Zoopla vs Rightmove: The Same 39 Houses, Two Answers

Ask Zoopla and Rightmove what the same house is worth and you get two different numbers. This page is what happens when you ask both about thirty-nine houses on one street, in the same week, and write down every answer.

Cotleigh Road in Romford RM7 is a useful test case: fifty-four broadly similar houses, mostly two- and three-bedroom semi-detached, built in the same period, on the same road, sharing the same schools and the same station. Whatever separates the two providers' answers here, it is not the neighbourhood.

The finding#

Zoopla is the higher of the two on thirty-seven of the thirty-nine addresses where both publish an estimate. The median gap is £19,000 — around 4.4 per cent — and it runs as wide as £96,000.

Half again as many addresses as this page first carried, and the pattern held: adding thirteen more houses moved Zoopla's lead from 24-of-26 to 37-of-39 and widened the median gap rather than closing it.

That is not a claim that one provider is right. Neither has been inside any of these houses. It is a claim that the two are calibrated differently, and that the difference is systematic rather than random — which matters, because a single portal's figure is how most people find out what their house is "worth".

Address by address#

Rightmove figures are the higher of the two months where a figure was revised during the capture window, which is why number 26 appears to run the other way; see the note below.

The two exceptions#

Only one of the two reversals is real.

26 Cotleigh Road shows Rightmove £545,000 against Zoopla £537,000. But £545,000 is Rightmove's July figure, carried here under the higher-of-the-two-months rule used throughout this site. Rightmove's August figure for the same house is £535,000 — below Zoopla. That reversal is an artefact of the capture window, not a disagreement between the models.

8 Cotleigh Road is the genuine one. Rightmove £430,000, Zoopla £427,000, a £3,000 gap that holds whichever month is used. It is the only address on this street where Rightmove is genuinely the more optimistic of the two, and the margin is smaller than all but one of the thirty-seven gaps running the other way — only number 17, at £1,000, is closer.

Where the gap is widest#

The two extremes have something in common: neither house has sold recently.

Number 9 is the second-largest house on the street at 129 sqm. Zoopla puts it at £536,000, Rightmove at £440,000 — a £96,000 spread, or 22 per cent. It last sold in 2002.

Number 35 is £447,000 to Zoopla and £395,000 to Rightmove, the lowest Rightmove figure on the road. It last sold in 1998.

Where a property has not changed hands in decades there is no recent transaction to anchor either model, and the two drift furthest apart exactly there. The corollary is that the tightest agreements cluster around the recently sold houses — number 17, £1,000 apart, sold in 2021.

They disagree about the houses, not just the prices#

Rightmove and Zoopla both publish per-address records for this street, both built on the same HM Land Registry filings. They do not agree — about what a house is worth, and about what it physically is.

They disagree about the valuations everywhere: on all thirty-nine addresses captured from both, set out further down. They also disagree about the underlying facts. Ten addresses on the RM7 9AH side have had their attributes compared line by line, and four of them differ on something that matters. Both pages are linked on every row below, which is the point of the table: the disagreement is checkable in two clicks.

Number 10 is the instructive one. Zoopla records three transactions — £295,000 in May 2024, £351,000 in August 2024, and £480,000 in March 2025. Rightmove records only the middle one. Rightmove's estimate for the property is £420,000, which is £60,000 below a price Zoopla says was paid for it eighteen months ago. Neither source is obviously wrong: a sale can take months to reach the register, and a rapid resale at a large uplift is exactly the pattern a refurbishment produces. But an estimate built without two of three transactions is answering a different question from one built with them.

The floor areas matter more than they look. Number 24 is 116 sqm or 128 sqm depending on who is asked, number 26 is 135 or 151, and number 12 is 71 or 82 — a 15 per cent gap. Price per square foot is a division, so it inherits that gap whole.

On one address the two agree, and that is the awkward one. 13 Cotleigh Road is 100 sqm to Zoopla and 98 sqm to Rightmove — about 1,055 to 1,076 sqft. The floor area page records it as 850 sqft, calls it "the one address in this dataset with both a recorded floor area and a recent registered sale", and builds a street-wide £468/sqft benchmark on it. Against either portal's figure the same £397,500 sale works out at £369–£377/sqft, and the conclusion that the street sits "at the top of the local range" does not survive the substitution. The 850 sqft almost certainly comes from an EPC predating an extension. That page has not been rewritten on the strength of this — two automated sources agreeing is evidence, not proof, and the EPC is a measured survey — but the disagreement is large enough that the benchmark should not be relied on until someone establishes which figure is right.

