Rightmove builds its data foundation on Google Cloud, using BigQuery and Looker to help employees make faster business decisions.
Rightmove builds its data foundation on Google Cloud, using BigQuery and Looker to help employees make faster business decisions.
Overcoming fragmented data bottlenecks with unified business intelligence
Home-moving is one of the most significant journeys in a person’s life—and, as the top property portal in the United Kingdom, Rightmove aims to make it simpler for everyone. The digital platform’s ambition is clear: to support consumers through every phase of home-ownership, from finding and affording a property to transacting and moving. Delivering this comprehensive experience requires clear data insights, which serve as the foundation for modern property search and real estate business intelligence (BI).
Before migrating its data systems to Google Cloud, Rightmove managed its data assets across on-premises infrastructure and local servers, making data reporting complex. Because different business units used separate third-party legacy BI tools, teams frequently had to recreate business logic, resulting in inconsistent calculations for basic performance metrics.
The central data and analytics team meanwhile had to spend time assembling and maintaining reports, meaning other teams could be kept waiting for the information they needed. For the product team, delayed data insights risked slowing the pace of new feature releases, while for marketing, they could limit their ability to deliver targeted campaigns.
To solve these problems, Rightmove decided to modernize its BI architecture by adopting a cloud platform that could handle its large data volumes. The company built a unified repository for its data, known internally as the Data Hive, using BigQuery, and selected Looker as its business intelligence platform to deliver fast, trusted data access across the organisation.
“The team evaluated multiple BI platforms to enable data-driven decision-making,” explains Louise Cochrane, head of digital and partner analytics at Rightmove. “Looker stood out because it integrates naturally within the Google Cloud ecosystem, handles large traffic volumes, and provides self-service capabilities that allow users to find insights easily.”
The team evaluated multiple BI platforms to enable data-driven decision-making. Looker stood out because it integrates naturally within the Google Cloud ecosystem, handles large traffic volumes, and provides self-service capabilities that allow users to find insights easily.
Louise Cochrane
Head of Digital and Partner Analytics, Rightmove
Accelerating self-service analytics and
home-moving innovation with Looker
Using Looker has changed how our business works with data. It gives our teams the independence to explore information on their own, transforming our central analysts from report builders into strategic partners, working proactively with our business units to pursue opportunities.
Louise Cochrane
Head of Digital and Partner Analytics, Rightmove
Looker acts as the main gateway to the Data Hive—Rightmove’s data repository—enabling approximately 400 team members to independently turn data into action. This shift to self-service analytics has reduced the reporting burden on the central data and analytics team. Marketing specialists build dashboards to monitor email campaign performance, while product teams interact directly with raw platform data to track feature engagement and customer retention.
This accessible framework has transformed how Rightmove collaborates with external partners. Previously, the New Homes team spent hours before every developer meeting pulling statistics and cutting manual reports to build presentation slides. Today, account managers simply open an interactive Looker dashboard during the meeting to answer developers' questions in real time.
“Using Looker has changed how our business works with data,” explains Cochrane. “It gives our teams the independence to explore information on their own, transforming our central analysts from report builders into strategic partners, working proactively with our business units to pursue opportunities.”
Looker also enables Rightmove to deliver deeper market insights to estate agents and developers. By accessing historical data stored in BigQuery, Looker breaks the 12-month visibility limit of older third-party systems. This allows real estate partners to study multi-year trends in listing activity, average asking prices, and rental yields.
With this stable data framework, Rightmove also now has a launchpad for advanced AI services. The company uses Google Cloud and Gemini to create AI features to digitize the entire home-moving life cycle, including an AI-powered conversational search assistant that lets buyers describe ideal properties using natural language. To add detail to property listings, the company uses Cloud Vision API to scan uploaded real estate photographs and automatically extract descriptive tags, such as identifying a garden or a kitchen island. Rightmove also uses Gemini models to analyze scanned floor plans to extract exact square footage dimensions, helping to refine monthly automated property valuation models across the country. Meanwhile, generative image models, such as Nano Banana, have enabled Rightmove to build a Style with AI tool that lets users digitally redecorate listing photos while maintaining the room's structural layout. This allows users to visualize the property to their own tastes, helping them decide whether it meets their requirements.
Building a digital map of the UK property market
on Google Cloud
By transitioning to Looker and Google Cloud, Rightmove can now generate BI reports four times faster than it could previously. This speed helps teams across different units look at the same trustworthy data to make trusted business decisions rather than working with conflicting numbers. As a result, Rightmove can shift from tracking past performance to building predictive business models. By connecting Looker with BigQuery, business units can implement advanced lead and metric forecasting models within weeks using just 10 lines of code, a task that was difficult with siloed systems. Across the three core forecasts Rightmove built, the models are forecasting to within 2-4.5% of actual results.
Moving forward, Rightmove plans to expand these analytics to make data access even more straightforward.
We are building a living, breathing digital map of the UK property market on Google Cloud. By stitching together structured and unstructured data, we can understand relationships across the entire ecosystem to create unique experiences for users and remain a powerful engine for real estate partners for years to come.
Steve Pimblett
Chief Data Officer, Rightmove
The team is running a proof of concept to allow staff to query internal datasets using natural language to evaluate platform performance.
“Using conversational analytics in Looker has the potential to fundamentally change how people access and use insights, making answers faster and data more accessible across the organisation,” says Cochrane. “More than just a new way to access data, conversational analytics is an important step towards a more self-sufficient, data-driven organisation, giving our analysts more capacity for the strategic work where their expertise really matters.”
Rightmove also intends to use the LookML Assistant for Gemini in Looker to automatically write Looker Modeling Language code using natural language. This allows developers to generate custom dimensions and build interactive dashboards in minutes, reducing the time they spend on manual coding.
“We are building a living, breathing digital map of the UK property market on Google Cloud,” says Steve Pimblett, chief data officer at Rightmove. “By stitching together structured and unstructured data, we can understand relationships across the entire ecosystem to create unique experiences for users and remain a powerful engine for real estate partners for years to come.”
Rightmove is the UK’s number one property portal, bringing together the nation’s largest home-moving audience with the biggest inventory of properties.
Industry: Real Estate
Location: UK
Products: Google Cloud, BigQuery, Cloud Vision API, Gemini, Looker, Looker (Google Cloud core), LookML Assistant, Nano Banana
