Rightmove removes ‘misleading’ website wording after rival challenge

Rightmove has removed website wording promising “over 900,000 properties for sale” and “over 200,000 properties to rent” following a challenge from property-discovery platform MyPorta.

Public archives record the sales wording in April 2010 and the rental wording in July 2010. Both were still appearing on Rightmove search engine descriptions in 2026. MyPorta challenged the claims in September, after which the descriptions were changed.

Mal McCallion (pictured), Founder and Chief Executive of MyPorta, says, “We regard these as clearly misleading claims. Rightmove claimed it had 1.1m properties “for sale” and “to rent”. Consumers were entitled to take those words at face value.

Truth, trust and integrity are important attributes for any business, let alone one that wishes to remain a market leader.”

“To find the same promises in archives from 2010 still being used without any proof in 2026 is deeply troubling. We show more properties than Rightmove – so we know that the numbers could simply not be true.

“During that 16-year period, Rightmove’s reported average monthly revenue per advertiser rose from £379 to £1,726 – an increase of approximately 355%. These increases were made possible by Rightmove’s traffic claims. How much of that traffic was from consumers believing they were seeing more of the market than they actually were?

“How much more successful might challengers such as OnTheMarket and Zoopla have been if consumers had understood that they needed to look beyond Rightmove to see what else was available?

“We welcome the change we have secured. But a business’s size should bring greater accountability. It should never buy exemption from scrutiny.”

Portal wars

MyPorta is free for agents to list and McCallion says it will always be.

Users describe their ideal home in their own words. MyPorta identifies and ranks matching properties and directs them to the advertising agent’s page for the particulars and next steps.

McCallion, a former sales director at Zoopla, adds: “Truth, trust and integrity are important attributes for any business, let alone one that wishes to remain a market leader. In the AI world it is not good enough to simply make unsupported claims and hope that no one notices.

“We intend to keep questioning the status quo in the industry. This change shows that scrutiny can make a difference. The future of property discovery is going to look very different from the past.”

Rightmove said in a statement: “This related to a small number of historic meta descriptions embedded within our website, which have since been updated.”