I read Rightmove's entire technical rulebook so you don't have to. Here's what's actually in it.

Rightmove publishes a 25-page document called the Agent and Developer Technical Guidelines — the rules every UK estate agent has to follow to keep their listings live. It’s not secret. It’s just not something anyone reads unless they have to. I read the whole thing. Here’s what stood out, with the exact wording and where to find it, so you can check every claim yourself.

You can’t tell anyone where else to find you

This is the rule Rigove exists because of, and it’s stricter than I expected. It’s not just your property description:

“Contact details, including: web addresses, phone and email details must not be included in Your property descriptions. You will not include any text or language that encourages Users to make enquiries to You outside of the enquiry channels available on the Platforms.” — §29, Data Quality Requirements Table, “Misuse of Properties Descriptive Text”

Same restriction on your office profile page:

“You must ensure that external links to other websites are not included in the profile page.” — §29, “Misuse of Profile Page”

Same restriction on videos and virtual tours:

“No additional media such as virtual tours and/or videos should direct a User to Your agency’s website or any other external website.” — §29, “Media links & Videos”

And even the floorplan/brochure/virtual-tour links Rightmove does let you upload have a leash on them: “Links must go through to a contained area and must not purposefully drive Users through to other properties and or other services” (same section). Every door Rightmove could have left open, it’s closed, individually, in writing.

You’re not allowed to mention Rightmove has competitors

This is the one I didn’t expect. It’s not just “don’t badmouth another agent” — it’s your own profile page, on a business Rightmove is hosting for you, and it names Rightmove’s competitors specifically:

“You must not mention or display details of businesses We deem to be competitors to Rightmove on Our Platforms.” — §29, “Misuse of Profile Page,” under “The promotion of Our competitors’ websites or names on Your office profile page”

Read that again: not competitors of you, the agent — competitors of Rightmove. Separately, §17 (Property Advertising Integrity) bars your listings from “specific comparisons with third parties who We perceive to be competitors of You or Your Client,” and §16 (Branch Advertising Integrity) applies the same ban to display adverts. Between the three, there’s no surface on Rightmove’s platform where you’re allowed to point a customer toward an alternative — Rightmove’s alternative or your own.

Rightmove decides what “sold” means, and it’s not a light touch

If a sale falls through and you mislabel it, Rightmove’s language is unusually blunt for a supplier contract:

“You understand that inaccurately declaring a property as a Fall Through is likely to be classed as a misleading action contrary to the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act, with a resultant penalty of a fine and/or up to 2 years imprisonment, and that, if requested, You authorise Us to provide confirmation of this declaration to National Trading Standards or any statutory body to assist in their investigations.” — §18, Updating of Your Property Advertising

Price reductions only display as “reduced” once they hit a threshold, and Rightmove is candid about why:

“Your property listings will only be shown as ‘reduced’… if the reduction is at least 2% of the property price… The 2% threshold is a commercial decision taken by Rightmove to reduce portal juggling.” — §18

Worth sitting with that phrase: “a commercial decision,” in Rightmove’s own words, not a consumer-protection rule or a technical necessity. And once a sale is under offer, you get 8 months before Rightmove intervenes; a Let Agreed listing gets 6 weeks (§20). You can’t even market past success on an active listing — “SOLD BY” or “ANOTHER SOLD BY” is explicitly banned (§29, “Misuse of Properties Descriptive Text”), on the grounds that it “interferes with the User’s experience,” not the agent’s.

The phrase doing the most work in this document is “in Our opinion”

I started noticing it repeat, so I counted. Across 25 pages: “in Our opinion” appears 7 times, “in Our sole discretion” 3 more, “We deem” 4 times, “We believe” 3 times — 17 instances of language that hands Rightmove a unilateral, largely unappealable judgment call. Some examples: Rightmove can edit, suppress, or remove your data “if We believe it is inaccurate [or] inappropriate” (§4); can edit or remove “any links… if, in Our opinion, the operation of such links will adversely affect… the User experience” (§22); can terminate your membership if a data breach happens “more than twice on Your account” (§28, Sanctions Policy – Fraud), following an account-lock and mandated remediation process — password resets, MFA, an IT investigation report you have to hand over (§24) — that reads more like an enterprise security policy imposed on a vendor than terms between two independent businesses.

To be fair, not all of it is about control

An analysis that only lists the parts that annoyed me wouldn’t be an honest one, so: some of this document is genuinely reasonable, and worth saying so plainly.

• Accessibility (§30) requires alt text, plain language, captioned videos, and bans “click here” as link text — solid, unambiguous, pro-consumer requirements with no upside for Rightmove beyond a better product.
• Housing benefit / DSS restrictions (§29) can only be mentioned if there’s an actual contractual restriction, and the specific restriction must be named — a real constraint on blanket “No DSS” discrimination, aligned with CMA guidance.
• No generic bans on families or children in listings (§29) — same spirit.
• AI/CGI-enhanced images must be labelled as such and shown alongside a real, current photo of the room (§10) — a genuinely useful anti-misleading-listing rule as AI editing gets more common.
• Sold or let properties must come down promptly (§29) — annoying for an agent who wants to keep the listing up as a shopfront, but the guidance is explicit that stale “unavailable” listings are home hunters’ single biggest frustration, and that’s a believable claim.

None of that cancels out the sections above. It just means the honest read of this document isn’t “Rightmove is uniquely villainous” — it’s that a dominant platform writing its own rulebook will naturally write some rules for its users and plenty more for itself, and the second kind is usually the one nobody reads closely enough to notice.

Why I went looking in the first place

I’m selling a flat, and reading my own listing made me curious what was actually written down versus what I’d just assumed. So I built Rigove — paste a Rightmove listing link and see every other place that property is genuinely advertised, since Rightmove’s own rules make sure the listing itself never will. It’s small, it’s free, and it doesn’t touch Rightmove’s own data — it only stores what people volunteer. This post isn’t really about that, though. It’s about what’s actually in a document most people, agents included, have never opened.

— Ed

Rigove is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Rightmove. Every quote above is transcribed directly from Rightmove’s own published PDF, linked at the top of this post — check it yourself.