Rightmove
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Features
The battle for North Yorkshire
North Yorkshire has become a battleground for dominance among the portals, says Nigel Lewis.
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Latest property news
Interest in buy-to-let could plummet
Interest in new purchases from buy-to-let investors dropped 27 per cent in March compared to the same month last year as April 1st tax change starts to bite, according to Rightmove. The fall reverses the upward trend between December and February which brought a 24 per cent year-on-year increase in buy-to-let enquiries, indicating a potential slowdown in new investor purchases at least in the short-term. Demand from home-hunters is at an all-time high with a record number of Q1 enquiries, so the pause from investors could give some first-time buyers more of an opportunity to make a move. Some buy-to-let investors took a break from looking for new properties in March as the new tax changes deadline loomed, the new data from Rightmove reveals. Whilst Rightmove recorded its busiest ever Q1 for enquiries to estate agents, the intentions of buyers shifted in March, with the number of people saying they were planning to buy a property to rent out dropping by 27 per cent compared to the same month last year. This contrasts with the increase in interest seen from investors between December and February (+24 per cent year-on-year) as they tried to make last minute purchases before April’s additional…
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Marketing
Rightmove grows in spite of OTM
Rightmove continues to hold a dominant position in the online property search market after increasing its market share to 77 per cent, up from 74 per cent a year ago, in spite of fresh competition from the arrival of OnTheMarket.com at the start of 2015. Recognising the fact that its website remains a must-see destination for buyers and renters, the number of agents listing on Rightmove rose by two per cent year-on-year to 19,752 over the year to the end of December. The rise in the volume of agents listing on the portal helped boost Rightmove’s revenue by 15 per cent to £192.1 million in 2015, while pre-tax profit was up 12 per cent to £137.1 million. In total, Rightmove attracted 1.3 billion visits to its website in 2015, up 18 per cent compared to a year earlier. Rightmove’s underlying operating margin also increased from 74.6 per cent a year ago to 75.1 per cent. This comes as a blow to its competitors, especially Agents’ Mutual, which had hoped to break Rightmove’s stronghold on the market with the launch of OnTheMarket. Zoopla announced last week that it also increased its agent members by one per cent to 12,841, indicating that…
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Marketing
Rightmove posts record traffic
Rightmove delivered more leads than ever before on the back of record online traffic in January, the company has revealed. More than 127 million people visited Rightmove last month, up almost 20 per cent compared to the corresponding month last year, and surpassing the previous record of 118 million set last August. The sharp increase in visits helped to ensure that email and phone enquiries to agents and developers hit a new record of over 4.9 million, up 15 per cent year-on-year. The latest data also confirms what many of us already know. We are a nation obsessed with property. Collectively people spent the equivalent of over 2,000 years browsing Rightmove in January, with the number of page views for the month hitting a new record of 1.7 billion. The most popular places people looked for a new home after London was Bristol, Cambridge and Milton Keynes. Miles Shipside (left), Rightmove Director, said, “These January statistics should give both sales and lettings agents confidence that an active year with plenty of business opportunities lies ahead. While January is usually a very busy month for home-hunting, the scale of these records shows just how habitual Rightmove has become when people are…
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Marketing
Moving target
Andrea Kirkby reviews the financial and market positions of the major portals as the new challenger squares up to ‘the establishment.’
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Marketing
OTM’s ‘one other portal’ rule stifling transactions
A well-respected figure in the estate agency sector has written an open letter in conjunction with his business partner to Ian Springett (left), CEO OnTheMarket (OTM), urging him to drop the portal’s “One Other Portal” rule. OTM is attempting to break the so-called duopoly held by Rightmove and Zoopla with its ‘one other portal’ rule preventing their member agents from advertising on both Rightmove and Zoopla, with a view to saving agents money. The duopoly of the current two biggest portals means that prices of listing on the two portals have increased significantly in recent years, but to prevent further growth, OTM launched earlier this year with a view to saving agents money overtime. But with traffic to OTM failing to attract anywhere near the level of website traffic being generated by Rightmove and Zoopla, the number of leads being generated for some agents is falling, contributing to the current decline in transaction volumes in the UK, according to estate agency Consultant and Trainer, Richard Rawlings (right) and his business partner Bradley Payne. In an open letter to OTM’s CEO, one behalf of “the approx. 1,000 agency branches we serve, as well as the wider industry”, Rawlings and his business…
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Marketing
OTM continues steady growth
OnTheMarket.com (OTM) has claimed another rise in traffic levels last month. OTM said that based on its own internal data from Google Analytics, the website achieved 5.6million visits in September, including 2.7million unique visitors, up from 5.4million in August. “We believe it is only a matter of time before we overtake Zoopla as the number two portal in terms of available UK property listings and provide agents and consumers alike with a credible alternative to the current duopoly of Rightmove and Zoopla,” said CEO Ian Springett (left). However, despite OTM’s growth, their level of website traffic and brand awareness at this early stage of their existence remains low compared to what Zoopla and Rightmove are achieving, and a significant number of agents are now thinking of quitting the portal as a consequence, according to a report by Barclays. The report states that nine of the 100 OTM member agents that it apparently interviewed expressed an interest in leaving the site, while a further 35 said that they will review their membership. According to its last trading update, Zoopla said that it had attracted a net rise of 213 branches in the four months to 31 July, after winning back 100…
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Marketing
Property portal supremacy
Marc Da Silva asks, “which portal is winning the battle for agents?”
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Marketing
Blow for Zoopla as Chestertons leaves the portal
Zoopla was dealt a blow last week as Chestertons, one of London’s largest estate agencies with 30 offices across the city, announced that it would be leaving the site in to list its properties with Rightmove. The firm, a founding member of Agents’ Mutual, continues to list properties on OnTheMarket (OTM) and is therefore not permitted to list homes on more than one other rival website, under OTM’s ‘one other portal’ rule requiring, in effect, their member agents to stop advertising on either Rightmove or Zoopla. The typical scenario has an agent sticking with Rightmove and choosing between OTM and Zoopla, so Chestertons is unusual. “We had more and more of our clients telling us that they expected to see us on Rightmove and you have to listen to your clients,” said Chestertons Chief Executive Robert Bartlett. The launch of OTM earlier this year had an adverse impact on Zoopla’s business. A number of agents have cancelled their subscriptions with the online property giant in order to list homes with OTM. OTM is now claiming to be on course to replace Zoopla as the number two property portal by the end of 2016 on its way to achieving their medium-term…
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Latest property news
Zoopla-OTM battle will “strengthen Rightmove’s dominance”
With membership now at more than 5,000 offices and with a significant number of member offices uploading their properties to the website ahead of any other portal, OnTheMarket.com (OTM) has already established itself as one of the UK’s leading property portals, but it is Rightmove that is expected to benefit the most from the launch of OTM, it has been claimed. An article on the popular investment website, The Motley Fool UK says that dominance by one company is commonplace in the internet industry, highlighting that the likes of Google, Facebook and eBay dominate their respective sectors. “Size matters, because of network effects and economies of scale,” it said. But although Rightmove is the biggest online property portal by traffic, it points to the fact that the website “still faces stiff competition from Zoopla.” “Innovations ranging from calculating the distance to the nearest railway station and archived listings have helped Zoopla to stay in a strong second place position,” it added. Only last week, Zoopla Property Group (ZPG) launched its Real-Time Listings Service, allowing its members to send updates to property listings on ZPG websites within minutes of being updated on the agent or developer’s system or website. The service…
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