At Rightmove, we want to make home moving easier for everyone, from house hunters and homeowners to estate agents and brokers. Behind every search, listing, and connection on our platform lies a complex network of users, partners, and properties — and we’ve built our data and AI strategy to serve all three.
To deliver on this mission, we migrated from siloed, on-premises databases to Google Cloud. This move wasn’t just about technology. It was about unlocking smarter, faster, more personalized experiences for our users and partners, and helping them find the right match for each property more efficiently.
Our strategy is guided by four core data and AI value areas:
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Delighting consumers with personalized search and discovery
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Empowering partners, such as estate agents, with smarter tools and insights
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Monetizing data through innovations such as property price prediction
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Driving operational efficiency across our platform
Today, we’re building this future with a unified analytics and AI stack — BigQuery, Vertex AI, and Looker — that we call “the data hive.” Already, around 300 team members (a third of our workforce) are tapping into its capabilities to turn data into action and insights into impact.
Making it easier to find a home with personalized, dynamic suggestions
When someone’s looking for a new home, they often have a wish list: a garden, a modern kitchen, maybe a home office. We’re using Vertex AI to make that search feel more intuitive and tailored than ever. By extracting metadata from property descriptions and images, we automatically create listing features and keywords, even ones that weren’t manually tagged before, to provide more accurate search results.
We’re also exploring ways to streamline communication. Recently released is an AI-powered feature that uses Gemini to help estate agents respond to inquiries faster. With context-aware, automatically generated replies, agents can keep conversations moving, and potential buyers and sellers can get answers faster, even during the busiest periods.
Helping partners work smarter with AI-powered recommendations
Our partners — which include estate agents,new home developers, mortgage lenders, and other industry professionals — rely on Rightmove to connect with the right audience at the right time. With Vertex AI and Gemini models working behind the scenes, we’re helping them do that more efficiently and effectively.
Take lead generation, for example. We’ve built a vendor scoring engine that analyzes user search patterns and on-site behavior to predict the likelihood that someone is a homeowner. This insight helps partners focus their time and marketing efforts on high-conversion leads, while offering more relevant products — such as mortgage options — to the right people at the right moment.
Next, we’re excited to use generative AI to build agentic, conversational user interfaces, enabling anyone across our network to interact with data or find insights using natural language. Whether it’s a business user running a query, or a partner navigating market trends, we’re working toward a more natural, accessible way to engage with data.
Turning data into insight and insight into value
Another exciting way we’re unlocking the value of our data is through an Automated Valuation Model (AVM). This AI-powered tool predicts the sale and rental price of every property in the UK, every month, by analyzing a wide range of signals including market trends, supply and demand, and the condition of individual homes.
Traditionally, valuations were fairly static, based on fixed data points that didn’t reflect recent improvements or shifting market conditions. Vertex AI makes them dynamic. Whether it’s a newly renovated kitchen or a shift in local market conditions, we can factor in real-time changes to properties on our website, delivering more accurate, up-to-date valuations for both homeowners and estate agents.
These monthly valuations are invaluable to our partners. Mortgage lenders, and estate agents use them as trusted pricing guides to understand local markets and assess risk, especially when managing large property portfolios or backbooks.
Behind the scenes, the hive gives us access to both structured and unstructured data, including more than 25 years of property images that were previously siloed. Now stored securely in Cloud Storage, this rich visual data is fueling advanced use cases, including these enhanced valuation models and deeper market analysis.
Driving operational efficiency with a smarter, unified data platform
With our migration to the cloud, we’ve embraced a “hub and spoke” model to ensure both consistency and flexibility in how data and AI are used across the business. The “hubs” are our central teams — experts in BigQuery, Looker, and Vertex AI — who set best practices and help scale innovation. The “spokes” are our vertical business units, such as the New Homes department, that tap into the hive platform to run their own business intelligence and AI use cases, tailored to their specific needs.
By consolidating multiple legacy business intelligence tools into a single platform with Looker, we’ve simplified our tech stack and created operational gains. For example, the New Homes team has cut down meeting prep with developers from hours to minutes, thanks to easily accessible, self-serve Looker dashboards.
And we’re constantly discovering new ways to create value from our new platform. For example, as Google Cloud rolls out new features such as BigQuery’s Series FM function for low-code forecasting, our teams are quickly adopting them to move from descriptive to predictive analytics. Forecasting leads, time spent on site, or whatever KPI a business unit has, was previously unthinkable, with siloed data and manual processes for developing models and ingesting data somewhere else for analysis. In our new platform, we can quickly trial this kind of forecasting in a spoke using just 10 lines of code and our BigQuery-Looker integration. It only took weeks for many of our business units to start using Series FM for forecasting.
Helping users at every stage of homeownership with AI
As we look to the future, our AI strategy is expanding beyond helping people find a home. Rightmove is evolving into a smart, supportive companion for every stage of the home journey: find, afford, transact, move, and live.
That means using data and AI to continue helping users to find properties but also to make better-informed decisions throughout the entire lifecycle of homeownership after that. We’re already rolling out new capabilities, such as smarter mortgage in principle matching and insights into the total cost of ownership, including broadband, energy, and utility costs, so buyers can move with confidence.
One exciting step in this direction is using Vertex AI to power the models and data behind our Track a Property feature — a way for home-owners to regularly check the value of their home. This upgrade means the valuation models are built and trained faster, will improve their accuracy over the long term with added model engineering and tuning, as well as taking advantage of better cloud architecture to host them.
This is just the beginning. As Google AI continues to evolve, so does our platform, becoming a home and living assistant that supports not just the move, but the life that follows it.
