Property AI Report
00:00:00 · Mal McCallion, Matt Goddard
[00:00:00] S0: Hi everybody and welcome to the Property AI Report. This is your weekly digest of all things property and AI brought to you by me, Mal McElian, and my good friend and um cold-infested co-host, Matt Glorat. Matt, how are you today? Buenos dias, Malcolm. I'm good. How are you? I'm really good, thanks. You are in somewhere exotic incha. [00:00:18] S1: I'm in Madrid, yes. Maybe it's slightly cooler this morning than I expected when I went out, but uh it's gonna warm up this afternoon, so cannot complain.
00:00:26 · Mal McCallion
[00:00:26] S0: Very nice out there for the Property Portal Watch conference, which is always a good one. It is our hundredth episode today. I brought something. It's not gonna work. What? Yeah, there we go. It's in my coffee now. Anyway, for those listening, that was a it's actually called confetti popper. There we go. Hundredth episodes in. Thanks everybody for listening. Obviously, very excited um to have the hundreds and hundreds of people that are out there. Thanks particularly to the like 15 people who listened from the very start who weren't my mum. Uh or you know, then um when it was bad, when Matt wasn't even there. And so, yes, obviously, um super excited for um the next hundred. Um, and there is still plenty, plenty of stuff to uh come over the next couple of years as well. Yes, um, before uh sorry, without further ado, let us get stuck into our 100th property news. All right, um, this week's property news, um, something that has come to light over the last few days, um, actually been driven by by us here at MyPorter. So, full disclosure, we have been monitoring Wright Move's stats in terms of their property numbers for some time. And we discovered that that there was um some significant anomalies in those numbers and dating back over the last 16 years plus. So we we spoke to them about it specifically, they changed them. And essentially what we see is is almost kind of like a scandalous lack of um either lack of care about the numbers that they put up there or something um that you know was was um intended to potentially see more traffic um going into the to their site and with the potential knock-on that that engendered elsewhere, right? So, you know, if people are believing that right move, and then the very specific claim here is that Right Move said they had 1.1 million properties, so 900,000 for sale, 200,000 for rent over the last 16 years on their for sale and two rent pages, the ones with the most traffic um after the home page. And that will have guided people to those pages ahead of any competitors. And you know, full disclosure back in 2010 when this kind of first started in terms of the planes, it was sales director at Zupla, we were building, we were growing. But it's not really about that, it's very much about what's happened to the industry since.
00:02:30 · Mal McCallion
You know, since then Romeo's average fee back in 2010 was was 379 uh pounds per month, it is now 1762. Is it possible that that would not have been um able to grow quite so significantly had these claims not been in place? What would that mean for um competitor portals? What would that mean for competitor agents? Would would the industry itself have been a lot healthier? Right move have been able to get to 70% um uh margins. Consumers had not seen every time they went onto Google and booked properties for search, uh, properties for sale in the UK, a claim that Right Move had 900,000 when they did not. So, Matt, I'm mindful that um that you know there's um this is something that that has blown up very recently and something that you know you may not necessarily, particularly as you've been traveling to to Madrid, have have had time to kind of get a get across. Um, but but any sort of um any sort of thoughts from your side?
00:03:21 · Matt Goddard
[00:03:21] S1: I think um the the one main one that sort of sticks out, and we we touched on it before the show was um going through the show notes, I put something in there about um lettings agents having uh a third of them not having their fees on there despite sort of trading standards and that to happen. In a way, we sort of said, well, is that is that a surprise? Right move allegedly, not allegedly, no, on our uh aggressive fears uh misleading with this sort of level of data, is um is quite significant if you if you think about like the the encouragement that brings. I'm I'm really interested as well in terms of the figures that um it was just this morning property industry I've got another article in there, hasn't it, about sort of the the the data and how how that figures have come off, come back on again. And as you've sort of uh alluded to, there is sort of very different to what's reported in their annual accounts. So why why are you putting you back on the spot? Why why do you think this is the case?
00:04:13 · Mal McCallion
[00:04:13] S0: So it's it you're right. So again, this morning property industry, I um and a couple of others um would write move yesterday and sort of hand wove away the the actual um uh the accusations and said, well, you know, just a couple of pages from historic pages. Um now that these were up until the beginning of September still showing 900,000 for sale and 200,000 to rent, so vastly inflated. The actual number was near as 680,000, so nearly 40% more than they actually had. And that was still in early September in 2026, so not you know, historic, and it may have been a handful of pages, but these were the most visited pages, with the exception of the homepage in their entire site. So, you know, it is first of all, you know, that for for them to just kind of try and um and brush it off um by saying that I think is is slightly very misleading. Um and secondarily, you know, the the most visited page was it is the home page, and they only changed that in 2021. So up until 2021, that still had that claim in it, and they've removed it from there in 2021. There is a question about why they didn't remove it from the rest of the site. You know, is it you know, and and this is the question, is it because they knew that that was going to see their traffic decrease? And then last year, and this is the one that that really kind of really asked the question, last year in April, April 23rd, they still had these claims on their for sale and two red sites. So 900,000 properties, 200,000 uh sorry, for sale, 200,000 to let. And then they removed them. And by the 30th of April last year, they had gone. But then at the end of May, they came back. So what that suggests is that there is some kind of reason why they had a look at what was happening when they removed those particular claims, again, years after they were true, if they were ever true, and then they put them back. And that's on the watch of, you know, you know, Hans Vanstrom and the and the people that are there right now. And it just strikes me that if you had seen that they were incorrect in 2021 and take them off your homepage, but chose not to take them off your saying two red pages, that has serious questions around it. But then last year, to take them off for a month and then put them back, again, presumably knowing that these were not correct, again, is is serious.
00:06:24 · Mal McCallion, Matt Goddard
That the impact, like I said, over time can be significantly cumulative, you know, to the benefit of right move and to the detriment of pretty much everybody else in the industry, because consumers do make decisions based on these things. You know, this is Google, this is where you go and you you say properties for sale in you know, Basing Stoke, and it comes up and says 900,000 properties um for sale, and that is wrong and not true, and has not been true for a long, long time. [00:06:52] S1: And if you look at their you do think this is maybe something sort of uh for a better word, sort of considered rather than like a marketing intern who's maybe tweaked it and then someone's brought up in a following marketing meeting months later and gone, oh, why have we not got that? And then popped it back in again without without thinking that we removed it because of this unsubstantiated claim at some point.