Rightmove
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Latest property news
OnTheMarket has been signing up 16 new agents a day since flotation
OnThemarket’s strategy to sign up more agents on the back of its recent AIM listing appear to be working. The formerly mutual portal has signed up 243 additional sales and letting agents to its service, up from the 81 revealed just after its shares were listed on AIM ten days ago. The portal also says independent agency group Chancellors has begun listing its properties on the portal. In November Chancellors agreed to sign a five-year listing deal, but only if OnTheMarket successfully achieved an AIM flotation. This means Chancellors’ 53 sales and lettings branches, which range across Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Herefordshire London, Oxfordshire, Powys and Surrey are now listing their properties on both OnTheMarket, Zoopla and Rightmove. The portal says Chancellors’ listing is evidence that agent support for the portal, which is now valued at £101.4 million following the AIM launch, is growing. Chancellors has agreed to more than just a listing with OnTheMarket, though. The company has agreed to actively promote the OnTheMarket.com portal brand with digital and branch-based marketing activity. Chancellors Group Chancellors, which used to be known as Hogg Robinson Property Services, in 2016 generated profits of £2.5 million on a turnover of £26.6 million, its latest accounts…
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Latest property news
Agent spend on Rightmove rises by 10% last year to £922 a month
Agents spent 10% more listing their properties on Rightmove during 2017 than the year before, pushing their average monthly spend on the portal to £922 a month, its latest results show. This helped increase its revenue by 11% to £243.3m and operating profit by 10% to £178.3m. This means, its results show, that it has an extraordinary profit margin of 75.8%. The company says the increase in revenue is largely down to agents buying more of its products, data and services. “As the industry becomes more digital our software has become even more valuable to our customers with 90% of our Agency members making use of it each month,” says Rightmove’s CEO Peter Brooks-Johnson (pictured). Peter also reveals in the results that the company has been concentrating on renters over the past year, which is not surprising given the sluggish sales market and the decrease in ownership in recent years. Rightmove’s shareholders will also be happy – the cash rich company, which has also been buying back its share regularly throughout 2017, paid dividends totalling £140.4m last year, up from £131.3m in 2016. Rightmove’s site traffic also continues to run at full tilt – its site was visited 1.5 billion…
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Latest property news
Huge difference in traffic to three main property portals revealed by latest ZPG results
ZPG has revealed how much traffic it drives to its various property portals and, the latest figures show, they were visited 68 million times during January, trailing Rightmove by 52 million visits on average but well ahead of OnTheMarket’s 14 million. ZPG’s figures includes 58 million visits to its three property portals; Zoopla, PrimeLocation and SmartNewHomes, while the remaining ten million visits were to its other websites such as uSwitch and the recently-acquired Money. ZPG also says its property websites enjoyed a 10% year-on-year uplift in traffic and, as evidenced by the sea of faces staring at smartphones in Britain’s streets and train carriages, that 60% of its portal traffic now comes via mobile devices. Property portals Visits to its comparison website uSwtich increased by 7% year-on-year, the company says. “We’ve had a great start to the year with a record of over two million visits per day to our websites in January,” says ZPG CEO Alex Chesterman (pictured, left). “These figures demonstrate that consumers are highly engaged with the services we provide and that we continue to deliver incredible exposure, value and results for our partners.” These latest ZPG figures would suggest that Rightmove’s average monthly visitor figure of…
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Latest property news
Proptech firm claims it can help agents banish email ‘tyre kickers’
Estate agents will soon be able to automatically sort out the useful portal email leads from the tyre kickers following the launch of a new proptech service. OneDome says its OneLead product will enable estate agents to respond instantly to any buyer or vendor email enquiry coming in from Rightmove, Zoopla or OnTheMarket and work out which kind of customer they are and then direct them to either a valuations or viewings booking page. The system generates an automated reply answer to an email enquiry depending on the information within it, helping agents answer them more quickly and filtering out the ‘chaff from the wheat’, it is claimed. OneDome says Rightmove’s own figures show that 65% of vendor and buyer leads from the portals arrive out of hours. “Consumer expectations are greater than ever and they expect instant gratification,” says OneDome CEO Babek Ismayil (pictured, left). “When sending an enquiry form from a portal, buyers often get a slow response or no reply at all because agents find that many of the enquiries they get from portals are low quality, or worse, spam. “This discourages agents from responding and unfortunately, this means that high quality enquiries are missed.” The company…
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Features
How did the big property portals take over the industry?
Andrea Kirkby takes a tour through the property portals 10 years on...
