Rightmove has signed off new ‘golden handcuffs’ for its two most senior directors totalling, based on the portal’s current share price, nearly £2 million between them.

CEO Johan Svanstrom (main image, right), its CEO has been given 183,759 free ‘performance shares’ or options while CFO Ruaridh Hook (left) gets 97,440.

Both will have to wait until March 2030 before they can sell their Rightmove shares, and will have been set share price and dividend growth targets.

Svanstrom’s shares will be worth, assuming a share price of £6.86, just over £1.26 million while Hook’s are worth just under £670,000.

Higher

But, given shareholders have gifted the pair these share, no doubt their share price targets will be much higher as will their potential payday in 2030.

Both awards are technically part of Rightmove’s Performance Share Plan and are dictated by ‘total shareholder return’ criteria along with ‘earnings per share’ growth.

So the more the pair make Rightmove’s many institutional shareholders happer, the wealthier they too will become and, therefore, want to say with the company for another five years.

New options

The new options vastly increase the pair’s holdings in the portal. Hook already had share options and other types of shares worth some £350,000 while Svanstrom’s existing holdings are worth £466,300.

Part of the reason for the generous ‘handcuffs’ is that some shareholders will have been keen to see Rightmove’s share price rise from its current £6.86 to the giddy heights of 2022 when it peaked nearly £8.

Two weeks ago the portal revealed its annual results which revealed that, despite achieving a modest 2% increase in the number of agents using the portal, it reported revenues up by £25.6m (7%) to £389.9m while underlying operating profit increased by 4% to £273.9m.