Rightmove's sizzling day sets new record

Rightmove’s colossal domination of the property portal market was boosted with news of its busiest-ever day for site traffic last Tuesday.

On August 6, Rightmove served 22,533,164 pages, topping the website’s previous record set in March 2008. Even the site itself was astonished.

Commercial director Miles Shipside said: “In the housing market, it’s crazy to have your busiest day ever in the height of the holiday season.

“If we were selling ice creams I could understand it, but this clearly shows on-going interest in buying property. We have been reporting a shortage of fresh properties coming to the market since the beginning of the year, and the result is that potential buyers are searching harder to find the new stock and the best buys.”

The news also came in a week that saw Rightmove release a free iPhone app, which has already reached the number one ranking on the iTunes App Store.

Shipside added: “With the Rightmove iPhone app, we’ve now extended our property search options to people on the move, with a GPS function which can identify a user’s exact location and map out local properties around them.”

Rightmove’s record day for traffic came in the week when the RICS revised its predictions for house prices from negative to positive for the rest of the year. The NAEA also released a positive report.

However, a Rightmove spokesman warned that despite encouraging recent indicators, the longer-term recovery of the housing market remained harder to judge.