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Gary Bray · 04-08-2012, 05:23 PM

Hi property people,

I was wondering if any of you know if there are any tools out there to allow you to perform more granular searches on Rightmove?

As I’m sure you’ll all agree, Rightmove is a brilliant website, it’s right up there with all of the all time great property sites, such as PropertyTribes etc. But although Rightmove is great for simple searches, the sort that a potential owner/occupier would make, as a property pro I find it very limited. I want to be able to search for properties that have been ‘Sold STC’ and then back ‘For Sale’ more than x number of times (requires the help of Property Bee). I also want to be able to search for properties with bedrooms over a certain size, you might think that this is not possible as Rightmove does not store room sizes as numeric data but it can still be done.

Does anyone know of anything out there that will do this? Has anyone had any experience of writing any programs to query Rightmove directly? I don’t have the time to do this type of stuff myself these days but would consider getting one of my team to write something like this if it’s not already out there.

Gary.

Adam Hosker · 04-08-2012, 11:35 PM

Not that I know off - but -perhaps a request for the features on Property-Bee would be a good place to start.

Vanessa Warwick · 05-08-2012, 11:28 AM

Gary,

I think you raise a very interesting point.

We had a meeting with Rightmove last year and one of the things we mentioned to them was the "back end" data that they had that could potentially be of huge value.

Such as which areas had the most tenant searches.

And which areas had low house prices but high rents.

These are gold dust to investors and this kind of data would be worth paying for.

I also like the amount of detail that you need for your research.

The portal that understands the needs of investors could really clean up and develop another income stream.

Rob Dix · 05-08-2012, 08:01 PM

The idea of more detailed info for investors (for a fee) is really interesting - it's similar to sites that offer stock market data for free, but more detailed or up-to-date prices for subscribers.

The problem that I imagine Rightmove would have is that their data is only as comprehensive/accurate as what Estate Agents upload. So if only 70% of agents include room sizes in their listings, you'd never be able to rely on an 'advanced' Rightmove search to find all suitable properties.

Ditto for 'phantom' moves to 'Sold STC' and back to generate interest when nothing's actually happened (I have no idea if that happens, but I always assumed it did).

Regarding room sizes, it might be possible to write a script the scrapes them from the listings, but I imagine it'd be tough to ensure accuracy. It'd be great if someone could nail it though, because trawling through individual listings to find sizes is one of my biggest wastes of time.

Gary Bray · 05-08-2012, 08:20 PM

Hi Vanessa, Rob, Adam,

Looks like there is some demand for this after all.

I think it's more than 70% that upload room sizes but even if it is that low, that's still 70% less time wasted sifting through the ones that do have their room sizes listed.

As regards to never being able to rely on it finding all suitable properties, I'm not so sure that is the case. All you'd need to do it write it in such a way that if it couldn't work out the room sizes for what ever reason, just return it in the results as unknown, a bit of human input would still be required on those few but still an overall time saving.

As for the phanton 'Sold STC' moves, I've no idea wheather that happens either, maybe one of the other forum members has experience of this but even if a few of those did show up in your search results, you'd still have weeded out all of those dormant properties that haven't had their status changed in ages.

(05-08-2012 08:01 PM)Rob Dix Wrote: The idea of more detailed info for investors (for a fee) is really interesting - it's similar to sites that offer stock market data for free, but more detailed or up-to-date prices for subscribers.

The problem that I imagine Rightmove would have is that their data is only as comprehensive/accurate as what Estate Agents upload. So if only 70% of agents include room sizes in their listings, you'd never be able to rely on an 'advanced' Rightmove search to find all suitable properties.

Ditto for 'phantom' moves to 'Sold STC' and back to generate interest when nothing's actually happened (I have no idea if that happens, but I always assumed it did).

Regarding room sizes, it might be possible to write a script the scrapes them from the listings, but I imagine it'd be tough to ensure accuracy. It'd be great if someone could nail it though, because trawling through individual listings to find sizes is one of my biggest wastes of time.

Vanessa Warwick · 10-08-2012, 05:53 PM

Rightmove have contacted me to say that they have started to provide some of the data we are discussing here for their new "market intelligence" feature for Landlords.

It takes the form of a "mission". Have a look >>> here.

John Corey · 10-08-2012, 10:07 PM

(10-08-2012 05:53 PM)vanessa warwick Wrote: Rightmove have contacted me to say that they have started to provide some of the data we are discussing here for their new "market intelligence" feature for Landlords.

It takes the form of a "mission". Have a look >>> here.

Rather cool that they got in touch.

The interface is a bit fun. Not sure of the data. No complaints so far. Just need to play around more and see what I can learn.

Lynne Davis · 12-08-2012, 12:05 AM

They're also giving away free copies of the latest edition of David Lawrenson's "Successful Property Letting" - or at least they were a couple of weeks ago. Our copy arrived a few days ago. You have to go through the video thingy and the book offer comes up on the page right at the end, if I remember correctly (it's not especially prominent).

Gary Bray · 12-08-2012, 03:01 PM

That's pretty impressive, I only ask for this a week ago Smile

(10-08-2012 05:53 PM)vanessa warwick Wrote: Rightmove have contacted me to say that they have started to provide some of the data we are discussing here for their new "market intelligence" feature for Landlords.

It takes the form of a "mission". Have a look >>> here.

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