The scale of the challenge facing Agents’ Mutual should not be under-estimated – if an interview with Rightmove’s head of operations, Tim Harding, is anything to go by.
In the interview, he reveals that out of the 400 current staff, 69 are IT developers.
He also reveals that Rightmove pays external consultants to try to hack into it.
It’s interesting stuff! The full interview is below.
How many people are involved in the running of the website?
A total of 400 people now work at Rightmove. There are 12 people in my team and 69 developers. Put very simply, we’re the people who make sure the site works, that it’s secure and that it’s performing as it should be. We also take new applications and features that the developers create, such as Real-time Data Feed and Sold Prices on mobile, and put them into production so that they do what they’ve been designed to.
So essentially we do all the things behind the scenes that people don’t see, to make sure that what they see or do on the site is what they expect.
My team’s doubled in size since the start of 2012 and we’ve got people on call 24/7, 365 days a year, even on Christmas Day when we’ve been getting more and more visitors every year.
What are the big challenges that come with running a website that serves up 45 million page views a day?
First, there’s the need to be super quick. If we spot an issue, especially one that might have a number of different causes, we need to know what to do straight away to fix it. So we’ve invested in experienced and knowledgeable staff, who are always ready to expect the unexpected.
To safeguard the site we check for issues in thousands of different ways, and to keep the site secure we have regular penetration testing by external consultants, which in effect means we pay people to try and hack into the site and report back to us.
We send over 50,000 email leads a day to customers and over one million property alerts to consumers, which equals a vast amount of data going through our mail server.
If we have a new feature that really takes off with consumers, like the recent newly designed property alerts, we need to have already thought about the effect the increase in emails being sent will have.
What additional challenges have come with new platforms such as mobile and apps?
One of the big changes we’ve noticed as more people use Rightmove on mobile (through apps and the mobile website) is that our daily traffic patterns have changed and we now have an extra peak in the evening as people use their phones and tables whilst travelling home from work.
As well as the peak times, we also know that people use the site in the middle of the night, perhaps if they can’t sleep, or if it’s the only time they can get some peace and quiet to look for a new home.
Differences in things like reliable network connectivity and available bandwidth – as well as obvious things like screen size – for mobile devices mean that both the mobile site and the infrastructure we use to serve are optimised differently than for the desktop website.
How do you and your team make sure the site is always up and working well?
Having 1.6m people visit the site daily, and being one of the UK’s busiest websites alongside Google and Amazon, means that people have very high expectations. When they type in Rightmove they expect it to work, and to work fast.
To maintain 99.99% availability we need a lot of infrastructure. For example, we have 250 physical servers and three separate data centres that we control in various different locations, which have multiple power supplies and back-up network connections.
So in the unlikely event that there was a power cut in all three of our data centres at the same time, the site could still run as normal thanks to back-up generators.
Everything is controlled by Rightmove, not external companies, to ensure it’s to the high standard that we and our customers expect.
It’s also part of our job to monitor for spikes in demand so something like the purple house going viral last year may have been good news for our marketing team but potentially not such good news for us! Luckily once again we were prepared for that big influx of traffic.
How much data is there and how can agents use it?
Since we launched nearly 15 years ago there have been nearly 40 million properties listed on the site, with almost 3 billion images.
At any one time there are over 1 million properties on Rightmove, and on average 1.5 million images are uploaded daily, which averages 1,000 images per minute.
There’s lots of other data that our customers can make use of in Rightmove Plus, and we’re currently making enhancements to these tools for the new Rightmove Intel, which will provide improved ways for our customers to measure market share and benchmark against competitors.
Penetration testing is something that every website owner reading this site should undertake at some point (and not just once) regardless of the size and amount of traffic the website receives. And if you use a cloud based service for your backend software you should be asking to see the same from your provider too. Just look at the issues every other week with some sort of data loss. Do you want that to be your business or client data!?
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SteveP. The majority of people in this industry don't really care about their website let alone it's security. They see it as simply a needed presence on the internet and rely solely on portals to generate leads. This is obviously a very silly idea but one that the industry seems comfortable with.
