A strategic risk analysis for agents who are paying attention, and a warning for those who are not.
The Conversation Already Shifting Beneath the Surface
Rightmove is not collapsing. Let us be clear about that from the outset. It remains one of the most visited websites in the United Kingdom, deeply embedded in the property search habits of millions of buyers and renters. Its revenues are substantial. Its market position is, for now, dominant.
But dominant is not the same as permanent. And the market conversation has begun to shift in ways that more commercially alert agency leaders are already registering.
Rightmove's share price has experienced meaningful volatility over the past eighteen months, with analysts and institutional investors beginning to ask harder questions about the durability of the aggregator model in an environment where AI search is changing how people find information across almost every category. Property is not exempt from that change.
This article is not about whether Rightmove survives. It is about something more useful: what does the future look like if Rightmove gradually loses the power it currently holds? And what does that mean for the London agents who did not notice it happening until it already had?
The risk is not a sudden shock. It is a slow erosion that looks like stability right up until the point it does not.
How Power Erodes: The Slow Shift No Dashboard Will Tell You About
Most structural shifts in how markets work do not announce themselves. They accumulate quietly. A few percentage points of buyer enquiries start arriving through different channels. Direct website traffic ticks upward for agencies that have been investing in SEO. AI-assisted property search tools begin surfacing listings outside of portal infrastructure. Social platforms start converting browsing behaviour into genuine buyer intent. None of this shows up as a crisis in your Rightmove analytics. It shows up as slightly softer numbers, attributed to seasonality, to stock levels, to interest rates.
This is the real risk. Not the catastrophic event, but the gradual migration of discovery away from a single dominant platform, slow enough to be explained away quarter by quarter, significant enough that agencies without alternative distribution will find themselves structurally exposed by the time the shift is undeniable.
The agents who will be most damaged in that scenario are not necessarily the ones who ignored the warning signs. They are the ones who were looking at the wrong indicators entirely.
What Losing Portal Dominance Actually Looks Like in Practice
Rather than modelling a sudden disappearance, it is more instructive to think about what a gradual redistribution of property discovery looks like over a three to five year horizon, and what it means operationally for London agencies.
Lead volume from portals does not drop to zero. It becomes less reliable. Conversion rates from portal enquiries begin to fall as the quality of traffic shifts. Agencies that have invested in owned distribution, a well-maintained database, strong local SEO, an active social presence, start to see those channels make up a growing share of their inbound. The gap between agencies with distribution independence and those without it widens slowly, then faster.
Vendor conversations begin to change in tone. Sellers who are more digitally aware start asking different questions about where their property will be seen. The idea that Rightmove is the beginning and end of digital marketing starts to feel insufficient as an answer. Agencies that cannot articulate a broader distribution strategy begin to lose instructions at the margin, not dramatically, but consistently.
Cashflow implications are gradual but cumulative. Longer time-to-sale on properties that are less well-distributed. Slightly higher marketing spend to compensate for softer portal performance. Fee pressure from agents who are competing harder for the same buyer pool with the same tools.
Where Discovery Goes When It Moves
Understanding the risk requires understanding where property discovery actually migrates when it moves away from a dominant aggregator. Based on how other categories have evolved under AI-driven search, several patterns are already visible.
Google becomes more consequential, not less. When aggregators lose power, search engines tend to absorb a significant share of discovery intent. This rewards agencies with strong SEO infrastructure, well-structured property data, and consistent local search presence. Many London agencies have underinvested here for years, on the reasonable assumption that Rightmove was doing the heavy lifting. That assumption carries increasing risk.
AI-mediated search changes what structured data means. Conversational AI tools and AI-integrated search engines surface property information differently to traditional search. They favour listings that are complete, accurate, and machine-readable. Floorplan data, precise square footage, transport accessibility, EPC ratings, accurate room dimensions: these stop being optional details and start being ranking factors. Agencies with poor data hygiene will find their listings deprioritised in these environments without ever being told why.
Social-first discovery grows, but slowly and on its own terms. Platforms built around visual content and algorithmic recommendation are already generating genuine buyer and renter intent, particularly in younger demographics across London. Building an audience here is a long-term project. It cannot be accelerated quickly in response to a shift that has already happened.
