Rightmove and Chimnie both deal in UK property data, but they've built their businesses around fundamentally different assets. Rightmove owns the demand side - 25 years of listing data, 4.1 million daily visitors, and real-time signals showing what buyers search for, enquire about, and how quickly properties sell. Chimnie owns the property side - around 500 attributes per address, covering physical characteristics, environmental risk, planning history, and rebuild costs across every UK property. The overlap between the two is surprisingly narrow.
This comparison draws on publicly available information and product documentation. It's written to help data and procurement teams understand where each platform fits, not to declare a winner.
Who is Rightmove?
Rightmove was founded in 2000 and listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2006. It's now a FTSE 100 constituent with a market cap of roughly £4.4 billion and revenue of £390 million in FY 2024. The business model is straightforward - around 19,000 estate agents and developers pay an average of £1,609 per month to list properties on the UK's dominant property portal.
The numbers that matter for data buyers sit on the consumer side. Rightmove accounts for more than 80% of time spent on UK property portals. It processes over 2.3 billion site visits per year and sends more than one lead per second to agents. That traffic generates a dataset no other UK provider can replicate: real-time enquiry volumes, search behaviour patterns, time-on-market metrics, price reduction frequency, and supply-demand signals at a granular geographic level.
Rightmove's Data Services division packages this into several products - a Market Intelligence Centre for self-serve analytics, an AVM processing over 400,000 valuations per month, a Surveyors Comparable Tool used 200,000 times monthly, Property Risk Alerts, and bespoke analysis engagements. The division sits within "Other" revenue alongside overseas and third-party income, which tells you it's still a relatively small part of the business. Rightmove's core revenue engine remains agent advertising.
In late 2025, Rightmove signed a multi-year partnership with Google Cloud to deploy Vertex AI and Gemini across its platform, with £12-18 million earmarked for AI and innovation investment in 2026.
Rightmove website homepage
Who is Chimnie?
Chimnie was founded by Jon Francis, a former data scientist from Google's innovation team, with the goal of making UK property data more transparent and accessible. The company operates two platforms: chimnie.com, a B2B property data bureau serving insurers, lenders, and property services firms; and chimnie.co.uk, a free consumer research site with over 150,000 users whose feedback validates the underlying data at scale.
Chimnie processes around 30 million virtual property assessments each month, drawing on hundreds of geospatial, environmental, and proprietary datasets. Its product range includes the UK Residential Property Database, the UK Commercial Property Database, a free AVM, rebuild cost estimates, address autocomplete, risk scoring, and AI training data. Delivery is via API or flat file, with published pricing at £0.45 per property PAYG with ratecard volume discounts.
Feature comparison
Market intelligence and demand data This is Rightmove's home ground, and it isn't close. No other UK provider can tell you how many enquiries a property received in its first week, how search volumes for three-bed semis in Didsbury shifted month-on-month, or whether buyer demand is outstripping new supply in a particular postcode. These are forward-looking indicators that registry-based data simply can't provide. Chimnie offers sales history and local market statistics but doesn't have access to live listing data or consumer search behaviour.
Automated valuation model (AVM)
Both platforms offer AVMs, built on different foundations. Rightmove's AVM processes over 400,000 valuations per month and benefits from real-time asking price data and demand signals drawn from its portal traffic. It's delivered via an interactive platform, API, or bulk portfolio valuations. Chimnie's free AVM uses Bayesian hierarchical methods with calibrated confidence intervals, produces separate listing and sale price estimates, and operates at micro-postcode granularity. It's completing two years of national planning data ingestion - launching imminently - which will allow it to account for extensions, conversions, and outbuildings that haven't triggered a new transaction or EPC. For lenders running selective high-value checks, either AVM has merit. For teams wanting to run a valuation on every case, Chimnie's economics are more practical.
Property-level data
depth Chimnie returns over 500 attributes per API call - structural characteristics, outbuilding mapping, roof type and condition, solar panel detection, garden boundaries, environmental risk factors, EPC data, and planning history. Rightmove's data strength runs in a different direction: listing metadata, price changes, time-on-market, and enquiry volumes. If you need to know that a property had a loft conversion approved in 2023 and sits within 50 metres of a subsidence claim cluster, that's Chimnie. If you need to know that three-bed houses in that postcode are receiving 40% more enquiries than last quarter, that's Rightmove.
Rebuild cost estimates
Chimnie provides rebuild cost estimates with confidence intervals, finish-quality segmentation, and decomposed materials and labour costs at regional level. This is a core product for insurance underwriting and claims validation. Rightmove doesn't offer rebuild cost data.
Planning data
Chimnie is completing a two-year national ingestion of planning permission data from every UK local authority, standardised into a consistent schema and launching imminently. This will be the only full UK planning dataset available from a single provider. Rightmove surfaces basic planning data from third-party overlays within its Property Risk Alerts product, but it isn't a structured planning data product you can query at scale.
Risk and environmental data Chimnie covers flood, subsidence, crime, pollution, traffic, energy performance, roof condition via satellite imagery, tree-fall risk, solar panel detection, garden boundaries, and listed building status. Rightmove's Property Risk Alerts flag environmental risks (flood, HS2, subsidence, fracking) alongside lending and market risks, but these are designed as flags within mortgage decisioning rather than standalone risk data feeds.
