I think it's frustrating you can't search by house age or garden size on Rightmove.

[LoveMAFS]

I'm not interested in anything post 1970s and yet I have to trawl through endless new-builds. I'm also more interested in the landscape/garden/views from the house. It's annoying you can't search by these variables. I know why they do it, to get you looking at maximum properties but it's a pita.

I really wish they would put the garden boundary on the ground floor plan.

Yes I wish you could search by number of acres. The keyword search now helps a bit. You could try typing view in as a keyword.

You can search by keywords in the app. This of course relies on the description containing the words you search for.

I was only looking for Victorian or older properties, so I could put something like "victorian", "edwardian" "period" in the search. It doesn't help much for anything pre 1970 though, I agree it's annoying. You can select "no new builds, buying schemes or retirement homes" in search preferences to help remove those.

Agree. Garden size and layout is just as important as the house. For some reason UK properties seem to ignore sq footage or land size and the number of bedrooms seems to be the selling feature. Even if you can't actually fit a bed in them.

I didn't find the feature for saying no new builds, only the option to exclusively search for new builds.

We did eventually luck out and find an Edwardian property with a large garden. I waded through a LOT of photos to get there.

YANBU. They also don’t give the option to search for a garage and not just ‘parking’. Whenever I tick garden, houses with small back yards come up. There should be option for ‘small’ ‘medium’ ‘large’ garden, with each having a bracket of square feet or whatever.

Would also like draw-a-search to be better designed as it’s painful! Or the option of excluding certain places within a parameter.

I wish they would stop putting link detached houses in the detached part of the search. A link detached or halls adjoining house is not detached. It is still joined to the next house or houses. It should be an option in the selection section.

They should also stop agents listing terraced cottages and other random properties in the detached search. Either the agents are stupid or dishonest, maybe both.

One last thing that bugs me, a huge detached house comes up in search but only a part of it is for sale, how can a section of a house be detached?

I doubt that anyone gains from this dishonesty because if you want detached, you wouldn't want all the other stuff that is randomly thrown into the search, I get really annoyed by it, wasting my time.

And I agree, it is impossible to find older properties or a decent plot without wading through a lot of modern boxes with no appeal. Started with one of those, to get on the property ladder, don't want another one, let me search for what I want, please.

What frustrated me the most was when I was house searching I would put acre into the keywords (as I needed land with the house) so many estate agents were adding the garden size as 0.02 acre etc to the listing. That's not even a big garden!
So I ended up looking at so many listings that were not what I needed or wanted! It really pissed me off.
I think it was just to gain as much interest as land was hot cakes but still...super annoying

I think rightmove is good for a regular look at what’s gone on in your price range over the last couple of days, but not a from scratch search. You’d be better emailing local estate agents and saying what you are looking for, ask them to give you details of just those properties.

most people I know who’ve moved in the last two years have moved into properties they had been given details of / viewed long before they hit rightmove.

I think there should be a requirement for estate agents (and therefore Rightmove) to list the floor space. The first thing I do is look for that on a listing and it would be so handy if was searchable.

I would like to see 'cottage' as a type of property removed as it seems to let it come up when you search for detached even when they're not.

Agree with house age and garden size being important.

Definitely, and a minimum bedroom size too - a 1.9m room is not a feasible bedroom !

Agree! I used to skip to garden pics before looking at the house, as was so sick of finding a lovely house then realising it had a tiny paved area or a miniscule strip of astroturf. The layout/house size bothers me less, as potentially I could change/extend that, but obviously not garden size. Bugs me when they don't put garden orientation on there too, although sometimes I can guess that from where the seating area is positioned!

I always wish you could search for non estate locations too.

They should separate out “communal gardens” from private gardens too

100% agree with this. It’s crazy that they don’t have that functionality. It hasn’t kept up with other industries eg fashion for its online customer experience. I imagine it’s because they’ve got a monopoly on the market and they are too complacent/ don’t want to invest the money.
I’m sure it will come to bite them at some point. Ignoring what your customers need/ want isn’t usually sustainable longer term.

Yes, yes yes!

I do things like 'rural', and go on satellite view before anything else to see how densely populated the area is.

If you use the keywords, you can search by eg 'pre-war' 'post-war' '1930s'. - takes a bit longer, but wheedles out the ones you want.

Agree with all of the above.

My pet hate is the bungalow filter, where at least 50% of the houses have an upstairs (and some are taller). What is the use of that?

100% agree! I want a particular type of 1960s/1970s house but not fussy on area, if there was an age filter it would make my search so much easier!

I always search with new builds filtered out but would love to search specific ages.

And "cottage" is the most vague category ever. From terraced to detached and anything in-between.

Yes! They put photos of gardens that are carefully taken to make them look bigger, or they don’t make it clear where the boundary is between the garden or next door’s, or adjoining land.