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By some accounts, Google’s move into U.K. real estate was a death knell for Rightmove, the dominant U.K. property portal. Rightmove’s stock initially plummeted in the wake of the announcement, with analysts lining up to explain how brokers will welcome Google’s free service over Rightmove’s annoying pay-per-play model.

"It will certainly blow Rightmove out of the water,” Sarah Beeny, host of Channel 4’s Property Ladder and a site owner told a reporter after Google went public with its plans. “You can only get your property listed on that site if you are an estate agent--what Google will do is level the playing field and they are doing it for free.”

That’s why Friday’s announcement that Rightmove is linking with Google Maps raised more than few eyebrows. The mega-portal will use Google Maps for all its property listings, while additional uses for Google Maps are "now in development."

On one hand, a portal signing up for Google’s mapping service is hardly news, but this is Rightmove, which must convince brokers and consumers that its site is better than Google.

If nothing else, Rightmove’s acquiescence provides further evidence of how engrained Google is becoming in the consumer real estate experience.

In a press release, Rightmove commercial director Miles Shipside said, “Google provides clear and easy-to-view maps which will perfectly compliment Rightmove’s extensive level of detail about each property and suite of informative user guides, altogether making it even easier for buyers and sellers to research property on Rightmove.”

Nevertheless, it could not have been an easy pill for Rightmove to swallow. Clearly its customers demanded Google’s level of functionality.

“With Google about to launch a map-based property portal in the UK, this type of functionality will soon become the de facto standard for consumers,” Ashley Rigg writes on Global Edge. “Without it, Rightmove risks losing market share.  Their previous OnOneMap technology simply was not good enough to rival what Google is about to offer, leaving their board little choice but to partner with a company that could become their biggest competitor.”

Now the portal pundits can speculate about Rightmove’s strategy. Does the Map deal signal appeasement with Google? Will Rightmove, which registered a million visits in a single day in January, opt to work with Google rather than fight it?

Perhaps most importantly, if Rightmove’s customers can push it to add Maps, will they also force Rightmove to give Google its listings?

These are big questions for all the property portals, which will eventually have to figure out how to compete in a Google world.