Direct brand search becomes a genuine competitive asset. In a fragmented discovery world, the agencies that have built recognisable local brands, that people search for by name rather than finding by accident through a portal, hold a structural advantage that is difficult for competitors to replicate quickly.
The Data Quality Problem Most Agents Have Not Solved
Portal dependency has had a quiet consequence that rarely gets discussed: it has reduced the urgency of investing in property data quality. Rightmove has historically been relatively tolerant of incomplete listings. Missing floorplans. Inconsistent room counts. Absent EPC certificates. Sparse descriptions. These gaps have been acceptable because the platform provides discovery regardless, and the buyer pool is large enough that even poorly presented listings receive enquiries.
That tolerance is specific to the portal environment. AI-mediated discovery environments do not share it. They surface what they can confidently interpret and deprioritise what they cannot. An agency whose listings are routinely incomplete is not just missing a best practice, it is building a structural disadvantage into every property it markets.
The London agencies best positioned for a shift in the discovery landscape are those that have already begun treating listing data as a strategic asset: maintaining accurate floorplans as a matter of policy, ensuring every required field is completed, writing descriptions that are factual and structured rather than aspirational and vague, and managing their property data with the same discipline they apply to their financials.
The Metrics That Will Matter, and the Ones That Already Do Not
The KPIs that currently dominate agency performance conversations are almost entirely portal-dependent. Rightmove views. Cost per portal enquiry. Portal listing performance by price band. These metrics are useful in a world where portals are the primary discovery channel. They reveal very little about the resilience of an agency's distribution model.
The agencies thinking most clearly about medium-term risk are beginning to track different things alongside the standard metrics. Owned audience size: how many opted-in contacts can they reach directly, without paying a platform to access them? Direct website traffic: how many people find the agency without being routed through a third party? Brand search volume: how many people in their core geography are searching for the agency by name? Database quality: how current, how segmented, how actionable is their contact base? Repeat and referral rate: what proportion of their instructions come from people who have chosen them specifically, rather than found them by default?
These are the metrics of distribution independence. Most London agencies, if they are being direct about it, would score poorly against several of them. That is not unusual. But it is worth knowing.
Where the Competitive Divide Actually Sits
It is tempting to assume that larger London brands are automatically better positioned for a shift in the discovery landscape. The reality is more nuanced.
Large corporates with centralised data infrastructure, established SEO capability, and marketing teams that understand structured data do have real advantages. They can adapt faster when the direction of travel becomes clear. Their brand recognition generates direct search traffic that independents cannot easily replicate. Their data feeds are typically more consistent and more complete.
But size is not the same as readiness. There are large agencies operating with fragmented CRM systems, inconsistent listing data, and marketing functions that are still primarily configured around portal optimisation. And there are independent London agents with small but deeply loyal local audiences, strong direct traffic, and a database that has been built and maintained with genuine care over many years.
The divide is not between big and small. It is between agencies that have been building owned distribution and agencies that have been renting it. That distinction cuts across both categories.
The Strategic Questions Worth Sitting With
The value of this analysis is not in predicting when or whether the portal model changes. It is in the clarity it produces about where your agency currently stands. These are the questions that matter:
What percentage of our inbound leads depend on rented attention from third-party platforms, and what is our plan if the terms of that rental change?
Are our listings structured for AI-mediated discovery, or are they formatted for a portal environment that may look significantly different in five years?
Do we have an owned audience that we can reach directly, and is it large enough and current enough to function as a meaningful distribution channel?
What does our brand search volume tell us about how recognisable we are to buyers and sellers who have not been directed to us by a portal?
If portal traffic declined gradually over the next three years, at what point would we notice, and what would we do about it?
None of these questions require a crisis to be worth answering. They are simply good questions for any business thinking carefully about where its distribution comes from and how resilient it actually is.
The Closing Thought
The agencies that will be most exposed in a post-portal or reduced-portal world are not those caught off guard by a sudden change. They are the ones that had years of gradual signal and interpreted it as noise. The ones who looked at their Rightmove dashboard every morning and saw a business that was performing, without ever asking whether the thing generating that performance was becoming less reliable.
Slow and ignorant arrives at the same place as sudden and surprised. It just takes longer to get there.
Are you building for where discovery is going, or optimising for where it has been?
