different unit metrics: Rightmove charges agents per branch, while Sweden's Hemnet earns most of its listing revenue from sellers per published listing. Sourced figures only — this section is deliberately short because we publish nothing we cannot trace to a real publication.

Hemnet (Sweden's dominant portal) earns its listing revenue per published listing, paid largely by the seller once per sale rather than by the agent every month; its published 2023 average is below. Germany's Scout24 (ImmoScout24) reports professional-customer ARPU growth and customer counts but does not disclose an absolute monthly figure in its results announcement, so we quote none.

The Competition Appeal Tribunal claim — what is alleged

A proposed collective claim against Rightmove has been filed at the Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) on behalf of UK estate and lettings agents, with Jeremy Newman — a former Competition and Markets Authority panel member — as the proposed class representative. The claim alleges that Rightmove abused a dominant position by charging agents excessive and unfair subscription fees; the value it seeks is shown below and is an allegation, not a finding. No tribunal has ruled on it, and Rightmove has publicly called the claim "without merit" and said it will defend it.

The Tribunal is scheduled to hear the application for a Collective Proceedings Order (certification) on 2–3 November 2026. Certification decides only whether the claim may proceed as collective proceedings — it is not a ruling that anyone was overcharged, and refusal would not be a vindication of portal pricing. The claimed value is the claimant side's own estimate of the ceiling, prepared for certification.

What that could mean per sale — estimates

The figures below are arithmetic on the sourced FY2023 ARPA of £1,431^{Rightmove plc FY2023 results} per branch per month, combined with one stated assumption: 10 listings handled per branch per month, which is a TrueDeed assumption rather than a published statistic. They are estimates of the scale of the cost line, not findings about who ultimately bears it. For context, the HomeOwners Alliance puts typical sole-agency commission at 1.2%–1.8%^{HomeOwners Alliance — Estate Agent Fees guide} of the sale price including VAT.

• Listings per branch per month (10) is a TrueDeed stated assumption, not a published statistic — branch throughput varies widely, so the per-listing figure scales directly with it.
• ARPA is a portal-wide average across packages and advertiser types; an individual branch's bill can sit well above or below it.
• Whether, and how much of, portal costs pass through to consumers is not established by these figures — they show the scale of the cost line, not its incidence.
• The Competition Appeal Tribunal claim against Rightmove is alleged and untested; nothing on this page asserts wrongdoing as fact.