I wanted to sell my cheap little flat in Birmingham so I decided to turn the whole UK property listings market upside down!!

Okay, that title is doing a job — you clicked, hi — but I should undercut it immediately so the rest of this isn’t misleading. Rightmove has something like 80% of UK property search traffic, and its own numbers show agent retention at a 10-year high even with a live £1.5bn lawsuit against it. I have not moved that needle. Nobody has, yet. What I actually did is much smaller, and this is the honest version of that story.

I’m selling a one-bed flat on Wake Green Park in Moseley, Birmingham. Offers in the region of £82,000. It’s a nice flat. It is not, in any sense, a big deal. But watching my own listing crawl through the process taught me two things I hadn’t really clocked before, and one of them annoyed me enough to spend a few weekends building something.

Thing one: the cost. Every viewing, every enquiry, every version of my listing a buyer sees runs through a company that charges my agent for the privilege — trade press puts the average UK agent’s Rightmove bill at around 7.2% of monthly commission, rising to 13.5% in Glasgow. That’s not my agent being cheap; it’s baked into what they can spend actually marketing my flat.

Thing two: the friction, and this is the one that actually got me. Look at my own listing. There is no link to my agent’s own website anywhere on it. Not hidden, not hard to find — just not there, on principle. I assumed that was an oversight until I went and read Rightmove’s actual rules for agents, and it isn’t:

“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.”

— Rightmove Agent and Developer Technical Guidelines, January 2026, “Property Advertising Integrity”

That’s not me paraphrasing a grievance. That’s the written policy, straight from Rightmove’s own PDF — go and check it yourself if you don’t believe me. My agent has their own site, with their own contact form and more details about my flat than Rightmove shows — and Rightmove’s own rules make sure you never see a link to it. Every enquiry stays inside Rightmove, by design.

Neither of those things is a conspiracy. It’s just how the product works, and once you notice it as a seller you can’t un-notice it. I’m not the only one irritated by the fee side of it either — over 250 UK estate agencies are currently backing that £1.5bn claim against Rightmove.

So, the small thing I actually built: Rigove.

If you’re already looking at a listing on Rightmove, delete htm from rightmove in the address bar and hit enter — rightmove.co.uk/properties/12345 becomes rigove.co.uk/properties/12345, same listing, and you’ll see every other place it’s genuinely advertised: the agent’s own site, a floorplan, a virtual tour, wherever someone’s added a link. If you don’t have the page open, you can paste the URL or the listing ID instead. It never touches Rightmove’s own listing data — it only stores links people volunteer, agent or visitor, and Rightmove links themselves get rejected, since the entire point is finding somewhere other than Rightmove.

Here’s the honest bit: it’s very early, and most listings — including my own, still — don’t have an alternative link added yet. This isn’t a finished product with a case study attached. It’s a small, free tool trying to solve one specific, verifiable problem, and it gets more useful every time someone adds a link. If you’re an agent, there’s a free account to bulk-add links for everything you manage instead of doing it one property at a time. If you’re just nosy, my own listing is a fine place to try it.

I didn’t turn the market upside down. I made it very slightly less one-company-shaped. That’s the real headline, it just doesn’t get the clicks the other one does.

— Ed

Rigove is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Rightmove.