In short: Rightmove Featured puts a listing at the top of search results and again in its normal position, roughly doubling views in the week attention is highest. We include it as standard on every property, because speed is what protects your rent.
Updated 11 August 2026
Every landlord letting a property in 2026 is competing for a smaller pool of tenants than they were two years ago. Rightmove reports an average of 12 viewing requests per rental property in 2025, down from 16 in 2024 and 22 in 2023. Zoopla's June 2026 Rental Market Report puts enquiries per rental home at 5.6 in May 2026, against a peak of 15.5 in 2022. Tenant competition is returning towards pre-pandemic levels.
Properties are taking longer to let as a result. Zoopla's March 2026 Rental Market Report puts the average time to find a tenant at 20 days, against 13 days at the peak of the market in 2022.
In that market, where your property sits on the page matters more than it used to. This is a short guide to what Rightmove's Featured Property product actually does, what the evidence says about its effect, what a slow let really costs, and why we include featuring as standard rather than selling it back to landlords as an upgrade.
It is also a guide to the thing that gets forgotten. More demand is only useful if you screen it properly. Not all demand is good demand.
In this article:
Rightmove sells prominence as a product, and the market diverges sharply on who bears that cost. This is worth looking at closely, because it tells you a lot about how a service is designed.
Rightmove's recommended retail price for a Featured Property on the sales side is £500. That is not a rounding error, and most agents treat it accordingly. In letting, some sell it to landlords as an upgrade once a property has been sitting on the market for a few weeks and the landlord is anxious. Purplebricks, for example, sells a 14-day Rightmove Featured Property for lettings as a paid extra.
OpenRent takes a different position again. There is no featured product offered alongside Rightmove, which costs an additional £70 anyway. A landlord on that route pays extra to reach the largest portal in the country, and then competes for attention on it as a standard listing like everybody else.
Hello Neighbour features all properties on Rightmove for the first seven days as standard. That applies across our packages, DIY and managed alike. In our DIY products, landlords who want to extend prominence beyond that first week can buy it, but nobody has to buy the first week. It is already in the price. For the properties we manage on a landlord's behalf, we keep it Featured until we let the property.
We do that for a straightforward commercial reason. The single biggest determinant of how quickly a property lets, and at what rent, is how many suitable tenants see it in the first week.
So what is it that we are giving away?
Rightmove's own customer documentation is clear about the mechanics. A Featured Property appears at the top of the search results page as a larger advert with a blue banner. Critically, it then appears again lower down as a standard listing within the normal results. Rightmove describes this as twice the visibility, and we think that is a fair description: the same property occupies two positions in the same search.
This is what it looks like to be a Featured Property on Rightmove.
Rightmove publishes its own performance data on the product, and it is more specific than most portal marketing.
Rightmove says that Featured properties typically get double the detail views of a standard listing. Featured Property material for sales cites more than double the property detail views, based on internal data covering September 2023 to August 2024.
They also say that a Featured property on the sales side reaches Sold Subject to Contract an average of five days faster than other properties on the market, based on Rightmove data from October 2023 to September 2024.
Two honest caveats. The five-day figure is a sales metric, and Rightmove has not published an equivalent lettings figure. And these are averages across a very large pool of listings, not a controlled experiment. Featuring will not rescue a property that is priced wrong or presented badly.
What it does do is put a well-presented, correctly priced property in front of substantially more people during the days when tenant attention is highest. Listings get most of their attention in the first few days. Featuring compounds that window rather than trying to recover it later.
We use Featured across all the properties we list, and we average 49 viewing requests per property, against a Rightmove average of 12 in 2025. Our average time from listing to accepted offer is six days.
Featuring is not the only reason for that. Professional photography, a floor plan, a virtual tour, a properly written listing and a defensible valuation all contribute, and a listing that is featured but poor will simply be seen by more people who scroll past it. But featuring is the multiplier that makes the rest of it count.
From our own experience of over 4,000 lets, there is no doubt in our mind that Featured makes a huge difference and helps us deliver great choice, quickly, for the landlord.
An empty property hits your returns quickly. It costs you the rent you are not collecting, and that meter runs every day regardless of what else is happening.
The average rent for a new let in the UK is £1,321 a month, according to Zoopla's June 2026 report. That works out at roughly £43 for every day the property stands empty. On a £2,000 a month London property it is closer to £66 a day.
Now set that against the market. Zoopla's average time to find a tenant is 20 days. Our average from listing to accepted offer is six.
Those two measures are not perfectly like for like, and it is worth saying so. Zoopla is measuring time to agree a let across the whole market, while our six days measures time to an accepted offer, with move-in following behind it. But the gap is wide enough that the direction is not in doubt. Fourteen days of difference on an average UK rent is around £600. On that £2,000 London property it is more than £900.
Featuring a property on Rightmove is not an indulgence you buy when things are going badly. It is cheap insurance against the most expensive thing that can happen to a rental property, which is nothing happening at all.
There is a second cost that is harder to see. A property that sits unlet starts to look stale to the tenants browsing it, and the usual response is to reduce the rent. Rightmove reports that in 2025 an average of 24 per cent of rental listings had their asking rent reduced after first marketing, the highest proportion this decade. Our own figure is lower at around 18 per cent. A reduction does not just cost you the void days already spent. It resets your income for the entire tenancy.
By maximising exposure and demand at the outset you avoid both.
