Adding properties

The simplest way in, and also the slowest, since it involves no extension and no screenshot, just you typing the details out.

1. 1
   Open the map.
2. 2
   Click the add button.
3. 3
   Manual entry is the default mode, already selected for you, so you can start typing straight away.
4. 4
   Search for an address or postcode in England, and fill in the rest. Location and price are the only two required fields; title, bedrooms, bathrooms, council tax band, and a listing link are all optional.
5. 5
   Check where the pin has landed. If it looks off, drag it to the exact spot yourself, it is down to you to confirm it is in the right place before saving. The pin can be dragged up to about a mile from wherever the search put it, which is plenty for correcting a house number but means a wildly wrong result is better fixed by searching again.

Only properties in England can be added. Council tax is set locally and works differently in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, so anything outside England is turned away when you save it.

Typing all of this out on a phone keyboard gets old quickly, which is why there are two faster routes in. You can upload a screenshot of the listing, or use the browser extension.

No extension installed, or browsing on your phone? Take a screenshot of the listing instead, and let the app read it for you.

1. 1
   Open the add property form and switch to the "Upload screenshot" tab.
2. 2
   Choose up to two screenshots of the listing, from Rightmove, Zoopla, OnTheMarket, or similar. PNG, JPEG, and WebP are all supported, up to 8MB each.
3. 3
   Tap "Extract details" and give it a moment to read the images.
4. 4
   Review what it found, title, price, bedrooms, bathrooms, council tax band, and location, and correct anything before saving. This includes checking the pin on the map, since it is still down to you to confirm it has landed in the right place.

The one thing this method cannot capture is the original listing link. Add it yourself afterwards if you want it saved against the property, or use manual entry or the browser extension instead, since both of those carry it across for you.

The quickest way in, if you are browsing on a laptop or desktop. The First Move browser extension adds a button to listing pages on Rightmove, Zoopla, and OnTheMarket. Click it, and the details it can read from the page, title, address, price, bedrooms, bathrooms, council tax band, and exact coordinates, are sent straight into the add property form in one go, with nothing left to type in yourself.

Because the extension usually already has exact coordinates from the listing page itself, the add property form skips showing a draggable pin altogether in that case, there is simply nothing left to correct. If it only managed to find an address rather than coordinates, that address is looked up automatically instead, with a pin shown for you to check, and a fallback to manual address search if the lookup fails entirely.

Once a location is set, the app works out which council covers it and pulls that council’s real published Band D rate, rather than a generic England-wide average. If your search did not return a postcode directly, the exact coordinates you placed are reverse-geocoded into one first, so the lookup still runs.

From there, the postcode is matched to its local authority, whose current Band D yearly rate the app already holds for every English billing authority from the government’s published figures for the year. Whichever band you select (A to H) is then converted to a monthly figure using the standard national ratio between bands, applied to that specific council’s own rate.

If you are not sure of the band, leaving it unset defaults the calculation to Band D, still using your actual local council’s rate rather than a rough guess, and you can correct it later if you find out the real band.

One thing worth knowing about the monthly figure itself. The app spreads the annual bill evenly across all twelve months, because every other cost it shows works that way and it is what the bill genuinely costs you per month. Most councils collect over ten instalments as standard, with nothing to pay in February and March, so if you compare the app’s number against a real direct debit it can look like the app is running low. It is not, the yearly total is identical, and paying over twelve months is an option every council offers if you prefer smaller, year-round payments. The government is also making twelve the default, for newly liable taxpayers from April 2027 and for everyone else from April 2028, so the app’s figure will soon match the standard bill too.