Why listings on Home are free for estate agents

Every estate agent in the UK knows what it costs to list on the major portals. The number has gone up every year for most of the last decade. Many agents feel they have no choice but to pay it, because the traffic is there and the alternatives have not been credible enough.

We think that needs to change. Our part in changing it is straightforward: listings on Home are free.

Why free?

The property portal duopoly is built on a specific kind of lock-in: agents pay, because buyers search the portals, and buyers search the portals because the listings are there. It is a self-reinforcing loop that makes it very hard for a new entrant to compete, because they need listings to get buyers and they need buyers to attract listings.

The way to break that loop, on the listings side at least, is to remove the cost barrier entirely. If listing on Home costs nothing, every agent has a reason to try it. If the platform delivers value, better tools, better data, a growing audience, agents will stay. We earn our keep by being useful, not by being unavoidable.

This matters more now than it did a year ago. The £1.5bn lawsuit against Rightmove has put portal fees under scrutiny in a way they have not faced before, and independent agents are asking harder questions about what they get for the cheque they write every month.

What the free model means in practice

Free to list means free to list. No hidden monthly fee, no per-listing charge, no paid-tier requirement to have your properties show up in search. You connect your CRM or upload your listings, and they appear. Home is currently tracking 1,249,531 live UK listings, sale and rental combined, including 45,623 new-build listings, so the properties agents list here sit inside a search pool that already has scale.

Home makes money through the moving services marketplace (conveyancing, surveys, removals, mortgages, broadband) and through optional premium tools for agents who want them: branded market intelligence reports, AML and ID check credits, advanced analytics. The listing itself is the starting point. We do not charge for it.

A note on the history

Home.co.uk was free to list when it launched in 1995. That founding principle survived thirty years under its original owners. We have no intention of changing it under ours. It is one of the reasons we made the case for a challenger portal in the first place.

The agents who list on Home now are helping build the audience that makes the portal useful for everyone who comes after. That matters to us. The free listing is how we acknowledge it.

Listings on Home.co.uk are currently free for estate agents. Homemove reserves the right to introduce premium listing tiers in future, but core listings will remain free.