Show Notes
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 works The 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 incumbents The 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 agents For the operators and agents who pay to be seen, the first benefit is
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Abri may be one of the UK’s most significant large-scale housing organisations you have never heard of. It owns and manages almost 60,000 homes, stretching from Somerset and Bristol through a Hampshire heartland to Bracknell, Berkshire and, through Octavia, west London. As Andrew Teacher observes on this week’s PropCast, that scale would make it comparable in size with a FTSE 100 company, were it listed. For context, Grainger, the UK’s largest listed residential landlord, owns just over 11,200 rental homes; Abri owns more than five times as many. Even adding Unite Group’s 64,000 student beds to Grainger’s total (and beds, admittedly, are not quite homes), the two listed names together reach around 75,000 roughly the scale of the group Abri now hopes to create through its proposed merger with Curo Group, which would bring the combined organisation to more than 73,000 homes and community assets serving around 142,000 customers across the south and south west of England. Like the G15 giants, Abri has built scale deliberately, through the merger of Radian and Yarlington in 2019, Silva Homes in 2023 and Octavia in 2024, and built capability alongside it: customer satisfaction at the top end of the sector, an A3 stable rating from Moody’s and the Regulator of Social Housing’s G1 and V1 grades, confirmed in November 2025. G1 is the highest governance grade, the regulator’s assurance that the organisation is effectively run and manages its risks. V1, the highest viability grade, confirms “the financial capacity to deal with a wide range of adverse scenarios”, and has become rare among large associations. Gary Orr, chief executive of Abri Group and its predecessor organisation Yarlington since 2011, has done a remarkable job steering the organisation through significant change and significant expansion, never an easy thing, particularly in the housing association world. The result is a balance sheet that equips Abri both to manage the daily complexity of providing homes and services for well over 100,000 people, a figure approaching 150,000 through the proposed Curo merger, and to pursue an ambitious growth strategy supported in part by institutional capital. “We’re ambitious about being a trusted partner in delivery and piloting some of these ideas,” says Theo Plowman, Abri’s head of policy and campaigns. “We’re in the room on several different conversations, we’re really well placed and we have the expertise to do it.” Plowman joined a year ago from the British Property Federation, where he led much of the trade body’s residential policy work, particularly on supporting institutional investment into build-to-rent. The conversation that follows ranges across pension capital, shared ownership reform and why the sector needs to stop underselling itself. Scale as strategy Growth is deliberate. In April 2026 Abri published an investment strategy targeting 20,000 new homes by 2036, “doubling our output” as Plowman puts it, alongside around £450m of investment in existing homes and an ambition to become a top five provider by scale, customer satisfaction and as a place to work. Delivery runs through its Strategic Partnership with Homes England, which awarded Abri £300m under the 2021-26 Affordable Homes Programme as part of a £2.66bn investment in new homes, joint ventures such as the 50:50 acquisition of the former Ford Airfield in West Sussex, where 1,500 homes are planned, and ambitious regeneration schemes like The Granges in Windsor, where four tower blocks containing 192 properties are being replaced with 413 sustainable homes. The next step came on 1 July 2026, when the boards of Abri and Curo announced they are exploring a new partnership that would create a group owning and managing more than 73,000 homes and community assets, serving 142,000 customers across the south and south west of England, with combined turnover of £598m in 2024/25. Curo, formed in 1999 through a stock transfer from Bath and North East Somerset Council, owns
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