The case for a challenger portal: why the UK property market needed a new option

The UK property portal market has been dominated by the same two or three names for most of the past two decades. That is not a criticism of those businesses. They built products that worked and acquired the network effects that make portals hard to dislodge. But network effects are not the same as continuous improvement, and concentration in any market tends, over time, to push costs up and innovation down.

When HM Haus Group acquired the home.co.uk domain, the question was not whether to build a portal. The question was whether there was something different to offer.

What the incumbents do well and where they stop

The large portals do search well. They have large listing databases, decent map interfaces, and enough traffic that most agents list with them without much debate. That is a lot to replicate. It is also why Rightmove's dispute with independent agents over listing fees has become such a live issue: when three portals hold most of the traffic, agents have little room to negotiate.

What they have been slower to develop is anything that happens around the search: the information buyers and renters need to make decisions, the tools agents need to run their businesses more efficiently, and the kind of transparent data infrastructure that would make the market less opaque.

The experience of finding and moving into a home in the UK involves a remarkable number of separate services, most of which do not talk to each other. A portal that only does search is capturing a small slice of a much longer journey.

What we are building

Home is a portal with a moving platform attached. Search at homes for sale and homes to rent is the starting point, but the aim is to support the whole move: conveyancing, surveys, utilities, the administrative work that tends to fall on buyers and sellers to coordinate themselves. Right now Home carries 1,249,531 live UK listings, including a three-bed house in Fringford, Oxfordshire at £350,000 and a one-bed flat on Henry Street in Manchester at £195,000, the kind of everyday stock a portal has to get right before it earns the right to build anything else.

For agents, we have built a set of tools that go beyond listing management. The AI assistant Inigo, launched December 2025, handles valuations, canvassing research, and routine buyer queries. The goal is to reduce the administrative overhead so agents can spend more time on the work that requires their actual expertise. You can learn more at estate agents on Home.

We are a small team by the standards of established portals. The Atlas monorepo that powers the platform was initialised in October 2025, so the platform is new. That is a constraint and an advantage: we are not carrying twenty years of technical debt, and we are not protecting a margin structure that depends on things staying as they are.

The honest version of the pitch

Building a challenger portal means competing for listings against businesses with existing relationships and much larger sales teams. We are not going to claim that is easy or that we have solved it. What we can say is that the product is built with a clear view of what is wrong with the current market and a genuine attempt to fix it.

The UK property transaction is still too slow, too opaque, and too fragmented. There is room for a platform that takes those problems seriously.

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Home.co.uk is operated by HM Haus Group Ltd. The platform is in active development; feature availability may change.

Further reading: the ONS UK House Price Index.