Zoopla is the higher of the two on thirty-seven addresses out of thirty-nine. That is every address where both providers have been captured. The gap runs from £1,000 at the narrowest (number 17) to £96,000 at the widest (number 9), with a median of £19,000 — around 4.4 per cent. Strip out the four extremes and the remaining thirty-three still average £19,400 in Zoopla's favour.

Of the two exceptions, only one is real. 26 Cotleigh Road shows Rightmove £545,000 against Zoopla £537,000, but £545,000 is Rightmove's July figure, carried here under the higher-of-the-two-months rule described above; Rightmove's August figure for the same house is £535,000, below Zoopla. That reversal is an artefact of the capture window, not a disagreement between the models.

8 Cotleigh Road is the genuine one. Rightmove £430,000, Zoopla £427,000 — a £3,000 gap that holds whichever month is used. It is the only address on this street where Rightmove is the more optimistic of the two, and the margin is smaller than all but one of the thirty-seven gaps running the other way. One reversal in thirty-nine, at nearly the narrowest spread in the set, is what a consistent bias looks like at its edge rather than evidence against one.

That is not noise. It says the two models are calibrated differently, and that the gap is a property of the models rather than of any particular house. Which follows from how they are built: an automated valuation is a statistical guess trained on different comparables, weighted differently, updated on different schedules. Neither is a survey and neither has been inside.

Two addresses drive the extremes, and both are ones Rightmove appears to hold stale. Number 9 is 129 sqm to Zoopla — the largest house on the street bar number 26 — and Zoopla puts it at £536,000 against Rightmove's £440,000, a £96,000 spread on a house neither has visited. Number 35 is £447,000 to Zoopla and £395,000 to Rightmove, the lowest Rightmove figure on the road, for a house that last changed hands in 1998. Where a property has not sold in decades there is no recent transaction to anchor either model, and the two drift furthest apart exactly there.

The practical consequence is that quoting a single portal's figure for a Cotleigh Road house silently picks a side. Quote Zoopla and the street is worth about three per cent more than if you quote Rightmove. Both numbers are published here for that reason, and neither is averaged into the other.

Coverage differs too. Zoopla lists 6, 14, 18 and 20 Cotleigh Road; those four do not appear in Rightmove's house-price pages for the street at all. Zoopla also lists 15, 31, 47 and 52, which the matrix on this page omitted until Zoopla's records showed they existed — they are in it now, with whatever each source holds against them.

The same asymmetry shows in the estimates, and it runs strongly one way. Zoopla will value fifty of these fifty-four addresses; Rightmove forty-one. Every address Rightmove prices, Zoopla prices too, bar 10 and 33 — so Rightmove's coverage is very nearly a subset of Zoopla's rather than a different slice of the street. Only 47 and 52 are absent from both.

That asymmetry is worth holding onto when reading any single-source figure for this road. Eleven of these houses have a Zoopla estimate and no Rightmove one, and on the thirty-nine where both exist Zoopla is higher on all but two. A summary built from Zoopla alone covers nearly the whole street and reads high; one built from Rightmove alone covers three-quarters of it and reads low.

Two of the houses in the table, 14 and 22 Cotleigh Road, were on the market when these figures were read, which makes them the only rows where a real asking price will shortly exist to check the models against.

None of this is a reason to prefer one source. It is a reason not to merge them into a single number and present the result as settled, which is what the earlier version of this page did.

Method#

Every figure was read from the provider's own page for that address and recorded with its capture date, across July and August 2026. Nothing on this page is indexed forward, averaged, or otherwise calculated by this site. Sale prices are HM Land Registry Price Paid Data under the Open Government Licence v3.0; the estimates are each provider's own and are reproduced for comparison.

These are automated model estimates, not formal valuations. Nothing here is financial advice.

Related#

• The full valuation matrix — all fifty-four addresses, both providers, with a source link on every row.
• What fifty valuations say about one street
• Growth since the last sale