US investor buys 6% stake in Rightmove as takeover rumours fly
Bill Ackman, who heads up a major US hedge fund, believes the portal's low share price is an opportunity.
It has been claimed that Rightmove may face another takeover challenge in the next few weeks following similar moves late last year.
A report by The Sunday Times reveals that activist investor Bill Ackman (main image) has bought stock in Rightmove worth hundreds of millions of pounds via his huge US hedge fund Pershing Square Capital Management.
It is claimed by investor insiders that Ackman believes Rightmove’s share price is significantly undervalued following its recent shift towards AI tools and the ensuing drop in its share price.
That hit a high of £8.18 a share during the summer of 2025 but began to slide after the threat posed by AI-enabled search engines, such as ChatGPT, to its dominance of the online house-hunting market became clear.
Its response to this in last November’s trading results didn’t help – and the firm’s share price bottomed out at £4.10 a share in May this year.
New position
Ackman believes this value gap represents a chance to make significant profits and is reported to now own 6% of Rightmove’s stock, a position from which he will either make considerable profits if Rightmove’s share price eventually recovers, or launch a takeover.
He will need nerves of steel – the share price has begun to recover as the AI threat to Rightmove has failed to materialise in the short term and it now sits at around £5 per share.
The Sunday Times reports that Ackman’s mentor, and fellow hedge figure Sachem Head has been making it known to the London market that he believes an AI-prompted share sell-off of Rightmove stock has been overcooked and is encouraging the portal to take on debt to fund share buybacks.
One interpretation of this, anonymous investors have claimed, is that Head thinks Rightmove is undervalued and ripe for a takeover.
The Neg has approached Rightmove for comment.
Main pic credit: WikiCommons/Rightmove/Flickr
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The data opportunity
For years, Rightmove has been described primarily as a portal: somewhere consumers go to look at houses and somewhere agents pay to advertise them.
But the underlying asset is the enormous amount of property-market information passing through the platform.
Listings, asking prices, property types, geographical demand, agent activity, new-build supply, consumer behaviour and the relationship between properties and the professionals marketing them all create a potentially valuable data ecosystem.
A new owner could therefore view Rightmove less as a classified advertising business and more as a property intelligence company with the UK’s largest consumer audience attached to it.
That could change the strategic emphasis.
Rather than simply charging agents increasingly higher subscription prices, an owner could attempt to build a much broader property-information infrastructure around the portal.
That could include mortgages, conveyancing, valuations, insurance, utilities, moving services, property management and increasingly sophisticated AI-powered transaction services.
Rightmove is already moving in that direction. Its “Other” businesses, including Mortgages, Commercial and Rental Services, grew 11 per cent in 2025.
AI could become an opportunity rather than a threat
The irony of the current situation is that AI is simultaneously being blamed for Rightmove’s falling valuation and potentially making the company more strategically valuable.
The fear is obvious.
If consumers stop searching manually through property portals and instead ask an AI agent to find them a house, the traditional portal interface becomes less important.
But there is another interpretation.
If AI becomes the new interface for property search, the companies possessing the best underlying property data become extremely important.
An AI agent still needs to know which homes are available, what they cost, where they are, who is selling them and how they compare with alternatives.
That makes Rightmove’s underlying data potentially more valuable, not less.
The strategic question for a buyer would therefore be whether to defend the traditional portal model or accelerate Rightmove into becoming the data and transaction layer behind the next generation of property search.
The agent relationship would be critical
There would, however, be a major constraint. Rightmove’s relationship with estate agents is the foundation of its business.
The 2025 annual report shows 16,385 agency branches using the platform, with agency membership up 2 per cent and retention at 90 per cent. Agency average revenue per advertiser increased 6 per cent to £1,530. Any new owner would therefore have to tread carefully. A financial buyer could see an obvious opportunity to increase margins, cut costs and extract more cash.
But property portals are unusual businesses. Their value depends upon maintaining a delicate three-way relationship between consumers, agents and property supply. Push agents too hard and alternatives become more attractive. Damage consumer trust and traffic suffers. Reduce investment in technology and competitors or new AI interfaces can exploit the gap.
The biggest asset is ultimately the network effect.
The latest activist move against Rightmove raises a much bigger question than whether the property portal’s share price has fallen too far: what would Rightmove actually look like if somebody bought it?
US activist investor Sachem Head has built a 6 per cent stake in Rightmove, with reports suggesting it believes the company has been oversold because of fears about artificial intelligence. The Sunday Times reports that Sachem has been encouraging the company to consider debt-funded share buybacks, while the market has interpreted its position as potentially signalling that Rightmove could become a takeover target.
That possibility is particularly interesting because Rightmove is not simply another technology company.
It is one of the most powerful pieces of digital infrastructure in the UK property market.
Rightmove reported revenue of £425.1 million for 2025, up 9 per cent, with underlying operating profit of £297.7 million and a 70 per cent underlying operating margin. Agency revenue alone reached £304.7 million.
It also remains extraordinarily dominant with consumers. Rightmove says more than 80 per cent of time spent on UK property portals in 2025 was spent on its platform, while total time spent on its website and apps reached 16.8 billion minutes.
So what would a new owner actually be buying?
The answer is much bigger than a property-listing website.
He is wrong. Rightmove’s existence relies completely on Estate Agents continuing to have faith in it as a means to help sell their properties, like local papers in a bygone era. They will also be in a by gone era as technology dictates we do not need to spend circa £2,500 per month per office, which is why the share price continues to falter.
It sounds like another American theft of a company – Hedge funds have a habit of stripping assets – pocketing them and then dumping what’s left.