Rightmove’s dominance could be under threat: Onthemarket takeover by large US player

[KievLoverTwo]

I think this competition is needed. They are too powerful and their consumer trickery gets on my nerves.

Please can we have a sq ft selector, Americans?

https://www.cityam.com/onthemarket-shares-leap-53-per-cent-after-99m-takeover-deal-as-rival-rightmove-falls/

I disagree. It's nice to only have one to look at or Zoopla. Not sure competition is always what it's cracked up to be.

I was just coming on to say that if it has a square footage option, I’ll use it! Ridiculous that Rightmove doesn’t.

As it stands now, I can’t get email notifications if I deselect ‘student’ from the list of all types of rentals, which wastes a spectacular amount of time if your search is near a uni.

Nor are their instant alerts in any way instant.

They let adverts without an EPC get published, even though that is illegal.

When a property is reduced and then increased afterwards, they show it as reduced.

When a property is reduced, it gets pushed to the top of the newly listed search. Not newly reduced.

EA’s pay them the equivalent of one staff member’s salary a year.

Someone CAN do better for buyers/renters.

Agree its never good for consumers when one company holds a monopoly position. I think agents sellers and buyers should benefit.

In practice most people will still have a 'go to' platform that they generally favour, but does it really matter which one that is? If a bit of competition improves what's on offer, in terms of either useability or ethics, that can't be a bad thing surely?

You are right@KievLoverTwo . RM cannot be trusted to properly police the EA playground. They are also particularly useless at introducing new and valuable features. I have been asking them (yeah - they probably have me on ignore!) for years to fix the search/filter facility.

For example, you enter "solar panels" in the keyword, but then you go to the map and all properties are shown, so where are my solar powered properties!

Other requests include automatically excluding retirement properties and buying schemes. I hate it every time my partner tells me they've found a great priced property only to find it's one of those aged 60+ schemes or 25% shared ownership.

Other features I'd like include:

• only show properties within 1 mile of a railway station
• only show properties not in a flood zone
• only show properties with 1 mile of Aldi, Lidl, Waitrose, etc

You get the drift. This is all easy stuff for a competent developer, but alas RM is not that.

But you can exclude retirement properties and buying schemes - at least you can on the app

Yes you can but you have to physically go in and exclude them (on the PC). They should automatically be excluded and just added in if that is what you want.

Oh! Another! No leasehold property should be listed without full lease details.

I can’t work out how to look at the pricing history of a property. So something will show as reduced to £380k. But from what? And is it the first or the second or the third reduction?

Also I may want to look for property in the town of Blahtown but I am not interested in the Broadfields estate. How do I exclude “Broadfields” from the results?

For the first question, this can only be done on a Chrome browser with the Property Log extension. Then all will be revealed.

They need to develop one for on the market now, pronto. I checked this morning and they don't show by how much. Iirc Zoopla show a percentage.

Also, RM's 'select your own area' tool is horrifically bad to work with.

They are not too bad a site IMO, but they do do some stuff that makes it harder to get information (as pps have said). The really tedious thing about this is much of the time you can get that information anyway - for example if they hide previous sold prices on the listing (which I suspect they do at some agents requests) then you can always find out by looking in the sold prices options or going to somewhere like nethouseprices. It's these sorts of tedious games that make the site irritating, and competition will help rectify that.