In our house I always default to Rightmove and thereafter to Zoopla. I do use Zoopla which is more than others do in my household but I did make me wonder why do i use it. Not everyone agrees with me, in fact I’m amazed how many people I know only use Rightmove. So do you use Zoopla in addition to Rightmove?
I decided to run a test and see what percentage of properties can I find only by using Zoopla. The comments i hear all the time is why bother with Zoopla when you have all the properties on Rightmove!
Is that true though
Well lets do an experiment and see what the results are.
I will set a random criteria and i have no biased in this experiment as i genuinely want to see the outcome
Experimental Name : Should you use Zoopla with Rightmove?
- Area : Swindon SW6 – Within 1/4 mile radius
- Any property added at anytime
- Any amount of bedrooms
- Budget £200,000 – £250,000
- See the criteria in screen shots below
So the results? Well Rightmove has one property more…
Rightmove : 23 properties for sale found
Zoopla : 22 results for SW6 property for sale within 0.25 miles from £200,000-£250,000
Should you use Zoopla with Rightmove?
Will Zoopla’s 22 properties be the same as the 23 Rightmove lists?
Well I went through each one to find the results and interestingly Zoopla is more generous on its 1/4 mile radius as is seen from the diagram below. Taking the map circumference 2 of the 22 properties Zoopla showed were outside the radius. So we would have to remove them to make the experiment like for like.
Well I was shocked as there were 8 out of 20 properties on Zoopla that were not on Rightmove!
Rightmove
- 23 properties in total
- 11 unique to Right move
- 12 shared with Zoopla
Zoopla
- 20 properties in total if taking the same radius as Rightmove
- 8 unique to Zoopla
- 12 shared with Right move
Rightmove Combined Zoopla will provide 31 properties that is 26% extra property
In other words using Rightmove only gives you 4 out of 5 properties.
For me that answers the question for any serious buyer. Should you use Zoopla with Rightmove?
A resounding yes ! Do you agree?
This is very interesting. I would have expected the properties on Zoopla to have also been listed on Rightmove. This is clear research that shows you should use both when looking for a property. It would be interesting to see if you get the same results sampling a different area.
But do we know if any of those properties were actually for sale? (ps SW6 is Kensington, not Swindon)
Good test which is worth repeating! Using the criteria above today’s results for SW6 are Rightmove 25 properties, Zoopla 10 (after removing the include Sold STC). Looking at NW6 Rightmove has 74 properties, Zoopla 49. In SE6 Rightmove has 192 properties, Zoopla 94. In SN1 (Swindon Wiltshire) Rightmove has 74 properties, while Zoopla has only 54. I’ve made no adjustment for properties outside the area.
just read you post out of interest. now Zoopla has merged with DPG, including findaproperty.com who had approx 1million properties on their books, Zoopla will have double the amount of listings and fly past Rightmove volumes
Don’t forget that estate / lettings agents need to be registered with a site in order to advertise their property; the trouble is though, I have seen some very compelling evidence which suggests that many of the other property sites ‘skim’ Rightmove’s publicly available property data to build their own property portfolio’s, which begs the question as to how many of the properties shown on the competitors sites are actually as a result of ‘borrowed’ data and thus business from Rightmove.
This practice, whilst it could hit RM quite hard, is actually very useful to the EA/LA as they actually need only pay once (to RM) with a strong confidence that their listing is likely to show-up on the competitors sites.
So really, it could be said of this test that only the 8 non-Rightmove listed property is actually not listed with Rightmove.
In the end, whilst it is usually a good idea to use more than portal to ensure that you capture the full extent of the market, I am less inclined to use Zoopla based on the home-page looking remarkably similar to RM but usually only AFTER RM has updated theirs [where is the originality there??!] and when looking at the properties either in summary or at the individual listings, the pages just feel badly designed, poorly laid out and very cluttered unlike RM’s which to me feel the oposite.