MoveTwo vs Spreadsheets: Why Couples Ditch Google Sheets for House Hunting

Published 2 March 2026

The Spreadsheet Trap

It always starts the same way. You and your partner decide to look for a new place, and within about ten minutes someone has created a Google Sheet. Columns for address, price, number of bedrooms, a "Notes" column, maybe even a hyperlink to the listing. It feels organised. It feels productive. For the first five properties, it genuinely works.

Then the sixth property arrives. And the seventh. By the time you hit twenty, the spreadsheet has become a colour-coded labyrinth that only one of you understands, and every conversation starts with "Wait, which row was that one?"

If this sounds familiar, you are not alone. The house hunting spreadsheet is practically a rite of passage for couples in the UK. But it was never designed for this job, and sooner or later it starts to show.

What Goes Wrong With Spreadsheets

Spreadsheets are brilliant at crunching numbers. They are less brilliant at helping two people compare homes. Here is what usually breaks down:

• No photos. You can paste a URL into a cell, but you cannot glance at a photo and remember which flat had the kitchen you loved. Every comparison sends you back to the listing site.
• No commute data. You end up opening Google Maps in a separate tab for every single property, typing in two work addresses, and then manually copying the travel time into yet another column. By the tenth listing you stop doing it altogether.
• One shared "Notes" column. Your partner writes "nice garden" and you write "too far from the station" in the same cell. There is no way to rate properties independently or see where you both agree without talking it through every time.
• Links break. Listings get taken down. Rightmove URLs expire. That Zoopla link you saved last Tuesday? Gone. And the spreadsheet has no way of telling you.
• Painful on mobile. Nobody wants to pinch-zoom into a Google Sheet on their phone at the end of a viewing to update a row. So the update doesn't happen, and the data goes stale.
• No real-time awareness. You have no idea whether your partner has actually looked at the properties you added. The sheet just sits there, silently.

What MoveTwo Does Differently

MoveTwo is a Chrome extension built specifically for couples and housemates searching for a place together. Instead of adapting a general-purpose tool to a very specific problem, it handles the things spreadsheets cannot.

Here is a side-by-side look at how the two approaches compare:

The difference is not that spreadsheets are bad. It is that they were built for accounting, not for deciding where to live. MoveTwo saves you from the busywork: copying links, switching tabs, manually entering commute times, trying to remember what your partner thought of the place you found at 11pm on a Wednesday.

When one of you saves a property from Rightmove, Zoopla, Zillow, or any of the over 30 supported sites, it lands in a shared dashboard. Both of you can rate it independently, leave comments, upload photos from viewings, and move it through stages like "Viewing booked" or "Offered." The commute overlay shows travel time to both workplaces right on the listing page, so you do not need to open Google Maps at all.

When a Spreadsheet Is Enough

Honesty matters more than a sales pitch, so here it is: a spreadsheet is perfectly fine in some situations. If you are searching on a single site, in one area, with a short list of five or fewer properties, and neither of you cares about commute data, a Google Sheet will do the job. It is free, you both already know how to use it, and it takes thirty seconds to set up.

The problems start when the search gets longer, the list grows, and you are juggling multiple sites and areas. That is the point where the spreadsheet becomes more of a chore than a tool, and where something purpose-built starts to save real time and real arguments.

Ready to Upgrade Your Search?

If your house hunting spreadsheet has started to feel like a second job, MoveTwo might be worth a look. It takes under a minute to install, works alongside the property sites you are already using, and comes with a free trial so you can see if it fits before you pay anything.