There is only one reason and one reason alone. Cost. A package that includes Rightmove at an additional fee may well solve the problem. Let the customer choose.
The perceived value of Rightmove alone will make landlords choose Openrent, or not as it will be moving forward.
Openrents own published stats say that Rightmove receives around 150% more searches per month compared to Zoopla.
Quote:
“Rightmove receives over 125m views every month. Zoopla receives over 50m views.”
Any portal that ditches RM is struggling.
Some regions do well from Zoopla granted, but it is proven already that Rightmove has market share.
Applying national averages does not work in scenarios like this. Search behaviour is regional and this policy is now excluding a huge significant audience.
This is a game-changer in my view, if the properties are not going to be listed on Rightmove I will have to use one of the alternatives. What is the point to only advertising to part of the market, attracting the best customers is vital in any business, and even more so in letting as it is difficult to get rid of the wrong ones! Why narrow your choice???
I agree with others, make a chargeable option if necessary.
I was one of the customers caught out by OpenRent ceasing their relationship with Rightmove (as in their logo was still one of the portals listed when I placed the advert only for it not to appear.) To be fair to OpenRent they refunded the money after contact but a simple bit of communication would have avoided the majority of bad feeling amongst customers I’m guessing.
Quick Lister has none of the functionality that I really appreciate about the OpenRent platform but from the unintended A/B testing that I’ve had to do I really cannot not be on Rightmove for it’s potential tenant reach.
I guess going forward I’ll have to run both OpenRent and Quick Lister adverts, then guide selected tenants to the OpenRent advert to use te Rent Now/contract features etc. Would happily pay more as others have said if Rightmove was included to utilise OpenRent features.
I don’t know which market this is referring to but all my enquiries have come from Rightmove and it is the only site that myself or anyone I know look for properties to rent. You may think that no one will notice but you will definitely notice a decrease in revenue once many of us landlords move away from OpenRent. First the crazy price increase and now this. The worst thing is that there was no communication whatsoever. Something as big as this should have been clearly communicated to your users. Very disappointing.
Thanks for this @David103, and your very reasonable approach and stance. I would just like to clarify that your other advert is posted on Zoopla as well, and if you look here:
You’ll see the other advert is “top” because it’s newer. This is likely skewing these numbers, as it will be drawing Zoopla/PrimeLocation/etc enquiries away from your OpenRent advert. There are also other failures in this test, because if you imagine a scenario, hypothetically, where all tenants are using Zoopla and Rightmove, just because you receive enquiries from Rightmove it doesn’t mean those tenants wouldn’t have found you via Zoopla afterwards. This is called incrementality testing, and tells you the true value of any particular portal / advertising location. The best way to do this is if you have 2 or more properties available to rent out at the same time, and even better if you have tens of thousands so you can draw statistically sound conclusions. This is exactly what we’ve done.
I appreciate setting up these tests isn’t super easy, and landlords just want a simple way to find tenants. This is 100% what we’ve always been dedicated to, and I want to re-assure everyone that we have done extensive fair testing here and once all our adverts on Rightmove drain fully we’ll share the more detailed analysis that covers any landlord concerns here.
In any case, I sincerely hope you find a tenant quickly and am confident your OpenRent advert would have delivered that. I apologise you’ve had to spend more money than you would have liked to in this interim period.
We’ll definitely issue a statement once all adverts have drained and we can share our full data - whilst we’re still in contract with and advertising with Rightmove this isn’t possible unfortunately. As I said previously, this will only take a few weeks.
If OpenRent portal generate the same amount of enquiries they would not offer it for free to anyone. Tories lost the election because of their lying so OR surely will lose most of its income soon as almost all landlords would stop paying them altogether knowing without Rightmove OR is really worth little. Hopefully OR can work things out with RightMove before losing the business altogether.
This issue is this. As a landlord the cost of a void is significant, as is the cost of a bad tenant. So it’s natural to want to maximum exposure, even if that means paying more to bring it to market.
Why has openrent decided to make their platform less attractive to use?
I too have complained and received £49 part refund, i am a retired owner of a Lettings business and wholly disagree with OR.
The following post is exactly correct….
“Applying national averages does not work in scenarios like this. Search behaviour is regional and this policy is now excluding a huge significant audience.”
Whilst Openrent say their decision is based on data and proven, what is disappointing to me is the manner it was implemented. If Opernrent were so sure that this was the right thing to do, why did they not sing it from the roof tops beforehand rather than trying to sneak it in and hope nobody notices. Note to Openrent, we are not stupid.
It is a matter of choices and I respect Open rents choice here although I suspect the decision was based on ‘the cost of Rightmove’ vs ‘the loss of revenue’. My view is they have calculated that figure incorrectly. Whilst the actual cost of not renewing with Righmove is a known quantity, I suspect the ‘loss of revenue’ has been deduced purely to justify their decision. Only time will tell
I have a property which will be coming to market soon, so I (like many landlords I suspect) will do my own research by using an alternative provider. So for now they have lost my business. I may or may be back for future lettings, but that is the choice I and Openrent have made.
We were disappointed to find OpenRent were no longer advertising on Rightmove. We really like the functionality of OpenRent. So - we posted with QuickLister. Functionality is not as good, but adverts appear on Rightmove, Zoopla and OnTheMarket.
In 2 days we had around 121 enquiries. 106 were Rightmove, 13 were Zoopla and 2 OnTheMarket. We also used the free OpenRent option and had 11 enquiries.
Suffice to say we did 11 viewings, all were Rightmove and there was 1 cancelation, who was via OpenRent.
I would overwhelmingly say that the decision to move to the other portal, advertising on Rightmove, was a phenomenal success and OpenRent are deluded if they think the stats say otherwise.
@Mark119 Good to hear of your experience on Quicklister. I have registered with them in preparation for my next letting. I was hoping to look on Rightmove and see what properties Quicklister have on Rightmove but could not find any. Which agent does it appear under on Rightmove?
I need to advertise my flat now for letting, if Openrent stops posting on Rightmove, could I know which alternative is the best portal for us to use and ensure the ads will appear on Rightmove?
I wonder if we can knock this one on the head by making a Data Access Request asking for all the detailed data generated by our accounts. Then we can all evaluate the impact on us as individuals rather than having aggregated data pushed our way?