Surveyors and comparable data Rightmove's Surveyors Comparable Tool is deeply embedded in surveying workflows - used over 200,000 times per month. The integrated Rightcheck feature automatically cross-references a surveyor's valuation against the AVM to flag discrepancies. Chimnie doesn't offer a comparable tool aimed at surveyors. For surveying firms, Rightmove's product is purpose-built.
Property coverage Chimnie covers 35 million-plus UK properties - the entire housing stock, regardless of whether a property has ever been listed online. Rightmove's data is richest for properties that have appeared on its portal. Properties sold off-market, through private treaty, or sitting in social housing stock will have limited or no Rightmove data.
Pricing and access
Chimnie publishes its pricing - £0.45 per property PAYG with ratecard volume discounts. The free AVM and free address autocomplete let you evaluate the data without a procurement cycle. Full API documentation is open. Rightmove doesn't publish data services pricing. All products require a consultation with a specialist team and bespoke contract negotiation. For organisations wanting to test quickly or build with transparent unit economics, Chimnie is materially easier to adopt.
Commercial property data
data Both providers cover commercial property. Rightmove runs the UK's largest commercial property website (60%-plus of online commercial user time) and launched a new commercial data API in 2025. Chimnie offers a dedicated UK Commercial Property Database covering offices, retail, warehouses, and mixed-use properties via its standard API.
Where Rightmove is stronger
Rightmove is the better choice when you need demand-side market intelligence. Its 25 years of continuous listing data and 80%-plus share of consumer property search create a dataset that genuinely can't be assembled from other sources. If your decisions depend on understanding buyer behaviour, enquiry velocity, supply-demand dynamics, or pricing trends at a local level, Rightmove's Market Intelligence Centre and bespoke analysis service are where that data lives.
Chimnie property data API homepage
The Surveyors Comparable Tool is another clear strength. It's used over 200,000 times per month, integrates with surveyor software, and the Rightcheck feature adds automated quality assurance to the valuation process. No comparable product exists from Chimnie or most other UK data providers.
For organisations already embedded in the Rightmove ecosystem - agents, developers, lenders using the AVM for portfolio revaluation - the data services products plug in with minimal friction. The Google Cloud AI partnership signals that these products will get more capable over the next few years.
Where Chimnie is stronger
Chimnie is the stronger choice when you need to know about properties rather than markets.
For insurance use cases - underwriting, pricing, claims validation, fraud detection - Chimnie's data is purpose-built. Rebuild cost estimates with confidence intervals, risk scoring across dozens of perils, and pre-fill APIs are designed around insurance workflows. Rightmove doesn't serve this market.
For mortgage brokers and sourcing platforms wanting to embed property data into every advisor conversation, Chimnie's free AVM and £0.45 per property PAYG pricing make universal enrichment practical. The planning data - completing national ingestion and launching imminently - will catch property changes that listing-based models miss: extensions, loft conversions, and outbuildings that haven't appeared in transaction records.
Chimnie's coverage of the full UK housing stock (35 million-plus properties) matters for any use case that touches off-market, social, or never-listed properties. Rightmove's data is strongest for properties that have been actively marketed online.
The consumer platform at chimnie.co.uk creates a feedback loop that continuously validates the underlying data against real homeowner input - over 150,000 users checking and correcting their own property details. This ground-truth validation mechanism is unusual and structurally hard to replicate.
For technology teams, Chimnie's API-first delivery, published pricing, and open documentation mean you can evaluate and integrate in days rather than weeks of enterprise procurement.
Who should choose which
Investors, consultants, and market analysts tracking supply-demand dynamics should look at Rightmove's Market Intelligence Centre. The demand-side data - enquiry volumes, search trends, time-on-market metrics - is genuinely unique and directly relevant to market strategy and investment timing.
Surveyors and lenders using comparable data for valuation support should consider Rightmove's Surveyors Comparable Tool and the integrated Rightcheck feature. This is a mature, embedded product with no direct equivalent elsewhere.
Insurers, MGAs, and reinsurers should choose Chimnie. The property risk data, rebuild cost modelling, and insurance-specific API design are built for underwriting and pricing workflows that Rightmove doesn't target.
Mortgage brokers and sourcing platforms looking to embed property valuations and enrichment into every case will find Chimnie's economics and data depth more practical for high-volume use.
Proptech firms and data science teams building property-related products will find Chimnie's self-serve APIs, published pricing, and training data products more suited to product development than Rightmove's enterprise engagement model.
Many organisations will sensibly use both - Rightmove for market intelligence and demand signals, Chimnie for property-level enrichment, risk data, and the use cases that sit outside Rightmove's portal ecosystem.
Conclusion
Rightmove and Chimnie aren't really competitors. Rightmove is a property portal that has built a data services division around its unmatched demand-side dataset. Chimnie is a property data bureau that has built depth and breadth at the individual property level. The two datasets answer different questions.
If your work depends on understanding market dynamics - what buyers want, where demand is heading, how quickly properties sell - Rightmove's data is hard to beat. If you need detailed property attributes, environmental risk, rebuild costs, or planning history across the full UK housing stock, Chimnie covers ground that Rightmove's portal data doesn't reach.
Chimnie's pricing is published, the free AVM is live, and the API documentation is open - so working out whether it fits your needs takes minutes, not months.
