Rightmove makes significant product updates for letting agents

Rightmove, the UK’s largest property platform, is making significant updates to its range of tools and products for lettings agents.

This includes updates to its Tenancy Manager service to help letting agents prepare for the Renters Rights Act, which comes into effect from May 1st and will create significant administrative and compliance demands across both new and existing tenancies. Other changes include a major overhaul of the Rightmove Plus dashboard.

Rightmove’s Tenancy Manager digitises and automates the tenancy set up and payment process for letting agents, ensuring compliance every step of the way, and saves agents over six hours a week on average, freeing up time to focus on managing relationships with landlords and tenants. It is part of Rightmove’s Lead to Keys suite, a fully integrated advertising, enquiry management and tenancy progression system, to make renting easier for agents and tenants by digitising and streamlining the often-complex processes involved in renting a home.

The new updates will mean it now provides a clear Renters’ Rights ready workflow, ensuring agents meet their obligations and remove the risk of errors, at a time when new regulatory requirements are adding to the operational demands on letting agents.

This will provide additional help for landlords, of whom 57% say they either have limited understanding of the Renters’ Rights Act or aren’t aware of it all – and are looking to lettings agents to manage the process and keep them compliant.

Renters’ Rights updates being made to Tenancy Manager include:

• Renters Rights Act tenancy agreement
• Easy process to inform existing tenants of tenancy agreement changes
• An updated offer letter to reflect changes in tenancy agreements
• Evidence backed rental data so letting agents can be sure that they are pricing rent reviews correctly
• Referencing criteria to reflect the changing requirements of letting agents and landlords following the removal of rent up front and tenancy terms

Rightmove Plus gets a fresh new look

Significant updates are also rolling out to the Rightmove Plus dashboard, to give lettings agents a clearer and more immediate view of branch performance and bringing key data to the forefront, making it easier to track performance, spot trends and respond to changes in their local market. Agents will be able to see quick stats on available stock and new instructions, with lettings agreed figures viewable by specific time periods. Market share comparisons across lettings metrics have also been made easier to access. The dashboard has also been updated for sales, providing an instant snapshot of key metrics such as available stock, price reduction rate and fall throughs, as well as a new visual sales funnel to give agents clearer visibility of their sales journey.

Christian Balshen, Rightmove Director of Agent Partnerships, said: “Letting agents have had to become experts at dealing with legislation changes and Tenancy Manager is here to help. Slightly unusually, the Renters’ Rights Act applies not only to new tenancies but also to all existing tenancies. This is a massive administrative task for letting agents with several compliance potholes, and I’m very proud that Tenancy Manager is helping our partners navigate these changes. Plus, the updates we’ve made to the Rightmove Plus platform are aimed at making it even easier for agents to act with confidence and clarity.”

ENDS

Notes to editors:

About Rightmove

• Rightmove has the UK’s largest selection of properties for sale and to rent, adds more listings than anyone else
• Latest view from Comscore is over 80% of all time spent on property portals is on Rightmove, and latest view from SimilarWeb is over 70% of time spent on property portals in the UK is on Rightmove (two datasets used across the industry to track time spent on portals)
• Rightmove’s vision is to give everyone the belief that they can make their move by giving people the best place to turn and return to for access to tools and expertise to make it happen
• Users can search Rightmove for residential resale, new homes, rentals, built for rent, commercial property and overseas properties. Rightmove also provide an extensive range of tools and information assisting their home moving journey, including but not limited to: local sold prices, online property valuation, agent visit requests, moving guides, mortgage in principle certification, renovation calculator, extension explorer, home services for renters like utilities, media and insurance, school information, moving guides and sustainability information
• Partners (Rightmove’s customers) include the following key groups: estate agents, letting agents, new homes developers, rental operators, commercial property operators, overseas property agents, financial services operators and home services providers for insurance, utilities and media
• Using the UK’s largest housing datasets, we issue a number of regular reports to track housing market indicators: our monthly House Price Index (established 2002), quarterly Rental Trends Tracker (established 2015), weekly Mortgage Rates Tracker (established 2023) and quarterly Commercial Insights Tracker (established 2024). Historical data is available on request
• Founded in 2000, Rightmove listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2006 and is a member of the FTSE 100 index