A number of years ago, The Guardian included The Modern House in its list of specialist agencies that offer an alternative to Rightmove. More recently, Ed Cumming wrote a profile piece about us in The Observer that once again compared us directly to the country’s biggest property portals: “When I was flat-hunting two years ago,” he said, “one website shone like a beacon through the terraced fog of Rightmove and Zoopla: The Modern House.”

Hugely flattering though this coverage is, The Modern House is not an aggregating website like Rightmove. It’s a full-service estate agency, working with people to make the process of moving into a new home – or leaving a much-beloved one – as smooth and enjoyable as possible. Indeed, we ourselves advertise on Rightmove, Zoopla and Primelocation in order to give our clients as much marketing coverage as possible.

However, what’s clear is that the property portals only get you so far. There are a huge number of buyers who haven’t identified a specific area, postcode or street, who aren’t obsessed by the idea of living in a particular catchment area. Instead, their aim is to find a home that inspires and excites them, that gives them butterflies when they walk through the door. For these people, there’s an awful lot of sub-standard stock to sift through. The portals offer no quality control. And that’s where we come in.

Below is a list of some of the ways in which The Modern House might just be the perfect alternative to Rightmove for the design-savvy buyer or seller:

Tunnel Vision
How do you search for design-led, architecturally commendable homes on portal sites? Well… you can’t, really. Offering an editorially-inspired platform for celebrating and presenting the UK’s best Modernist homes was one of the things we set out to offer when The Modern House was founded in 2005.

Since then, we’ve expanded our architectural remit to include new builds, period conversions, eco homes and more, but the fundamental tenets of Modernism are identifiable in all of these: flowing spaces, ample light and integrity of materials.

Whether it be a Modernist masterpiece or a well-executed flat in a former Victorian school, our uncompromising standards for what constitutes good residential architecture means that, as an alternative to Rightmove, the houses on our site are a curated selection of the country’s most exceptional living spaces. No trawling through pages and pages, no ‘it-might-look-better-in-real-life’ photography, just well-designed spaces for modern living in one place.

It’s not all location, location, location
Over the years, we’ve got to know our audience through listening and communicating with them. How do they want to live? What do they want their space to look like? Where do they want to be?

From our experience, the last question is the most open-ended. We’ve found that considered spaces that facilitate modern living are what our clients are after, and that they are open-minded when it comes to location.

As an alternative to Rightmove, we let the superlative standard of our houses speak for themselves. Of course, you can search by location on our site, but having a scroll through everything we have on the market is part of the fun, isn’t it?

Hot off the (digital) press
Quality control is one of the biggest complaints waged against portal sites. But not us. Our founders Matt Gibberd and Albert Hill set up The Modern House after stints as editors at World of Interiors and Wallpaper*, and applied their editorial know-how to the representation of houses on our site, carefully selecting photographers who hail from the architecture, interiors and lifestyle worlds.

We couple this exceptional photography with an editorial presentation of our homes, using historical material, quotes from architectural imprints and Journal features to offer an art-market approach to selling. Or, as journalist Lucy Kellaway put it, our listings constitute “the real hardcore stuff for property porn addicts”.

With this magazine-quality output, and our award-winning Journal, through which we explore themes of modern living, we attract over 12 million page views a year, and maintain a design-conscious audience of over 150,000 people across our social-media feeds.

People Power
Here at The Modern House, we’ve long asked ourselves why estate agency is one of the least-trusted professions, and how we can work to rectify this. Our solution has been to do business differently and, more than anything else, that starts with our staff.

Our team is made up of compassionate, knowledgeable and engaged people whose backgrounds range from the art world to journalism, vintage-furniture dealing and publishing.

Uniting us all is a belief in good design and an enthusiasm for selling the country’s finest modern living spaces. It results in lasting, positive relationships with our clients, 98 percent of whom say they would recommend us, and prompts our buyers to say things like, “their core skills offer a masterclass for any other agent operating today”.

If you have a modern home to sell, our team of specialists would love to hear from you.

Read more: What is a modern house?