Building blocks: How Rightmove uses insights

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Buying a house is the single most important purchase you will make and is a daunting task for many, from first-time buyers to housing market veterans. It is a purchase fraught with difficulty, from finding the right home and putting in a successful offer, to gaining a mortgage and completing the sale – not to mention the multitude of costs associated with moving.

The challenges have been heightened in recent years, as a housing supply crisis has been compounded by an acceleration in the market following the end of the first Covid-19 lockdown in July 2020. At that time, a government holiday on stamp duty tempted many to take the plunge and change home. UK house prices rose by more than 10% in 2021, to an average of £254,822, according to data published in December by building society Nationwide. The increase was £24,000 higher than figures in 2020.

Those who have made a move in the past few years will probably have used property search website Rightmove, the UK’s biggest housing advertiser, with databases containing details on more than four million people across the UK.

Abiola Oni, research manager at Rightmove, leads the company’s insight function, sitting within its marketing department. “This entails being very clear about what the research plans for the year look like, bearing in mind the priorities for the business, and ensuring we are providing enough support, from an insight point of view, to enable good decision-making,” she explains. “It keeps it really diverse and really interesting for us, as we are working on lots of different projects.”

Riding two horses

The company has to tread a fine line in order to keep both of its sets of clients happy: its customers (ie estate agents and house sellers) and consumers (those buying homes).

“There is always that tension between what the customer wants and what the consumer wants,” says Oni. “About 80% of the time they want the same thing, but at times there is tension between the two and that’s where insight really shines.”

The company swings between focusing on the customer and focusing on the consumer, says Oni. This can mean some years being unofficially designated a ‘customer year’, while others become a ‘consumer year’, with the work of the insights function part of that shift. Sometimes this is driven by market forces, with changes and permutations in the wider housing market dictating Rightmove’s policies; at other times, it is part of a specific company strategy.

“During my 10 years at Rightmove, I have seen that cyclical move, from year of the customer to year of the consumer, and sometimes a bit of both,” Oni says. “It definitely keeps the work interesting.”

A House Price Index is also used, including the biggest sample of asking prices in the UK. Land Registry data has a three-month lag between a house sale and the data being available, but Rightmove can track asking prices on its website and examine general trends.

Data insight helps to inform the company’s direction and the team is close to the senior decision-makers at Rightmove. “We can literally put time in people’s diaries,” Oni says. “People are very accessible and approachable.”

The key, she explains, is being proactive in demonstrating how insights can help people’s projects, but also pre-empting some of the issues on which the company is focused. “It is about influencing key decisions and providing a larger point of view,” says Oni. “When you look at data, you always bring your bias to it. It is breaking out of that and bringing a more objective view of things.”

Rightmove has a database of around four million movers, with the insights department initially a branch of the company’s marketing work, focused on surveys for PR requirements. This then developed into using the database to answer questions, before opening up to qualitative research. Oni’s role is to try to change perceptions of market research across the organisation.

“We are trying to get away from a culture of validation,” she explains. “When people came to me with challenges, they already had in their minds what they wanted to do; they just wanted some evidence for that. By being more proactive, we get ahead of them having made their decisions and make sure they have the full picture – a clearer view of the implications.

“People have targets and things they are being judged against. That is all they are thinking about. It is the insights professional’s job to do and know more, so when you are having conversations you can guide them in the right way.”

Home sweet home

For 2022, Rightmove’s focus is less on what you could consider its bread and butter – purchasing a home – and more on the most transient part of the housing market: renting. The rental market has long been seen as the poor cousin of buying, with risks for renters over housing quality, rent increases and unscrupulous landlords. Agreeing a rental contract can be tense and complicated.

Rightmove has set a goal of making the renting process as easy as possible, targeting five-minute completion as a way of helping renters navigate the labyrinthine process.

“The renting process is a stressful, tiring one; in other countries, it tends to be much more streamlined,” Oni says. “A lot of work is going into understanding how we can smooth out that process, so, from going to look at a property on Rightmove to requesting, doing the referencing and getting the keys, happens in five minutes. That is the dream for us. Essentially, by setting a huge goal, we are trying to get to a point where the process is condensed.”

To help with this goal, Rightmove has bought Van Mildert, a referencing and insurance provider for agents and landlords, which it rebranded to Rightmove Landlord last year. The hope is that this will streamline the referencing process, especially for people moving to the UK from overseas, as well as encouraging online bookings for viewings. “There is a bit of a stigma in being a renter over owning your own home and we are trying to reduce that,” Oni says.

This focus comes amid a turbulent housing market after the pandemic. Lockdown in 2020, and the accompanying moratorium on house sales and purchases, resulted in demand skyrocketing, with a surge in prices once the housing market reopened later that year.

This was accompanied by a stamp-duty holiday and many house buyers decided to take advantage of the tax break. The market has ‘run hot’ ever since. “We saw a huge swell of demand, to the point where demand really has outstripped supply,” observes Oni.

“Normally the housing market has a seasonal trend – Januarys are very busy, then it dips, demand comes back around April, it dips again, you get the August/September boom, and then it dies down towards the end of the year. We are seeing a very different picture right now. It has been good from a demand point of view, but it is the stock and supply where our customers are really struggling.”

The insights department at Rightmove has been tracking the fluctuations in the housing market and has three broad categories that cover its current workload. The first is ‘thought leadership’ – examining consumer trends and behaviour, particularly how people search for a property and when they complete their house move. This includes the ‘happy at home index’, which showcases the happiest areas of the UK, with Hexham, Northumberland, the most recent winner.

Oni explains that the research team’s work enabled Rightmove to anticipate the housing surge post-lockdown, at a time when there were fears about what the state of the housing market could be during a major worldwide pandemic.

“Because we had access to a rich database of around four million home movers, we were able to predict it would be a booming house market, as there was a pent-up demand that we were able to identify,” she says.

The second category of work is audience insights, working to better understand the needs of people moving home, including those who simply browse the Rightmove website without buying. A lot of the outsourced work is qualitative and companies include Behavioural Architects and Jigsaw on customer work, plus consumer work with Sparkler.

The third category is brand health tracking, including a business-to-business tracker and a business-to-consumer tracker, run by YouGov. Rightmove also has a bespoke tracking system reliant on phone surveys, which Oni says gives more balanced, and less polarised, views from respondents.

The research has found that the emotional part of people’s relationship with Rightmove was more important than the functional elements, such as providing exposure for property or tracking data.

“How they felt about the services we provide was driven by the emotional side of the relationship, such as whether they felt listened to, or whether we understood their business challenges,” Oni says. “That has really guided us in turning the dial to focus more on the emotional aspect of the relationship.”

Still, as Oni suggests, the focus is on making research more accessible, such as by providing yearly round-ups of the insights department’s success, and targeting general research findings towards specific teams. It is all part of building a strong research culture at Rightmove.

“People focus on what they are supposed to deliver, as that’s what they are incentivised to do. Sometimes they don’t have the time to step back and consider the bigger picture,” Oni says.

“We are moving away from being gatekeepers of knowledge – it is easy for people to run their own surveys or look into Google analytics. The value we bring is a holistic view of what the business cares about as a whole – that is something that can’t be taken from us.”

Abiola Oni left Rightmove after the completion of this article.