How HomeThink works

Open a listing, get a report

The whole product hangs off this one gesture. Find a property on Rightmove, Zoopla or OnTheMarket, open it with the free HomeThink browser extension, and press Analyse. You don't need to type anything about the house — the listing already says it.

1. 1Install the free HomeThink extension (Chrome, Edge or Brave on a computer) and connect it to your free account.
2. 2Open the listing on Rightmove, Zoopla or OnTheMarket and press Analyse in the HomeThink panel.
3. 3Confirm the pin. HomeThink drops a marker where it thinks the property is and asks you to check it before the run continues — everything about the area, the commute and the schools hangs off that point.
4. 4The report writes itself from there, usually inside a minute.

Every report starts free, and a free account gets five of these Free reports a day. The report is yours — it stays on your dashboard. To bring it up to date, open the listing again and press Re-analyse in the extension.

What the free report tells you

It reads top to bottom like an article, not a dashboard of dials. The verdict comes first, then the reasons for it, then everything you'd need to argue with it.

• A score and a verdict — a provisional score out of 100 with the headline concern named, not buried.
• Red and green flags — the top five of each, with why each one matters rather than a bare label.
• The price story — how it sits against the area, recent sold prices nearby from the Land Registry, price per square foot, how long it's been listed and any cut.
• What it costs to live there — the monthly breakdown, council tax, energy rating, broadband.
• The area, checked — crime, flood and ground risk, schools within a mile with Ofsted ratings where they exist, nearby planning applications, and real drive, walk and cycle times to the places you go.
• Questions to ask — for the agent, the viewing and your solicitor, specific to this listing.

Three things worth finding on your first report: the offer slider, which re-scores the property live at a lower offer so you can see what your money is actually buying; the chat at the bottom, which has read the whole report and your preferences; and Share, which gives you a link to the report exactly as you see it — nothing withheld — for whoever is buying with you. Ctrl+P prints it properly, too.

Tell it about you — once

Three settings change every report you will ever read here, and all three are easy to never find. Until you set them, HomeThink is scoring a house for a generic buyer, pricing it on generic money, and timing the commute to nowhere in particular.

• Your preferences — budget, areas, bedrooms, where you are in selling. Open the account menu and choose Preferences. This is what the fit score on every report is measured against, what the second order in a comparison is re-read against, and what the chat is tuned to. The Lifestyle tab beside it personalises the Lifestyle section of a Pro report.
• Your money — in Settings: income, deposit, mortgage rate and term, and whether you're a first-time buyer, a home mover or buying an additional property. Every monthly cost, every stamp-duty figure and every affordability line on every report resolves through these. Left blank they fall back to sensible defaults, which is fine right up until you believe a number that was never about you.
• Where you need to get to — add your work or family postcodes in Settings and every report from then on carries real drive, walk and cycle times to them, plus a travel-time map.

When you're serious about one house

Start with a Free report from the browser extension. A subscription lets you run a Pro report from the listing itself, or on any Free report you already have.

You press Run the Pro report on a report you've already read, confirm the asking price the listing showed, and the deep analysis runs on that same property. Confirming the price matters: the report is written against the number you confirm, not the one the scrape happened to see. It answers the three questions the Free report can only gesture at:

• Am I paying too much? A fair-value range with the working shown, against the asking price and recent sales nearby — wherever three same-type sales are close and recent enough to support one.
• What needs checking? Possible survey concerns, conditional repair budgets and questions for your lender.
• What do I offer? An opening number, a walk-away scenario and talking points for the call, with evidence and costs where justified.

The half nobody warns you about

An accepted offer is where most property tools stop and where the stressful part starts. Record the price you agreed on the report and it turns into a tracker for everything between the handshake and the keys.

1. 1Open the property's report and go to After the offer.
2. 2Enter the price that was accepted and the date. That's the anchor every date below is measured from.
3. 3Work the tracker as things move. It emails you when something is due rather than waiting to be opened.

What you get: a 13-stage conveyancing timeline with real UK benchmarks, so you can tell a normal wait from a stalled one; a mortgage countdown covering your broker, the rate lock and the offer expiry; up to five chain listings kept in one place, so a stall is one tap away from checking; and a completion-day checklist for the practical bits. It is the same tracker on free and on Pro.

Triage a shortlist before you book viewings

When you're down to a handful and can't tell them apart, put 2 to 4 of them side by side and get one AI read over the whole set. It's a triage read — which two or three are worth your Saturday — not a Pro report on each house.

1. 1Add each listing with the browser extension, then open Compare and put the ones you're torn between side by side.
2. 2Keep the set to one question: all for sale, or all to rent. A set that mixes the two is refused.
3. 3Press Rank these with AI. The answer comes back twice over — the listings on their own merits, and the same listings re-read against what you've told HomeThink you're looking for.

The gap between those two orders is the interesting part: it's what your own requirements are buying you, and costing you. Ranking is a Pro feature: five a day, of your own properties or of a Rightmove saved list from the extension.

Check listings without leaving the portal

The Chrome extension puts HomeThink inside the portal — a panel on the listing page itself, and a line on every card of a search results page. No copy, no paste, no tab switch, which is what you want when you're working through twenty results and only two deserve a proper report.

1. 1Install HomeThink: AI Property Check from the Chrome Web Store, then connect it to your account — one press on the connect page, revocable any time from Settings → Connected devices.
2. 2Open any listing on Rightmove, Zoopla or OnTheMarket. A HomeThink panel appears on the page; press Analyse this property and the read lands in it — score, red and green flags, monthly costs, the area, your commute, and the questions to ask, without leaving the listing.
3. 3On a results page, every card picks up a line of its own: how long it's been listed, any price cut, and the biggest risk the listing itself gives away. Anything you've already analysed also carries its score — click it to open the report.

What the panel writes is a real report, not a preview of one: it lands on your dashboard like any other, ready to upgrade to Pro. Free reports have a daily allowance — five a day on a free account, uncapped on Pro — and the results-page lines cost nothing, because they are read off the page rather than from us. On Rightmove there's one extra trick on Pro: open a saved list and the extension can rank the whole thing in one go, up to forty properties, with no need to add them to HomeThink first.

62 tools that need no account at all

Separate from the reports, and free to anyone: calculators and checkers for the individual questions that come up while you're looking. No sign-up, no listing needed — open one, type a number or a postcode, get an answer.

The money ones — stamp duty, mortgage, affordability, deposit, rental yield, remortgage savings, take-home pay. The place ones — crime, flood risk, school catchment, broadband speed, council tax band, sold prices, postcode explorer. And the renter ones, which use the same AI as the reports: a tenancy-agreement scanner, tenant rights, and rent negotiation.

Ask instead of reading

There are two chats, and the difference matters. The one inside a report has read that report — ask it why the score is what it is, what a flag means for your offer, or what to say to the agent. The HomeThink Agent, on its own page, is for everything that isn't about one house.

The Agent knows the buying and renting process, the jargon, and your saved preferences: what a Level 2 survey actually covers, whether to offer under asking, what happens between offer and exchange. Free accounts get 25 questions a day; Pro gets 50. Chat about a report is different — it is part of Pro.

What free gets you, and what Pro adds

Free is not a demo. Every piece of factual data we gather — the crime, flood, schools, planning, sold prices, commute times and costs — is on the free report. What Pro buys is the deep AI read of it: the valuation, the survey view, the offer plan and the area outlook.

5 Pro reports a day · unlimited Free reports · listings added on a computer · cancel anytime