A five-minute read

How HomeThink works

HomeThink turns a property listing into the research you'd do yourself if you had a week and a surveyor on speed dial. Everything starts with one gesture — pasting a link — and the rest of this page is what happens after that — all the way through to the tracker that runs from an accepted offer to the keys — plus the other ways in: the browser extension, the shortlist comparison, the 59 free tools and the AI you can just ask.

The core flow

Step 01

Paste a listing, get a report

The whole product hangs off this one gesture. Find a property on Rightmove, Zoopla or OnTheMarket, copy the address bar, and paste it into HomeThink. You don't need to type anything about the house — the listing already says it.

  1. 1Open the listing on Rightmove, Zoopla or OnTheMarket and copy its URL.
  2. 2Paste it into the bar at the top of your dashboard and press Analyse. One link per paste.
  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 quick reads a day. The report is yours — it stays on your dashboard, tracks price changes on the listing, and you can re-check the live page whenever you want.

Step 02

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.

Read a full example report
Step 03

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.
Open settings
Step 04

When you're serious about one house

Every report starts free. Pro is an upgrade you apply to a report you've already read — there's no way to jump straight to a Pro report.

You open Full reporton 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 quick read 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.
  • What will the survey find? Likely problems, rough repair costs, and how easily a lender would lend on it.
  • What do I offer? An opening number, a walk-away number, and a message you can send.

Your first full Pro report is free

Run it on any property — deep AI report, valuation and negotiation advice, one time, on us.

Step 05

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 watched for stalls and re-lists — the failure nobody sees coming; and a completion-day checklist for the practical bits. It is the same tracker on free and on Pro.

Other ways in

Triage a shortlist before you book viewings

When you're down to a handful and can't tell them apart, paste 2 to 10 listing links and get one AI read over the whole set. It's a triage read — which two or three are worth your Saturday — not a full report on each house.

  1. 1Go to Compare and paste your links one at a time — each is checked as it lands, so a bad link tells you why on the spot instead of failing the whole run.
  2. 2Keep the set to one question: all for sale, or all to rent. A run that mixes the two is refused.
  3. 3Press Compare. 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. Comparison is a Pro feature, and you can run three of them a day.

More on comparing a shortlist

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 full 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. Quick reads are a shared allowance — five a day across the extension and the web 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: 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.

Get the extension

59 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 a few questions a day; Pro gets a much bigger allowance. Chat on a report is capped on free and uncapped on Pro.

Ask the Agent something

What it costs

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.

Free
  • Five quick reads a day, web and extension combined
  • One free full Pro report, ever
  • All 59 tools, the area map and the guides
  • A few Agent questions a day
Pro
  • Up to five full Pro reports a day
  • Unlimited quick reads, no daily cap
  • Shortlist comparison, three runs a day
  • Unlimited chat on your reports

5 full Pro reports a day · unlimited quick reads · cancel anytime

See the full comparison

That's the whole thing

Every report starts free — Pro upgrades it afterwards. Find a listing you're curious about and paste the link — the first report will tell you more about the product than this page can.