It is “unthinkable” that artificial intelligence chatbots will take Rightmove’s place at the heart of the house-hunting process, the boss of the website has said.
Rightmove shares have almost halved since last summer, mostly on fears that, in a world of AI, more people will ask ChatGPT to show which homes that best fit their search criteria are up for sale, not Rightmove.
“We have a phenomenally well-built brand and platform,” Johan Svanstrom, Rightmove’s chief executive, said. “Consumers use it if they are buying, selling or renting. For agents, it’s not just putting up their listings but also the data insights, the training, the certification, the business management tools. This is all we do.
“The idea that [AI companies], which are really just out for traffic at the very top of the funnel, are going to replace that, is as unthinkable for property classifieds [websites] as it probably is for a number of other industries that are getting slammed at the moment.”
Nonetheless, Rightmove is still “leaning into” AI, Svanstrom said. The company has launched a conversational search function; will soon have a Rightmove app that will sit within ChatGPT; and has entered into a “multi-year collaboration” with Google covering, among other things, AI capabilities.
Anthony Codling, a property industry analyst at RBC, said the tie-ups with ChatGPT and Google suggest “the future of AI for Rightmove is about partnerships, not punch-ups”.
Svanstrom thinks AI has the potential to change the way people search for homes, but not necessarily the platforms they use to do so. “We see [AI] as an evolution,” Svanstrom, 54, said. “However you discover, we have you covered. That was also true from the shift to desktop to mobile web and into apps.”
His downplaying of the threat posed by AI helped to shore up the battered share price, which rose 18.6p, or 4.3 per cent, to 447.40p on Friday. However, it remains 45 per cent below where it was in August.
Rightmove is the country’s go-to property search website and, in total, Britons spent the best part of 32,000 years looking through its site and app in 2025.
As a consequence, estate agents know they need to pay to advertise their listings on Rightmove to boost their chances of completing sales. Another 200 or so branches signed up to Rightmove last year, taking the total number of estate agents and developers up to 19,272.
Rightmove also knows its importance to the ecosystem, and charges for access to its platform. Its average monthly cost went up by another 6 per cent, or £97, in 2025 to £1,621 per branch. For most estate agents, their Rightmove subscription is their second-biggest expense after people.
The combination of charging higher prices to more customers drove revenues up by 9 per cent to £425.1 million in the 12 months to the end of December, up from £389.9 million in 2024. Pre-tax profit rose by 12 per cent to £290 million from £258.4 million.
• Rightmove takes £1bn hit on AI spending plans
Sean Kealy, an analyst at Panmure Liberum, said the results were “perfectly in line with consensus”. Giles Thorne, at Jefferies, said the shares’ “relief rally feels justified” after the recent sell-off.
There was little evidence in the financial figures of any immediate impact from people using AI rather than Rightmove. Svanstrom said there is still “extremely little traffic existing on ChatGPT in terms of people looking for property” and less than half a per cent of all traffic on Rightmove comes from ChatGPT at the moment. The majority of people — 85 per cent — go straight to the app or website rather than through Google or another search engine.
The final dividend, to be paid in May, was lifted by 8 per cent to 6.59p a share, totalling £50 million, while Rightmove will return another £90 million to shareholders through share buybacks before the end of July.
Looking ahead to this coming year, Rightmove is targeting revenue growth of between 8 and 10 per cent, similar to what it achieved in 2025. It expects that increase will be driven by more estate agents taking out its premium — and more costly — “Optimiser Edge” subscription package.
