The 2025 Battle for Listings between Rightmove, Zoopla and OTM.

10th March 2025 In BestAgent

The 2025 Battle for Listings between Rightmove, Zoopla and OTM.

Key Considerations
  • Market Size: The UK housing market sees roughly 1–1.2 million residential sales transactions annually (e.g., Zoopla predicted 1.15 million for 2025), plus around 1.5–2 million rental listings, based on historical ONS and portal data. Not all properties are listed on portals, but the vast majority are, especially via the big three.
  • Duplicate Listings: A single property can be listed by multiple agents (e.g., joint agency agreements), inflating raw listing counts. However, your question specifies discrete properties, so we must estimate uniques.
  • Portal Overlap: Many properties appear on more than one portal, but the total unique instructions across all three should reflect the broader market minus off-portal sales (e.g., private sales or auctions).
Estimating Unique Instructions
1. Rightmove
  • Listings: Rightmove reported 692,000 properties listed in 2021 (sales-focused), with rental listings likely pushing this over 1 million annually. By 2025, with market recovery (Zoopla’s 1.15 million sales prediction), let’s assume 1.2–1.3 million total listings (sales + rentals).
  • Market Share: Rightmove claims over 70% of portal-driven instructions. Industry reports suggest it lists nearly all agency properties, but not all are unique to it.
  • Uniques: Assuming 90% of sales and rentals hit Rightmove, it’s a primary source, but we’ll refine later for overlap.
2. Zoopla
  • Listings: Zoopla listed 325,956 sales properties in January 2015, dropping to 265,231 by March after OnTheMarket’s launch (a 19% decline). Rental listings were historically higher. By 2021, it claimed 120 million monthly visits, suggesting 800,000–1 million listings annually (sales + rentals), adjusted upward to 1–1.1 million for 2025 based on market growth.
  • Market Share: Zoopla’s share is smaller (20–30% of instructions), with overlap from Rightmove.
3. OnTheMarket (OTM)
  • Listings: OTM’s stock grew post-CoStar (2023), with a 45% increase in listings by October 2024 (from a lower base). If it had 80% of Zoopla’s stock in 2019 (per Ian Springett), and Zoopla was at ~300,000 sales listings then, OTM might have had ~240,000, scaling to 500,000–700,000 total listings (sales + rentals) by 2025.
  • Uniques: OTM’s “new and exclusive” focus adds some unique listings, but most overlap with Rightmove or Zoopla.
Total Market and Deduplication
  • UK Transactions: Approximately 1.15 million sales (Zoopla, 2025) + 1.8 million rentals (based on ONS rental stock and turnover) = ~2.95 million properties potentially listed annually.
  • Portal Penetration: Around 90–95% of agency-handled properties hit at least one major portal (the rest are private, auctions, or off-market). So, 2.7–2.8 million unique properties is a starting point.
  • Overlap: Most properties appear on Rightmove, with Zoopla and OTM capturing subsets. Historical data (e.g., 2015 Guardian analysis) showed Zoopla losing listings to OTM, but Rightmove consistently had the most. Assuming 80–90% of properties are on Rightmove, 50–60% on Zoopla, and 20–30% on OTM, with significant overlap:
    • Total raw listings across all three might sum to 3.5–4 million, but unique properties are fewer.
    • A rough deduplication (e.g., using industry estimates like Homehere’s 2021 analysis of conversion rates) suggests 2.5–2.8 million unique instructions after accounting for multi-portal listings.
Cumulative Total
Based on this:
  • Low-end estimate: 2.5 million unique properties instructed across Rightmove, Zoopla, and OnTheMarket annually.
  • High-end estimate: 2.8 million unique properties.
  • Midpoint: 2.65 million unique instruction leads per year as of 2025.
This aligns with a market of ~2.95 million transactions, adjusted for portal dominance and deduplication. Rightmove likely accounts for the bulk (e.g., 1.2–1.3 million), Zoopla adds some uniques (e.g., 1–1.1 million total, ~300,000–400,000 unique to it or shared only with OTM), and OTM contributes a smaller unique portion (e.g., 50,000–100,000 not on the others due to exclusives).

Conclusion

The three main property portals—Rightmove, Zoopla, and OnTheMarket—collectively deliver approximately 2.5–2.8 million unique instruction leads (discrete properties) to estate agents each year, with a midpoint estimate of 2.65 million for 2025.