Yahoo Finance Rightmove profits surge as it attracts record number of customers
Online property portal Rightmove shrugged off concerns over the state of the housing market as customer numbers hit record levels and profits surged by nearly 10pc.
Rightmove said it enjoyed a 1pc jump in customer numbers to an all-time high of 20,358 in the six months to the end of June. Pre-tax profits rose 9pc in the first half of the year, up from £80.6m to £87.5m, while revenues were up 11pc to £120m.
The spike in profits came despite an 8pc drop in housing transactions in the first half, against a tough comparison with 2016, when buyers rushed to move ahead of stamp duty changes.
But research by UBS found that Rightmove was losing market share to its main rival Zoopla, and added that unlike its competitor, which has invested in technology start-ups and acquired price comparison site uSwitch, Rightmove has less room to grow.
Richard Eary, an analyst at UBS, said: "Rightmove faces a declining customer commission pool, has a customer base which is consolidating and is not actively pursuing adjacent revenue opportunities."
Peter Brooks-Johnson, the chief executive, said that it had a third more stock listed online than Zoopla, and that 75pc of all time spent on major property portals was spent on Rightmove. He insisted there was room to grow, such as taking more listings from newspapers.
He added: "There’s £130m worth of advertising in the local press - it surprises me but it's there if you look for it. There are a lot of property pages and they’re expensive, static and once a week."
The average revenue Rightmove received per advertiser rose by 10pc to £911 per month in the period, while website traffic rose 3pc to 131.8m per month.
Rightmove also announced a 16pc increase in its interim dividend to 22p, which Hargreaves Lansdown fund manager Charlie Huggins described as the “icing on the cake”.
He said: “This growth is all the more impressive given the difficult housing market backdrop. Rightmove’s traditional estate agency customers are under immense pressure from the low level of housing transactions and the assault from much cheaper online-only agents such as Purplebricks.
“The fact that many of Rightmove’s customers are choosing to spend more in this environment is a great vote of confidence in the platform, and a sign of just how dependent they’ve become on the group in today’s digital age.”
