Rightmove & Zoopla Property Data Aggregation for a UK PropTech Startup

Industry

Real Estate / PropTech

Geography

United Kingdom — London, Manchester, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Bristol, Leeds + 50 UK towns

Data Coverage

Property listings, asking prices, price history, EPC ratings, council tax bands, agent data

Actowiz Solutions built a property data aggregation pipeline for a UK PropTech startup — combining Rightmove, Zoopla, and OnTheMarket listings into a unified investor-grade dataset across England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

Client Overview

The client is a Manchester-based PropTech startup serving UK buy-to-let investors with an AI-powered property analysis platform. Their underwriting depended on continuous, multi-source listing data — including price history, days-on-market, EPC energy ratings, council tax bands, and local rental yields.

Rightmove dominates UK property search (~80% market share), with Zoopla and OnTheMarket providing complementary coverage. Triangulating all three is essential for completeness.

Business Challenges

Rightmove's Anti-Bot Defences

Rightmove uses Akamai protection and behavioural fingerprinting — basic scrapers die within hours.

Listing Deduplication

Same property often listed on multiple agents across all three portals with different photos and descriptions.

EPC & Council Tax Enrichment

Energy ratings and council tax bands directly impacted yield calculations but were scattered across listings and government databases.

Sold Price Reconstruction

Land Registry data lagged 3–6 months; investors needed real-time signals from price reductions and 'sold STC' status changes.

Project Objectives

The client partnered with Actowiz Solutions to:

• Aggregate listings from Rightmove, Zoopla & OnTheMarket across UK
• Deduplicate via UK address normalisation (postcode + property type)
• Enrich with EPC ratings (Open Data Communities API)
• Capture council tax bands and ground rent details
• Deliver investor-grade structured data via REST API

Actowiz Solutions Approach

Multi-Portal Crawl Stack

Dedicated crawlers per portal with residential UK proxies, Playwright browser automation, and adaptive throttling — sustaining 92%+ success rates against Rightmove's Akamai defences.

UK Address Normalisation

Used Royal Mail postcode taxonomy + property-type fingerprinting to deduplicate cross-portal listings at 98% accuracy.

EPC API Integration

Joined property data with UK government EPC database for energy efficiency ratings — a key buy-to-let yield input.

Price-Change Detection

Daily price snapshots reconstructed reduction history per property; 'sold STC' status changes detected within 24 hours.

Investor REST API

Sub-second query response, polygon search by postcode districts, and webhook alerts for new listings matching investor criteria.

Key Features

• Tri-portal aggregation: Rightmove + Zoopla + OnTheMarket
• 98% listing deduplication via postcode + type fingerprinting
• EPC rating enrichment via UK Open Data
• Council tax band capture
• Real-time price-reduction & 'sold STC' detection
• Postcode district polygon search

Business Impact

Within 12 months:

• 850,000+ UK properties tracked across 200 postcode districts
• 92%+ scrape success rate against Akamai-protected sites
• £280M+ buy-to-let capital deployed using Actowiz signals
• 3× faster deal sourcing vs the client's earlier manual portal workflow
• £190K annual savings vs commercial UK property data vendors

Testimonial

"Actowiz solved UK property data — Rightmove, Zoopla, OnTheMarket, EPCs, council tax bands — in one feed. Our platform wouldn't exist without it."

— Founder & CEO, Manchester PropTech Startup

Conclusion

UK property is Europe's deepest, most data-rich real-estate market — but also its most fragmented. Actowiz Solutions cracked the anti-bot defences of every major portal and delivered a unified, deduplicated, government-data-enriched property intelligence layer that now powers hundreds of millions in buy-to-let investment decisions.