Rightmove, which for many years has published a heavily-publicised monthly monitor of asking prices of homes on sale, is now extending its indexing work to the lettings sector.
Just as its sales index covers asking prices, so its Rental Trends Tracker - revealed this morning for the first time - is compiled from the asking rents of properties coming onto the market on the Rightmove portal.
The scale of Rightmove’s database - and the potency of the portal’s PR machine - makes this a high profile initiative by the website in the continuing ‘portal wars’ battle; both Rightmove and Zoopla have emphasised their ‘consumer-facing’ information.
In its first rental index, covering the second quarter of 2015, Rightmove measured 249,357 asking rents on properties were advertised on the portal. Some 11,270 properties have been excluded because of anomolies - amongst those removed are all short let properties.
With every Rightmove sales and lettings index, it includes the views of at least one agent on the accompanying press release. For the first lettings index it has included the comments of Zoe Rose, head of London lettings at Strutt & Parker - one of the high-end agencies that founded Agents’ Mutual.
The first results from its quarterly rental tracker are summarised here.
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Good news. Rightmove might not be everyone's cup of tea, but you can't really argue with their business model or success. Expanding the price index to incorporate lettings is an inspired move, even if it is a carefully engineered PR ploy.
Indeed. A clever, if unsubtle, move on RM's part. Given the size of their database and the strength and breadth of their PR team, Zoopla can't hope to compete. I'm sure OTM don't even feature on RM's landscape, they're just a fleck of dust that doesn't even have to be ignored.
Good to see RM starting to use some of their data to benefit consumers. But why has it taken them so long? This is something Zoopla has been doing for a while directly on it's own site and indirectly via it's support for innovation in the industry by working with niche portals such as http://www.liveyield.co.uk . In this case LiveYield.co.uk estimates a rental yield on Zoopla's sales to provide a yield and return based property search. Competition supports consumer choice and freedom of information enables educated decisions to be made, censorship and protectionism most of the time limits progress.
It is good news and as the article suggests a no-brainer PR exercise for RM... Their sales figures get picked up in all national press reports, so I'm sure their lettings data will receive much the same attention. Interesting, Richard, I have never heard of liveyield.... will take a look now!
Well said, Richard Rawlings. Completely on the button.
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