OnTheMarket shares begin trading at £1.63p, plummets to £1.48p

Shares in OnTheMarket began trading on London’s AIM stock market today kicking off at £1.63p, valuing the company at £100 million, and quickly rising by 2p to £1.65 before dropping to £1.48p by end of trading on Friday. The OnThemarket shares issue, which it says has raised £30m out of a hoped-for £50m to finance its battle for market share with Rightmove and ZPG, is the conclusion of a long and tortuous road for CEO Ian Springett’s ambitious portal project. It launched in January 2015 two years after founding members Knight Frank, Savills, Strutt & Parker and Chestertons first convened to form parent company Agents’ Mutual Ltd. OnTheMarket.com positioned itself as a mutual organisation of agent members, but introduced a controversial ‘one other portal’ rules that made agents choose between either Rightmove or Zoopla as their ‘other portal’. Last year agent Gascoigne Halman took OnTheMarket to court, claiming the ‘one other portal’ rule was anti-competitive, but lost the case. This cleared the way for OnTheMarket to demutualise, which took place following a vote of its 2,700 agent members late last year. Former members of the mutual organisation were allocated share options based on their size of listing and length of…

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