OnTheMarket has announced that it now has listing agreements with over 8,500 agent branches – an addition of 3,000 since it listed on the stock market on February 9.
OTM said this represents growth of over 54% in under four months. It said it believes 45% of UK agency branches now list with it.
CEO Ian Springett said the latest milestone was achieved just two weeks after reaching 8,000 offices.
He said: “In sustaining this pace of expansion, we are very strongly encouraged by the growing agent support and feedback to our proposition.”
In response, the share price ended the day up 5p at 181p, well above the 165p that the shares were first offered to investors.
OTM also earned itself the first ‘buy’ rating from an analyst.
Alastair Stewart of Stockdale Securities said the rate of new branches joining OTM appears to be accelerating, and that TV and outdoor advertising seems to be generating “heavier engagement from consumers – a key tool in attracting further agent take-up”.
He also pointed to increasing traffic to the portal and 1m email alerts set up by consumers.
He said there was “further and possibly growing momentum in agent sign-ups and encouraging engagement with their target consumers”.
Comments (8)
They are offering for free till Feb 28 next year. The gameplan seems like they want to get maximum agents on board and then when they have a substantial amount of Agents then they will come up with a basis of convincing us that as they have 60-70% of Agents they now will charge you XYZ amount from next year. Should have done this earlier. But it they’re thinking of even charging close to Zoopla they are sadly mistaken. The same 10s of 1000s would simply leave you after the free period and they’ll see that they’re back to where they were. They should make all the signing up members as shareholders and at a reasonable price for the admin of the site per month. RM is around £1000 a month on the average. Zoopla is around £400 . OTM think will charge £300 plus VAT. Don’t think anyone would leave Z for a mere £100. If it’s £100-£150 a month and they manage to convince to keep the 60% Agents on their books then maybe it will be challenging the monopolies soon or else it’s another failed attempt and loss to shareholders
There is any easy way for Rightmove to solve this problem…..
Offer all agents the chance to be shareholders and reduce fees to around £300+vat per month on the proviso that agents commit for 5 years.
I’m happy to pay for stuff like vendor/landlord leads but the other non essential silly add ons can be included in the £300.
Let’ talk Rightmove.
Should change the name to “Cannot be trusted”
Based on the values placed on Zoopla and Rightmove, the potential for OTM’s share price is quite dramatic. The strategy of getting the agents on is working, getting the views needs to happen but with this sort of growth, I would think they will get strong institutional support.
Perhaps some of the naysayers should by some shares, it would make being wrong a little less bitter.
Maybe another range of swingeing price rises from RM and the Z sale to an American company has meant the smell of coffee has finally wafted through.
I still don’t understand why this wasn’t done before stock market listing. Surely the larger number of listing agents would have meant being able to raise more money, when the time came.
I wonder what will happen though when estate agents have to start paying for OTM?
Ask Zoopla, it’s what they did when they set up themselves to challenge RM by posing as our saviours.
Of course they then went on to pull the trousers down of the people that believed them by becoming a RM v2. If they hadn’t done that there would never have been a need for OTM.