Most agents are already in the Rightmove claim

Start with the part most agents do not know. If your agency is based in the UK, and you paid Rightmove for its portal services at any point between 1 April 2020 and 1 April 2026, you are already a member of a £1.5bn legal claim against them. You did not sign anything. Nobody asked you. That is simply how this kind of case works.

Whether that turns out to be good news, bad news or no news at all depends on things nobody knows yet. It is still worth understanding now, because a lot of agents are going to hear about this in November and assume they have missed a deadline.

What an opt-out class actually is

Most legal actions require you to join them. A collective proceeding at the Competition Appeal Tribunal can work the other way round. One person, the class representative, brings a claim on behalf of everybody who fits a definition, and everybody who fits that definition is in unless they take steps to leave.

Here the class representative is Jeremy Newman, a former panel member at the Competition and Markets Authority. The class, in the claim's own words, is "individuals, partnerships and companies based in the UK, who paid fees to Rightmove for its online property portal services at any time between 1 April 2020 to 1 April 2026". That is not a small group. Rightmove had 16,591 agency branches on its books at the end of June 2026 alone, and the class reaches back six years.

The claim was filed on 1 April 2026. It alleges that Rightmove abused a dominant market position by charging estate agents excessive and unfair subscription fees. Rightmove's answer has been short and firm: "This claim is without merit, and we will defend it vigorously."

Registering on the claim's website is optional and changes nothing about whether you are in the class. It gets you updates, and that is all it does.

What happens on 2 November

The Tribunal has listed a hearing for 2 November 2026, with the 3rd held in reserve. This is the certification hearing, and it is worth being precise about what it is, because the headlines around it will not be.

It is not a trial. Nobody will decide at that hearing whether Rightmove overcharged anyone. The Tribunal is deciding a narrower question: whether this claim is suitable to be brought collectively at all, and whether Mr Newman is the right person to bring it. If it grants a Collective Proceedings Order, the case moves on towards a full trial, which would be years away. If it refuses, the claim stops there in this form.

Before then the case has already been through a case management conference in July, and a disclosure ruling and order across July and August. That is ordinary procedural work, and all of it sits on the Tribunal's public case page under case number 1771/7/7/26 if you would rather read the documents than the coverage.

The claim is fully funded by Innsworth Capital, a specialist litigation funder. What that arrangement means for an individual class member is a question for your own advisers rather than for us. We build websites, and nothing on this page is legal advice.

The number that makes this interesting

Here is where it stops being a news item and starts being worth a few minutes of thought.

The claim is backed by more than 250 agencies. It follows years of open letters, petitions and a good deal of public anger about fee rises. And in the same half year that the claim was filed, Rightmove reported its highest first-half agency retention in over a decade, at 96 per cent. Agency branches went up by 206 to 16,591. Agency revenue rose 9 per cent, which Rightmove put down to more customers upgrading to higher-tier packages. The average agency advertiser paid £1,636 a month, which is £116 or 8 per cent more than the same period a year earlier.

So the trade is furious, and the trade is also buying more. Both of those are true at once, and neither cancels the other out. It is not hypocrisy either. It is what a dependency looks like from the inside. When something is where your buyers already are, being cross about the invoice does not make paying it optional.

What the claim does not do

This part matters, because it is where expectations are most likely to run ahead of reality.

The claim seeks damages for fees already paid. It is not an application for a price cap, it is not a regulator's investigation, and it does not change what Rightmove is able to charge in future. Even on the most favourable possible outcome, years from now, the result is money back for past overcharging rather than a smaller invoice next renewal.

Which means that whatever happens on 2 November, and whatever happens after it, an agency's underlying position is exactly the same the following morning. If a portal is the only place people find you, its pricing is not really a negotiation.

The only lever that is actually yours

We are a website company, so treat what follows as the obvious thing we would say, and then check whether it happens to be true anyway.

The reason portal fees feel non-negotiable is that the portal owns the audience. The only durable answer to that is to own some of it yourself: people who find you directly, through search, through your own content, through the answer an AI gives when somebody asks who to sell with in your town. Not instead of the portals. Almost no agency can do without them, and pretending otherwise would be silly. Alongside them, so that the invoice becomes a choice rather than a fact of life.

We have written about the arithmetic of that in portals against your own website, and about where portal listings actually surface in AI answers in what ChatGPT does with Rightmove. Neither is a get-out-of-portals plan, because there is not one going. They are both about the share of your enquiries that arrives without a monthly fee attached to it.

What we would actually do about it

About the claim itself, nothing. You are in the class already, the hearing is in November, and no deadline has been published for anybody to act on. If you want updates, register on the claim's site. If the sums involved are large enough to matter to your business planning, talk to your own solicitor rather than to a website company.

The useful reaction is the boring one. Find out what proportion of your enquiries came through a portal and what proportion came from somewhere you own. Most agents have never separated those two numbers, and are surprised by the answer in both directions. Whatever the Tribunal decides in November, that ratio is the one you can actually do something about.

A note on sources, because this is a legal matter and precision matters more than usual here. The class definition and the funding arrangement come from the claim's own website. The hearing date and the case documents come from the Competition Appeal Tribunal's public page for case 1771/7/7/26. The membership, retention, revenue and fee figures come from Rightmove's own half-year results for 2026. We are not lawyers, this is a summary of what is on the public record, and it is not legal advice.