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I think "45 million" page views is VERY misleading. They themselves say it's 1.6 million people visiting the site per day which would be roughly 28 pages per visit; which is ONLY 1.6 million potential leads. I would also be worried that they claim to have 1 million properties at any one time on the site which they also claim they send out 50,000 email leads per day… that's not a lot of leads versus property, I would be asking for lower fees if that ratio were my return for putting stock on there. The interview is all about boasting, it has one line about security and the rest is "Look at us, aren't we clever…" Furthermore. 250 physical servers is a lot for the modest visits they get in a day. Rightmove are 24th on Alexa's most visited websites in the UK. This is behind 4 newspapers/websites. Alexa (while not 100% accurate) it does a pretty good job at estimating traffic, they claim RM has ~14 page views per visit which is HALF of what this interview claims, they also claim RM have a 20% bounce rate which means 1 in 5 people leave the website within a predetermined average time; most likely causes for this are open for debate but it's often a sign of very aggressive marketing. Alexa also claim that only 83% of RM's visits are from the UK with the rest roughly evenly split between America and Europe. Strangely America seems to account for 1.9% of their traffic and I was unaware that they even listen American property. Alexa also claim that only 20% of RM's traffic starts at a search engine, i/e Google which means the majority of their traffic is bookmarked and repeat business.
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Agreed, they've inflated their story just like the membership fees.
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I would also say that 80% of the page views are estate agents logging in and checking listings, then of course vendors and landlords checking their property everyday themselves.
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And don't forget all the 'window shoppers' too!
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Very good, PortalPerson. Care to comment, Rightmove? (Silly question, I know.) PortalPerson, isn't the 1.9% of American traffic simply people in America looking at UK property listed on the site? Perhaps they are needing to relocate here, for example.
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MF: It could be but that's a lot of traffic. With RM claiming so much dominance I was surprised to see that it wasn't 95% UK traffic that made up their visits.
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We're UK focused but about 1% of traffic is from the USA. We do our best (and hopefully with some help from Google) to filter out things like bots and spiders. Traffic increased over the summer so I suspect it's actually UK people but on holiday!
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Looks like Rightmove are trying to justify their fees all of a sudden, it must be September and that annual rate increase letter is ready and waiting to be sent out!
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RM admit themselves 95% of their traffic is a waste of time…………….They set an average target click through rate (CTR) of JUST 5%………………….not many companies would say a 5% conversion rate is good…………for me this justifies that the amount of RM traffic which is to be ignored, otherwise why not say 50% conversion rate or better still 75% conversion rate……….if it was quality visits the sheer volume would not matter….but the fact is, it is sheers volumes of bored people or property professionals looking at RM…..
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This is crazy. Why on earth do people pay them to advetise stock then?. With a colleague we developed / devised a method to advertise property for FREE in certain key places and in turn get near 100% CTR on each property. We managed to generate (as an experiment) 50 leads a day direct to the agency's own website for FREE. We ran the experiment for 4 weeks and from that 40% of the agents stock ended up being let or SSTC. RM enjoying a 5% CTR is terrible and quite frankly I would be asking for a refund.
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PortalPerson, that sounds pretty amazing to me so would love a bit more info on how that worked! Could save us (quite literally) millions.
And for the comment above, RM don't state that 95% of traffic is a waste. That's the CTR from search results to further details. If your photos are ****, the location is poor and the property is over priced you won't get clicks. Some people don't like new homes, they won't get clicked. Some people don't like old homes, they won't get clicked. Etc etc! Just think about it for a second, if you were looking for a house would you click on 100% of the search results? Nope, you'd click on the ones that you liked the look of. If you're getting poor CTR then you need to work on how you present your properties.
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I am not interested in sharing the idea to be honest. Once word gets out about how easy it is then everybody will be doing it and it will saturate the traffic source beyond repair. Secondly the industry in general doesn't really care about their own websites so the bounce rate would be high with people leaving their websites very quickly after the initial CTR for obvious reasons
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Nah….rubbish…..Steve….. I take very good photos, punchy 250 to 300 character max descriptions in the summary detail box on RM and much of my stock well over 50% is SSTC yet rarely will a property get over 15% CTR……..now if a property is correctly priced, excellent photos and the right location WHY doesn't it return 50% plus CTR as a minimum………. you would think if buyers are looking for a house on Acacia Ave (the best road in the area) and will pay 200k for one and I list one at 190k with belting photos it will get 50/60/70% CTR as this is what buyers want….yet it will not….no matter how great the listing is….because too many of RM users are not serious buyers……..My opinion Steve but I just dont get from a property appearing in 100 searches and it is the right price etc why it should not get 90% plus CTR……
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Sorry Steve perhaps the expression rubbish was not quite justified……..I agree someone would not look at 100% of results BUT thats not the point really………flip it……and why does the perfect properties not get 90% CTRs………
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