Rightmove has announced that it is launching a new tool designed to engage with home-owners who are not actively looking to sell right now, enabling the property portal to keep track their home moving plans now – and in the future.
Rightmove says extensive research among home-owners found that they now expect to be able to quickly receive an online valuation for their home, and that they would be keen to get regular updates to help them decide the right time to start thinking about moving.
The property portal says the new tool, Track My Property, has been created with input from a number of agents and will initially launch in Rightmove’s sold prices section by the end of May.
Following feedback from agents, rather than providing an exact valuation to a home-owner, Track My Property will give them an estimated range. The range will be calculated using a machine learning model that includes previous sold price data and Rightmove data.
According to Rightmove, the tool will educate people about the difference between an online estimate and an exact, expert valuation from an agent, and prompt people to contact a local agent once they are ready to obtain a professional valuation of their home.
James Bassil, product director at Rightmove, said: “After speaking to a number of agents and home-owners we’ve developed a tailored solution to help engage more people who are not quite ready to sell yet, but who want to keep a close eye on how much their home could be worth. More and more homeowners now expect a quick way to get an online valuation for their property, but we think that despite the wealth of data available, generating an exact automated value is virtually impossible.
“An exact valuation needs expertise from a local agent, and so the tool will provide an estimated range rather than an exact figure. It will educate people to take the estimate as a rough guide only and champion agents as the experts.
“We’ll be rolling the tool out slowly on our platform to ensure that we reach these home-owners at the right stage of their research journey.”
I don’t believe for one moment that any agents have had an input, RM need to catch up with the other portals that have done this for years, is this another justification for more price increases and could be in preparation for vendors to start listing direct.
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Dangerous tool as rightmove could control the market price.
It won’t be representative as they should receive feedback from owners if they have done renovations. They don’t even ask for it.
Also, they don’t cross the info with valuators which have the up to date valuations.
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