A note from the co-founders on acquiring home.co.uk

We started Homemove because the process of moving home is, in our experience, unnecessarily hard. Not catastrophically hard. Just relentlessly inefficient. Every step involves a different company, different paperwork, a different login, and no one talking to anyone else. We thought we could fix the coordination problem. We still do.

For three years we built the infrastructure: the moving services marketplace, the AI tools, the surveyor product, the data layer. What we did not have was the front door. A portal that people trust, that has been around long enough to mean something.

Home.co.uk has been around since 1995. That is longer than Google. Ben Horton and Doug Shephard built it and kept it independent for thirty years. When we first spoke to them about the acquisition, what struck me was that they cared about the same things we cared about: honest data, genuine usefulness, not optimising the platform for its own revenue at the expense of the people using it. Home now tracks 1,249,531 live UK listings, sale and rental combined, and we intend to spend that scale on usefulness rather than lock-in.

The deal closed on 4 November 2025. The morning after, we were already building.

What we are making is not Rightmove with a different logo. We are not trying to be the biggest portal. We are trying to be the most useful one. Listings are free for agents, because the lock-in model is bad for the market. AI tools that are helpful, because there is thirty years of property data sitting here that most portals never used properly. A moving platform that connects the search to the actual transaction, because finding the property is not the hard part.

It is going to take a while to build all of it. We are being honest about that. But the foundation is here now, and we are moving fast.

James Freestone and Louis O'Connell Bristow, co-founders