Rightmove's terms forbid bots, crawlers and scrapers. Without written consent, they allow only direct human use of the site. Rightmove offers its own routes instead. Property alerts email new listings as often as instantly, and Rightmove Data Services offers market data to businesses. Its sold prices for England and Wales come from HM Land Registry, which also publishes sold prices as a free download. A proxy does not change any of this.
What Rightmove's terms say
Rightmove's terms of use were last updated in February 2026. Clauses 5 and 8 list what users must not do.
| rule | what the terms say |
|---|---|
| bots | No use of "bots, crawlers, scrapers or other automated programs or means to access or collect data". |
| human use | Unless its Legal team gives written consent, information may be taken only "by means of direct human interaction", in a web browser or a program Rightmove publishes. |
| workarounds | Under the same clause, no "technical means to access the Platform" that let you or others reach it in a way clause 5 forbids. |
| research | A business may search commercial listings. Other research on the property market needs "prior written consent from our Legal team". |
| copying | No copying, storing or republishing of material from the site without "the prior express written consent of our Legal team". |
Under clause 14, Rightmove is not liable for the consequences of "any systems we put in place to prevent automated programs being used to obtain unauthorised access". The footer below the terms adds: "Rightmove prohibits the scraping of its content."
What robots.txt says
Rightmove's robots.txt keeps every crawler it does not name out of addresses under /api/ and /rss/, map and draw-a-search pages, contact forms and user pages. It shuts six named crawlers out of the whole site, among them CCbot, TrovitBot and one simply called "spider". GPTBot may read nothing outside /mortgages/. The robots.txt standard, RFC 9309, says its rules "are not a form of access authorization", so the terms still decide.
Rightmove's own routes to its data
Rightmove documents five routes, and none of them is a public API for listings. Searches of both its help centres for "rss" and "api" found no article.
| route | who can use it | what it gives |
|---|---|---|
| Property alerts | anyone with a free account | new and reduced listings that match your search, by email. |
| House Price Index | anyone | a monthly report on asking prices, with a full report to download. |
| Data Services | firms and public bodies, on enquiry | market data, reports and valuation tools. |
| Price Guides | members | past listing dates and historic asking prices. |
| Automated Datafeed | software providers for members | a way to load listings into Rightmove. |
Three Data Services products offer "API integration": the Surveyors Comparable Tool, the Automated Valuation Model and Property Risk Alerts. Rightmove says its valuation model is used to value "over 400,000 properties every month". The page we read publishes no prices for these products.
Price Guides are tools for members in Rightmove Plus. Historic data on a listing "can only be shared with the estate agent who originally advertised the property".
The datafeed runs the other way. Agents' software uses it to "Send property", "Remove property" and "Get branch property list", after testing with Rightmove's team.
Alerts and price reductions
Alerts are Rightmove's own way to watch a market. With a free account, you search an area and choose "create alert". You then pick how often: instantly, daily, every 3 days or every 7 days. Each email shows at most 14 new or reduced listings, with the total count and a link to the full results.
A price cut of 2% or more sends a listing out in the instant alerts. The listing then shows "reduced today" or "reduced on" a date, and the alert coverage lasts 7 days. A cut of less than 2% does neither. Agents can ask Rightmove to switch the flags off, but only for a whole branch.
Sold prices: the open data behind them
Rightmove's sold prices for England and Wales come from HM Land Registry, which sends them monthly. Any standard sale of a home there after 1995 is added. Scottish sold prices come from the Registers of Scotland. The Land Registry also publishes sold prices itself, as Price Paid Data.
| item | what the Land Registry says |
|---|---|
| coverage | "all property sales in England and Wales that are sold for value and are lodged with us for registration". |
| period | Sales received "from 1 January 1995 to the most current monthly data". |
| updates | "We update the data on the 20th working day of each month." |
| formats | Text or CSV files, linked data and a report builder. |
| licence | The Open Government Licence v3.0, "for commercial or non-commercial purposes". |
Two limits apply. The addresses in the files are processed against Ordnance Survey and Royal Mail data. Those two allow the address data only "for personal and/or non-commercial use" or to display property price information. For any other use, you must contact Royal Mail. And a sale usually takes 2 weeks to 2 months to register, so the two most recent months are incomplete. Anyone who uses or publishes the data must add the Land Registry's attribution statement.
What the scraping guides say
Two scraping guides we read take the data that each listing page embeds for its own use. One says "Rightmove has no public API" and "The only way to pull property data programmatically is scraping". Both say most of it works without residential proxies. Neither quotes Rightmove's terms, and one only adds general rules and says to consult a lawyer.
What they scrape is listings and their prices. For new listings and price cuts, Rightmove's alerts already send them by email. For data at scale, Rightmove points firms to Data Services.
The scrapers on GitHub
A search of GitHub for "rightmove scraper" lists 133 projects, and one for "rightmove" lists 670. The most starred Rightmove project, with 282 stars, turns listings into a table. Its README says that, under Rightmove's terms, "the use of webscrapers is unauthorised by rightmove", and it asks users not to use the package.
Another project sends a Telegram message when new listings match a search, with a new request every 30 minutes to an hour. Its README calls scraping "a grey area". Rightmove's alerts do the same job by email, as often as instantly. A third sells access to a hosted Rightmove scraper, with 1,000 free calls a month.
Where a proxy fits
For Rightmove, a proxy does not fit. The terms forbid bots and scrapers whatever address they come from, and clause 5.5.2 forbids technical means that get around clause 5. Rightmove's pages also answered our server in St. Louis normally, so we found no need for a UK address to read them.
For other work where a proxy is allowed, what a residential proxy is explains the type. How to check if a proxy is working shows how to test one. Residential traffic without city targeting starts at $0.44/GB, and every plan is on our pricing page.
The limits of this page
We read Rightmove's terms, robots.txt, ten help articles and its pages on the datafeed, Data Services and the House Price Index from our server in St. Louis on 4 October 2026. We also read the Land Registry's pages on Price Paid Data. We loaded no listing or search page by script, since the terms allow only direct human use. We did not open an account, set an alert or contact Data Services. This page is due for a check by 4 January 2027.
Sources
Every page below was read on 4 October 2026, from our server in St. Louis.
- Rightmove, Terms of use, last updated February 2026, and its robots.txt.
- Rightmove Help Centre, How to register for Property Alerts and Why do Rightmove store property Sold House Prices data?
- Rightmove's help centre for members, How the Property Alerts Work, Price reduction flags on Property Listings and Can I Request Historic Data for a Property Listed on Rightmove?
- Rightmove, Rightmove Data Services, the House Price Index and the Automated Datafeed specifications.
- HM Land Registry, Price Paid Data and How to access HM Land Registry Price Paid Data.
- IETF, RFC 9309: Robots Exclusion Protocol.
- GitHub's repository search for "rightmove scraper" and "rightmove" (not linked).
