Rightmove 2026: It Names 16 Property Risks and Answers None of Them

Credit where it is due: Rightmove is free and it is very good

Let us not be coy about this. Rightmove costs consumers nothing, it carries the deepest live inventory in the UK, and if you are house-hunting you should have it open. Nothing on this page is an argument for using it less.

Three things it does that are genuinely difficult to get elsewhere:

• Historic listing photos and floorplans. Because properties are re-marketed every time they sell, Rightmove accumulates an archive of what a house looked like in previous campaigns. You can see the kitchen before the last owner's refit, whether the "study" was once advertised as a third bedroom, and how the floorplan changed between sales. For spotting an extension that may not have permission, or a room that has quietly shrunk, this is one of the most useful free resources in UK property.
• Sold prices from the official registers. Rightmove's sold-price data comes from HM Land Registry and Registers of Scotland — the same primary sources everyone else uses, presented well and free.
• Free instant estimated valuations, plus listing pages that carry EPC, council tax band, broadband speed, sale history, parking, accessibility information and an affordability calculator.

For a free, ad-supported product, that is a great deal of value. Which is precisely why the next section is worth your attention: the one place Rightmove goes conspicuously quiet is the place a buyer most needs it to speak.

The Material Information block: seventeen topics, zero answers

On a live Rightmove listing checked on 28 July 2026, the entire Material Information section rendered as a single sentence:

"Information including utilities, Electricity supply, Water supply, Sewerage, Heating, Broadband, Mobile signal / coverage, Parking, Building safety, Restrictions and rights, Rights and easements, Flood risk, Erosion risk, Coastal erosion risk, Planning permission for proposal for development, Property accessibility / adaptations, Coalfield or mining area all of which will be supplied within the legal pack."

Read it again slowly. Seventeen topics are named: the umbrella "utilities" plus sixteen specific fields, including Flood risk, Erosion risk, Coastal erosion risk, Building safety, Restrictions and rights, Rights and easements and Coalfield or mining area. Not one of them carries a value. The section is a list of the questions, followed by an undertaking that the answers will arrive "within the legal pack".

The legal pack arrives after your offer has been accepted, once you have instructed a solicitor and started incurring costs. So the sequencing runs like this: you are shown the shape of the risk at the moment when checking it would be cheap, and the content of the risk at the moment when acting on it is expensive. If the coalfield answer turns out to matter, you find out several hundred pounds and several weeks into a purchase you might not have started.

In fairness to Rightmove, this block is filled in by the listing agent, not generated by the portal, and naming-then-deferring is a legitimate way of discharging a disclosure obligation. Plenty of agents do fill these fields in properly. But the pattern is common enough that a buyer should never assume a named field is an answered one.

Rightmove holds the risk data. It sells it to lenders.

This is the part that reframes the whole page. Rightmove Data Services markets a product called Property Risk Alerts to, in its own words, "Lenders and Surveyors". Its environmental risk categories include HS2, fracking, subsidence and flood risk, alongside idiosyncratic property features such as listed building status and thatched roofs. Pricing is not published.

So the correct mental model is not "Rightmove doesn't have that data". It has it, or can source it, and has built a commercial product around it. The product is aimed at the institution lending against the house and the surveyor valuing it for that institution. The buyer — the party with the most money at risk and the least professional support — is not the customer.

We are not alleging anything improper here. It is an ordinary commercial arrangement: the consumer portal is an advertising business, the risk feed is a B2B data business, and they serve different customers. But it is worth knowing that when a listing says flood risk "will be supplied within the legal pack", the same corporate group is already alerting a lender to flood and subsidence exposure on properties like it.

How current are Rightmove's sold prices, really?

Rightmove's own help centre is refreshingly clear on this. HM Land Registry updates its sold house price data on the 20th day of each month, and the interval between a sale completing and being registered "varies between a few weeks, and a number of months". Northern Ireland is not covered.

That is worth internalising before you treat any sold-price figure — Rightmove's, ours, or anyone else's — as the current market. Every England-and-Wales service quoting sold prices sits behind the same registration pipeline, so a missing recent sale on your street is almost always an unregistered one rather than a hidden one. We inherit the identical lag and say so in the report rather than implying our comparables are live.

Field by field: which of the sixteen named risks do we actually answer?

Here is the honest version, including the rows we lose. If a page like this only listed the fields we win, you would be right not to trust it.

Four clear wins, one partial, and seven rows where we either lose outright or the field belongs with your solicitor. That is the real overlap. What matters is which four: flood, mining, ground stability and radon are the fields that can move a valuation, affect insurability or kill a purchase — and they are precisely the fields deferred to a document you cannot see until you are committed.

What we do not do, stated plainly

• England and Wales only. Rightmove lists across the UK. If your property is in Scotland or Northern Ireland, we are not the tool.
• No listings, no photos, no floorplans, no archive. We are not a portal and never will be.
• No automated valuation. Rightmove will give you a free instant estimate. We give you sold-price comparables that a person has looked at, which is slower and narrower.
• Not a survey and not a lender-accepted search. Your solicitor's formal searches and your surveyor's inspection are separate things and remain necessary.
• Not every reading exists for every address. We run the screen; where the underlying dataset returns nothing for a property, the report says so in plain words instead of manufacturing a reassuring number. An honest blank is worth more than a confident guess.

The sequence that costs least

The point of the middle row is to protect the bottom row. Search fees, survey fees and solicitor time on a property that a screen would have flagged are the most avoidable money in the whole process.

Key takeaways

• Rightmove is free and unbeatable at listings. Keep using it. We do not compete on inventory, photos, floorplans or UK coverage.
• Its Material Information block names sixteen risk fields and, on the listing we checked, answered none of them — deferring all of them to a legal pack you see only after your offer is accepted.
• Rightmove sells flood and subsidence alerting to lenders and surveyors through Property Risk Alerts. The data exists; the buyer is not the customer for it.
• Sold prices lag by design — HM Land Registry updates on the 20th of each month, with registration taking anywhere from a few weeks to several months. Everyone inherits that, us included.
• HouseCheckup answers four of the named fields at the address — flood including surface water, coal mining, ground stability and radon — plus planning designations, EPC, crime, schools and comparables, for a one-off £9.99 or £24.99, England and Wales only.
• For the portal-versus-portal question, see Rightmove vs Zoopla; for the wider market, our best UK property reports comparison.