Here is the part that can get missed. Forty-nine enquiries is only an advantage if you can tell the difference between them.
A large, unfiltered response is expensive. It fills your diary with viewings that were never going to convert, it wastes tenants' time as well as yours, and at worst it puts somebody through your door who was never going to pass referencing. Volume at the top of the funnel is only valuable because it lets you be selective further down.
We analysed 8,304 anonymised pre-qualification messages sent by landlords to prospective tenants through our DIY platform, in our guide to screening viewing requests. Two findings have added to our experience to shape how we now handle screening.
So we screen progressively but thoroughly. A short first message covering the three areas most likely to determine whether somebody qualifies at all, which are move-in date, income and employment, and household size. Then secondary questions only after a reply: guarantor if income looks borderline, household relationships if the picture is unclear, pets and smoking as a follow-up. A strong candidate goes straight to a viewing.
On our own platform this runs automatically. Every tenant requesting a viewing answers a short set of questions on household income, occupation, contract type, UK residency and, where the answers suggest a referencing problem, whether they can offer a guarantor or pay rent upfront. Answers are captured and visible to the landlord. Our DIY landlords can add their own questions on top. The bar is calibrated to filter out tenants who cannot pass referencing.
The effect is real. Screening typically takes 49 enquiries down to roughly 20 viable viewings. That is still a strong shortlist, and it is a shortlist you can work with rather than a queue you have to wade through.
Screening is not a free-for-all, and the rules tightened when the Renters' Rights Act took effect on 1 May 2026.
Blanket "No DSS" policies are unlawful. You cannot refuse a viewing solely because an applicant receives Universal Credit, and you cannot advertise in terms that exclude benefit recipients. You may assess total household income, including benefit income, but benefit status is not a filtering question.
Blanket exclusions of families with children are prohibited. You can assess overcrowding, licensing limits and property suitability, but you cannot refuse a viewing on the basis that an applicant has children.
Under the Equality Act 2010 you must not screen on race or ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation, disability, pregnancy, gender reassignment or age. That includes indirect discrimination, where an apparently neutral question disadvantages a particular group. Right to Rent checks belong at the formal compliance stage, applied consistently to everyone, and not as a nationality question at enquiry.
Getting this wrong is now a more expensive mistake than it was, and one that is harder to correct after the fact.
Prominence and selectivity are not alternatives. They are the same strategy, done in the right order.
Feature the property in week one, when tenant attention is at its highest and when Rightmove's own data says the uplift is largest. Then screen the response properly, briefly and lawfully, so that the people who walk through the door are people who could actually take the tenancy.
Do the first without the second and you have bought yourself a busy week and a wasted one. Do the second without the first and you are being selective about a pool that was too small to begin with. Do neither, and the meter keeps running at £43 a day.
We do both, as standard, in every package.
Every Hello Neighbour listing is Featured on Rightmove in its first week, at no extra cost. Compare our packages and pricing.
For many landlords, yes. A rental property receives most of its attention in the first few days after it is listed. Rightmove Featured places your property at the top of the search results while also keeping it in its normal position, giving it twice the visibility. If your property is correctly priced and well presented, that additional exposure can generate significantly more enquiries during the period when tenant interest is at its highest.
A Featured Property appears as a larger advert with a blue banner at the top of relevant Rightmove search results. It also appears in its normal position further down the page, meaning prospective tenants are more likely to notice it.
No. Featured cannot compensate for poor pricing, poor photographs or an unattractive property. However, it increases the number of people who see your listing, giving a well-marketed property a better chance of finding the right tenant more quickly.
The greatest benefit usually comes during the first week of marketing, when most tenant interest occurs. If a property has not attracted sufficient interest after that, it is worth reviewing the asking rent, marketing photographs and property description before simply extending Featured.
That depends on how your property is being advertised. Some agents sell Featured as an optional upgrade, while others include it within their service. At Hello Neighbour, every property is Featured on Rightmove during its crucial first week of marketing at no additional cost.
Usually, yes. Increasing exposure is generally preferable to reducing the rent before the market has had an opportunity to respond. A rent reduction affects your income for the whole tenancy, whereas better marketing aims to achieve the original asking rent.
There is no universal answer because demand varies by location, property type and price. However, the strongest response generally comes during the first week of marketing. If enquiries are significantly below expectations, landlords should review the property's presentation, pricing and marketing strategy.
Only if they are the right enquiries. More enquiries without effective screening simply create more administration and wasted viewings. The objective should be to generate a large pool of suitable applicants and then filter them efficiently.
A small number of carefully chosen questions usually works best. Typical topics include: proposed move-in date, employment and household income, and number of occupants. Further questions about guarantors, pets or other circumstances can then follow if appropriate.
Landlords should avoid questions or policies that unlawfully discriminate. For example, blanket refusals based on receipt of Universal Credit or because applicants have children are no longer lawful. Screening should focus on affordability and suitability rather than protected characteristics.
We believe the first week of marketing is the most important. Rather than charging landlords extra for greater visibility during that period, we include Rightmove Featured as standard because helping properties let more quickly benefits both landlords and tenants.
This article is provided for general information and does not constitute legal, financial or tax advice. Housing law is complex and fact-specific, and whether a screening question is lawful depends on how it is framed and applied. Landlords should take independent legal advice before adopting a screening policy. Figures are correct at the time of writing and reflect the position in England.