During the 10 years that I owned my lettings agency you could set your clock by the metronomic consistency of Rightmove’s price increase.
Every year they would send a mail-merged email, completely devoid of empathy or understanding, announcing yet another double digit hike.
They would always cloud this with a completely unfathomable set of differently priced ‘options’ – designed to obfuscate and ultimately, upsell.
And like clockwork, the unsuspecting agent ‘victim’ would be left feeling somewhat bamboozled by the experience, having been skilfully encouraged to actively choose how much more money should be removed from their trading account each month.
Hats off to them, RM have this annual palaver down to a fine art.
Not long after I sold up, the groundswell of anti-Rightmove feeling seemed to grow significantly stronger – resulting in dedicated anti-Rightmove Facebook groups and what appeared to be a coordinated campaign to “bloody well do something about it!”
From what I could see it reached it’s peak with the regrettable set of circumstances at the start of the first C*VID lockdown – where RM mistakenly doubled down on their sociopathy at the time when agents needed most support. They swiftly backtracked but the damage had already been done.
And I see this sentiment bubbling up again, as agents become concerned that the Good Times of the last few years are going to come to a crashing halt thanks to inflation, rising interest rates, energy bills and Kwasi Kwarteng breaking the economy.
The unfortunate demise of Boomin has reignited some of the old debates about the unhealthy stranglehold RM has on the property market.
I know Boomin were keen to stress they weren’t a portal but if you bark like a dog, wag your tail like a dog and a generally disinterested Joe Public jumps to the perfectly natural conclusion that you’re a dog – better chow down on the Pedigree Chum.
By way of a small digression, I saw that agents tended to fall into 3 camps when it came to Boomin
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- What’s a Boomin?
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- They couldn’t see beyond the Purple past of the 2 founders
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- They dreamed that Boomin could be the Great White Hope to finally break Rightmove’s stranglehold
Sorry to all those who were part of the 3rd group. It was never going to happen.
Just like OnTheMarket was never going to break the Rightmove and Zoopla duopoly in a hurry.
I felt like a lone voice saying this back in 2014/15 when Agents Mutual were trying to garner support.
I can recall a meeting of the great and the good agents of Sunderland and South Tyneside (with a few not so good/not so great agents thrown in) where I seemed to be the only one failing to grasp what real problem AM/OTM were actually going to solve.
Yes, I got that Rightmove was very expensive and yes, it would be better to have a mutually owned portal where member agents could ultimately benefit.
But as I said 7 years ago – Joe Public doesn’t have a problem with the status quo.
They still don’t.
And THAT’S the biggest problem with Rightmove.
To succeed, a challenger portal needs to comes up with a sufficiently good enough proposition that the public can actually get a real benefit from.
Something that is new and genuinely disruptive, not a few polite little tweaks round the edges.
Think Uber with the app, where both driver and passenger can give each other ratings and the real time map to reassure you that your car is actually on it’s way.
Think Red Bull creating a global competitor to Coca Cola – rather than going down the Pepsi direct comparison route coming up with a drink that’s a lot more expensive, in a much smaller can…and tastes bloody awful.
I’m sure they’d argue otherwise but as I see it, OTM and Boomin (and all the other long forgotten challengers) have simply come up with small inward looking innovations.
Sure, the innovations could be spun sufficiently well to secure another round of funding, perhaps even get a number of agents to sign up and give it a go – but history teaches us that they’ve left the Rightmove-using public utterly cold.
They stick with what they know – even though objectively it may be an inferior ‘product’.
Coming up with something worthwhile is only the start.
Any serious competitors would then need to have pockets deep enough to fund years and years and years of heavyweight advertising in the hope of shifting consumer behaviours that have been entrenched for the last 20 years. I’m talking 5 – 10 years before you made a dint.
Even then it would be a bit of a punt.
I see OTM evangelist agents trotting out the standard line that if everyone delayed listing with the portals or gave OTM exclusivity for 24h the public would soon notice.
No. They really wouldn’t.
And even if they did (which they won’t) it’s naïve to think all other agents in your town would dutifully fall in line.
As for the corporates (with a vested interest in Rightmove), they certainly aren’t going anywhere…
So the fabled day when a punter goes onto Rightmove and recalls in horror as they find no local properties to look at is never, ever going to happen.
I’ll say it again. Rightmove isn’t the problem. The fact that Joe Public doesn’t have a problem with Rightmove is the problem.
If anyone is going to break the RM stranglehold they need to fully understand and appreciate this. Because Rightmove certainly appreciate and understand this. And they’re laughing all the way to the bank.
Any challenger needs to think about building something new that the house buying public will quickly appreciate and value, something truly game-changing that they can’t get from Rightmove or any other portal.