Every UK estate agent lists on Rightmove and Zoopla. A feed joins the agency CRM to those portals. It uses XML or an API. It sends your property listings from the CRM to the portals by itself. Rightmove fees are now a large cost for an independent agent. One agency with 40 properties paid £1,850 a month in 2026. Over 250 agencies are party to a £1.5 billion legal action against Rightmove over its fee structure.
The standard format for UK portal integration is the Rightmove V3 BLM (Bulk Load Mass) XML feed. This is not just a Rightmove format: it has become the de facto UK standard accepted by Zoopla, OnTheMarket, and most other portals. Zoopla also accepts the older FastCrop C1 XML format. Estate agent CRM software generates these feeds automatically when a property is listed or updated.
Feed companies charge about £20-35 for each branch each month for real-time feed setup with no long-term contracts. This is distinct from the portal listing fees paid to Rightmove and Zoopla, which are substantially higher. The integration service handles the technical connection; the portal fees are the commercial cost of being listed.
Update frequency for standard XML feeds is typically every hour. Real-time sync (closer to immediate updates) is available through API connections. Hourly updates are enough for most agencies: properties rarely need to be updated more frequently. For price reductions or availability changes, an hourly lag is acceptable.
Rightmove does not publish a public rate card. Rightmove agrees a fee with each agent and each group, and the fees differ widely. A large group pays about £250 for each branch each month. An independent agent may pay £1,500 to £2,000 a month, or more. One published example from mid-2026) an independent agency with 40 properties (sales and lettings combined) paying £1,850 per month.
Rightmove's annual revenue from agent subscriptions has increased consistently: from about £157 million in 2022 to a higher figure annually since. Analysts say Rightmove fees take 7% to 13.5% of the commission income of some independent agents. At the top of that range the cost is large.
More than 250 UK estate agencies have joined a £1.5 billion legal action against Rightmove. They say it used its hold on the market to set those fees. The case was ongoing as of early 2026. The outcome could affect how portal fees are set going forward, but agents cannot base current decisions on that uncertainty.
A group of top agencies started OnTheMarket in 2015. They included Knight Frank, Savills and Strutt & Parker. They wanted a portal that agents owned, next to Rightmove and Zoopla. It was acquired by CoStar Group in December 2023 for £99 million. CoStar is the dominant commercial real estate data platform globally and used the acquisition to enter the UK residential property portal market.
OnTheMarket shows a property 24 hours or more before Rightmove and Zoopla do. An agent who lists there first can therefore give a client a period before the open market. Whether this translates to higher buyer interest depends on OnTheMarket's audience size, which remains significantly smaller than Rightmove.
OnTheMarket Software (the related proptech arm that operated TecLet, TecCRM, TecHub, and TecWeb products for agent workflow management) closed on 30 June 2025. Agents who relied on those tools for sales progression, tenancy management, or content needed to migrate elsewhere.
The fees above are not a fault of one company. They follow from where the property data lives.
Your listings sit in a CRM, in the form that CRM chose. The portal holds the buyers. Neither side can read the other, so the feed is the only bridge, and whoever owns the largest audience sets its price. That is why 250 agencies now argue the point in court instead of in the market.
An interoperable market changes the ground under that. A property, a listing and an enquiry can mean the same thing in every system. A feed is then no longer a private bridge that one company owns. Any agency can send to any portal, and to a new portal, on the same day it decides to.
We explain what such a market looks like, and how it comes about, in what does an interoperable software market look like. We show how a whole sector shares one foundation in bespoke software for a whole sector.
The most frequent problems with portal feed integration:
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The core function is automatic: a property listed in the CRM appears on the portals within the next feed cycle without manual re-entry. Updates to price, description, photos, and status (available, sold STC, let agreed) propagate automatically. Most current CRMs also take enquiries back from the portals. A buyer asks about a home on Rightmove. They then appear in the CRM as a new contact on that property. The enquiry is not only an email in the branch inbox.
This inbound enquiry integration is where quality varies significantly between platforms. A good CRM takes enquiries from every portal into one inbox. It matches each one to the property by itself, and writes it to the contact record. That saves a lot of work by hand. A CRM where portal enquiries arrive as forwarded emails that must be manually entered as contacts does not.
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You can see this in a working system. The ESRE live estate agent demo opens with no login, and it shows the portal work in this guide. Sign in as negotiator and publish to Rightmove/Zoopla direct from the record, or as admin and see the feed status. It is a working system, not a screenshot.