nHabit’s Steven Charlton on taking on the Rightmove and Zoopla duopoly

About this episode

For two decades, finding somewhere to rent in Britain has meant typing a postcode into Rightmove or Zoopla and scrolling. Steven Charlton thinks that is a thin idea of search, and he has built a platform to prove it. nHabit, which reaches the App Store and Google Play in mid-June, lets renters describe the life they want in plain language and hands back neighbourhoods they would never have thought to type in. “Instead of following the herd to the same old postcodes,” Charlton says, “our aim is to let people search the way they’d plan their perfect holiday with ChatGPT.” The idea has already pulled build-to-rent operators including Quintain and Grainger into conversation, and it arrives as Rightmove, which by its own research takes around 80 per cent of the time British consumers spend on property portals, defends a £1.5 billion class action over the fees it charges agents. Charlton, a former Perkins&Will managing director turned founder, used a wide-ranging PropCast appearance to set out why he believes the two incumbents are too big to fix the thing renters actually struggle with. How the search actually worksThe starting insight is almost embarrassingly simple. “You need to know