When you are flat-hunting, the listing tells you about the house. It says nothing about how far it is from your office, your gym, or your parents. So you copy the address, open Google Maps, type it in, check one place, then another, then go back to the listing. For every property. It gets old fast.
The manual way
It works, but it is slow:
- Copy the address from the Rightmove or Zoopla page.
- Open Google Maps in a new tab and paste it.
- Set directions to your workplace and note the time.
- Change the destination to the gym, the station, a friend. Repeat.
- Switch back to the listing and try to remember all of it.
Do that across ten listings and you have spent an evening tab-switching instead of comparing homes.
The faster way
ListingMap is a free browser extension that does this in place. You save the spots that matter to you once, and it adds a button to the listing that opens a map of the property against them.
- Install the extension and save a few places (work, gym, family) into a list.
- Open any Rightmove or Zoopla listing and click the ListingMap button.
- Tap your list. Each place drops onto the map around the property with its travel time.
- Tap a place to see the full route by car, public transport, walking or cycling.
What you can actually check
Travel times use the same routing as Google Maps, so you get realistic numbers, not straight-line distance:
- Door-to-door commute to work, by your usual mode of travel.
- Walk time to the nearest station or supermarket.
- How far family or friends really are.
- Whether that quiet area is actually cut off at rush hour.
Why it matters
A flat that looks perfect in photos can be a 55-minute commute you will resent in a month. Seeing the home against your real life, before you book a viewing, saves wasted trips and bad decisions.
ListingMap is free for up to 10 saved places and 30 searches a week, and it works on Rightmove, Zoopla and a dozen other portals worldwide.