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Latest property news
Asking price reductions at their highest for five years, says Rightmove
Over a third of properties for sale in the UK have had their original asking prices cut since being listed, says the latest Rightmove house price index. At 37% of all existing homes for sale, this is the highest proportion dropping their prices during the autumn months for five years (see graph below), the portal says. This pushed down asking prices by 0.8% during October, the index shows, with price reductions heaviest at the top of property ladder. Rightmove says it’s a buyers’ market now and that vendors should be “wary of over-pricing” and that holding out for a Stamp Duty reduction in next week’s Budget statement to boost buyer activity. Price cutting following the Summer market high-point is a pre-Xmas tradition within the property market but the proportion of homes for sale being cut in price has been rising over the past three years and is now at a peak. “In the run-up to the festive season many sellers are trying to tempt distracted buyers to look at their property by dangling the bauble of more attractive pricing given the quieter time of year and more challenging market,” says Miles Shipside (pictured, right). “Many sellers who have been on…
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Housing Market
Too good to be true? Rightmove says sales up 5% across UK
The number of homes sold in the UK during September is nearly 5% higher than last year, latest research from Rightmove reveals. The portal also says people’s earnings are now rising faster than house prices rises, the first time this has happened since the early noughties. Rightmove’s monthly house price index says “demand remains strong for the right property at the right price” but that prices are rising by 1.1% on average across the UK, the lowest annual rise since February 2012. The portal says the average price for a home in the UK during September is 313,663, down from £330,003 in August and a 1.2% drop despite the overall annual rise. It’s part of a trend that has included drops in price or very weak increases since June. This trend bucks the usual post-Summer bounce that the property market enjoys as buyers and sellers stimulate the market after their return from holidays and activity ramps up. Damp squib Rightmove blames this“damp squib” Autumn market on London’s faltering performance, where prices dropped by 2.9% during September, although prices have been falling month-on-month elsewhere including in Wales (-3.3%), the South West (-0.7%) and the West Midlands (-1.3%). London is the only…
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Latest property news
Dolls’ house listed by agent on Rightmove receives serious enquiries
If you think the pictures of this property for sale on Rightmove from Cotswolds and Warwickshire estate agent Peter Clarke & Co are a little odd, then you’d be right. Because the three-bedroom property in Shipston-upon-Stour is really a dolls’ house uploaded to Rightmove in a bid to raise cash for a local charity. This didn’t stop one keen buyer asking to arrange a viewing at the property, branch manager Sally Coombs (pictured, below) told the BBC. It’s not surprising that the enquirer became confused. The property’s listing on Rightmove has been written to sound like a real one, albeit in a tongue-in-cheek way. Sally’s listing for property goes into a lot of detail, describing it as a classic Georgian house and that the roof and front elevations swing open to “reveal beautiful accommodation set on three floors, and it is part furnished”. She also thinks it would make a fantastic Christmas present and would “be bound to give years of joy for your children or grandchildren”. Peter Clarke & Co told the local paper that the idea came about when a local charity it is involved with called Shipston Home Nursing asked if a dolls house they wanted to…
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Latest property news
Rightmove revenue per agent rises by 10%, latest results show
The latest Rightmove results reveal that it has increased how much it receives in revenue from each agent every month by 10% year on year from £789 to £865. It also says it has seen a 1% increase in the number of agencies listing with the portal, in part due to the number of Purplebricks Local Property Experts listing on the site as ‘branch equivalents’. Rightmove says the price rise has come from an increase in prices and agents signing up to additional services, in particular its Optimiser product which helps an agent’s properties stand out more in their local area. Some 2,000 member agents have signed up to the service thus far, up from 1,000 a year ago, and Rightmove says agents who sign up to the package spend a minimum of £1,500 a month compared to the £780 average revenue per agent spent by non-Optimiser agents. Reporting on risks and uncertainties in the coming months within the UK housing market, Rightmove paints a relatively gloomy picture. It highlights how housing transactions were down 8% during the first six months of the year compared to last year, although it points out that transaction are up compared to the same period…
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Latest property news
Property market is over EU referendum shock, claims Rightmove
Rightmove says the property market has recovered from the shock of the EU Referendum with more sellers coming to market and more people buying than a year ago. Its latest house price index reveals that there were 4.6% more sales agreed last month compared to June 2016, and 7.6% more properties coming to the market. “The half way point of 2017 is a useful time to make a comparison with the previous year and the number of sales being agreed by agents is uncannily within fractions of a percent of the number at the same half-way point of last year,” says Miles Shipside of Rightmove (pictured, left). “This year and last year have had their own shocks and distortions, but these statistics show that the distractions have been short-lived and have now evened themselves out. “While the number of existing owners coming to market this month is up in eight out of ten regions compared to a year ago, giving more fresh choice, it has to be kept in mind that the comparison is against a subdued new listing period in 2016 around the time of the referendum.” Despite the upbeat market data, prices are at a “virtual standstill” across…
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