Rightmove profits climb 39% as more agents sign up

News Category: Industry News

A rise in the number of agents and an overall willingness to pay more to Rightmove has helped the portal giant to a 39% rise in profits.

Rightmove this morning released its half-year results for the six months up to June 30.

Share prices in Rightmove rose 25p yesterday, ahead of the announcement. This morning, they rose another 9p.

There has been a 7% increase in the number of advertisers with high retention rates and more estate agency branches opening. The number of agents advertising on Rightmove now stands at 17,993.

The company says agents are also choosing to adopt more of the additional range of advertising products with discretionary spend seeing an 89% increase and overall spend per advertiser up by 20%.

This has helped Rightmove increase revenue from continuing operations by 26% to £39.2m (2009: £31.2m) and underlying operating profit from continuing operations by 39% to £26.8m (2009: £19.3m).

Page impressions are up 22% to 3.9bn (2009: 3.2bn), which puts Rightmove into the top ten UK websites. Market share of page impressions on the top four UK property websites has also increased from 80% to 82%.

Ed Williams, managing director, said: “The strength of home hunter activity on Rightmove in what remains a very challenging housing market saw site traffic rise by 22%.

“We continue to develop Rightmove for the benefit of home hunters and our advertisers, and the record traffic figures and growth in advertisers show Rightmove is delivering. 

“We now give our advertisers the opportunity to convey who they are, what they do and what they offer, in addition to promoting the individual properties they have on their books. 

“Someone buying a home in the UK today is most likely to have first seen it on Rightmove. So how estate agents choose to advertise on Rightmove can make a major difference to their business success. The impact of this additional spending can be clearly seen in the financial results.”
 
The site’s record-breaking traffic has continued into August when Rightmove recorded its two busiest days ever. Pages served on August 10 topped 25.4m, but the record was broken again on August 17 with 25.5m pages.

Rightmove also this morning announced another round of TV advertising to hit screens on September 15, the third set of TV ads for Rightmove this year. This week, competitor Zoopla launched its first TV ad campaign and claimed that it was the only one of the major portals which had grown its traffic.


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