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

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 where you want to live before you can search,” Charlton says, “and how can you know all the areas you could live in when you’ve never been to them all?” nHabit flips that around. A renter draws a boundary by travel time, a method Charlton calls isochrone generation, then tightens it with the things that actually shape a day, a ten-minute walk from a Tube station, good schools nearby, and the app surfaces homes in places the renter had never weighed up.

Behind the conversational front end sits Milo, a proprietary large language model wired to a three-dimensional graph database. It is deliberately closed, working only across the roughly 100 datasets nHabit has ingested rather than crawling the open internet, and it answers in whatever language the question is asked. Renters tune five dials, safety, nightlife, amenities, digital connectivity and mobility, to their own priorities. “Everybody’s different,” Charlton says, recalling a South Korean renter who put safety first and still ended up somewhere that felt unsafe for want of the data to choose well, against a group of Australians who cared about nightlife and nothing else.

Taking on the incumbentsThe duopoly has barely moved in twenty years, and Charlton is blunt about why. The portals, he argues, cannot rebuild themselves around AI without tearing up the systems they already run on. “This is a ground-up build, not a ChatGPT chatbot wrapper dropped on top of an existing system,” he says, and the two giants are, in his view, simply too big to attempt it. He is just as withering about the wave of look-alike tools claiming an AI edge. “I look at a lot of businesses and think, that’s basically an AI wrapper,” he says. “You’re just piggybacking on somebody else’s technology. It’s essentially a dashboard.” OnTheMarket and others have tried to break the lock before and offered, in his words, alternative versions of the same thing.

The £1.5 billion claim against Rightmove, led by former Competition and Markets Authority panel member Jeremy Newman and funded by litigation specialist Innsworth Capital, reaches its certification hearing in November, and Charlton reads it as a market finally losing patience. He has heard the standard objection plenty of times. One national agency told him he would need venture capital, private equity and a £20 million annual marketing budget to land a punch. “Social media has genuinely levelled that playing field,” he counters, pointing to the direct-to-consumer brands that scaled through COVID on a fraction of the old launch cost. “If the industry is genuinely sick of the status quo, people need to actually support an alternative rather than just complain.”

What it means for landlords, operators and agentsFor the operators and agents who pay to be seen, the first benefit is cle