Rightmove plc

right now we officially start so good morning and welcome to the presentation of right moves results for 2025 I'm joined today by Rory hook our CFO sitting here we'll be here in a second first a couple of takeaways our 2025 performance showed strong continued delivery in a competitive market and we will step up the pace further in 26 we continue to deliver compelling value from and across our platform to both core and other partners We have a very strong position with consumers, partners and our data. And with our AI capability, we're enhancing all of that even further. We continue to deliver our proposition. We're executing our strategy. We're excited about all future opportunities to further digitize the UK property sector. Now, we delivered some really strong KPIs for last year. Revenue growth of 9% was supported by ARPA and membership increases in the core business, as well as contribution from growth in our strategic growth areas. Underlying operating profit growth of 9% reflects our revenue growth and ongoing investments in people, technology, and product delivery. Underlying EPS grew by 11%, and we increased capital returned by 21%. And finally, time on site at 16.8 billion minutes was the second highest on record, only beaten by the COVID exceptional burst in 21. Said differently, the equivalent of 32,000 years of time was spent on the Rightmove platform last year. We made some strong operational progress as well, right across the platform last year. So from the left, over 85% of that large audience came through direct and organic traffic, and we grew our app users by a strong 11%. We continue to evolve to meet consumers wherever they are, and we doubled our engagement numbers in social media channels. We saw strong penetration of our top packages in estate agency and new homes. as well as a very fast start for our latest and market unique estate agency on product online agent valuation our agency retention was the second highest in over 10 years and third party surveys showed record positive sentiment scores for rightmove we continued our strategic and operational progress and growth in the strategic growth areas and all of this was delivered through rightmove's platform and leading data we did over 6 000 tech releases And after multi year build, we now have 31 live strategic AI projects at year end. It's an increase of four on our November update, and we tripled the number of data models used to process our proprietary data in the platform. This strong stance is down to purposeful work and investments over the most recent years and has a strong trajectory for future product delivery. And finally, on people, we have a world class engaged and energized team. 89% of our team described Rightmove as a great place to work. So, my sincere thanks to all hard and smart working Rightmovers for delivering our results of last year. It is a competitive market out there, but our position is stable and it's strong. And that's because we keep delivering great value for both consumers and partners. We remain the leading place for consumers looking to make a move in UK property. And while facing various competitive dynamics over time, we have for years averaged over 70% share of portal time on similar web and over 80% on com score. In December 25, we were at 75% and 89% respectively. That love and trust from consumers drives frequency leads and of course a lot of data signals. And those enable us to drive strong outcomes and value for our over 19,000 UK estate agents and new homes partners. Now I want to touch on that value point a bit. We operate in a competitive market and we always gauge how we can do even better. So we commission third-party surveys quarterly with over 1,600 independent agents contributing responses. The top left chart here shows that the total positive sentiment scores from those surveys. There are two big takeaways. One, just in absolute terms, we've seen a positive trend and a new record high actually by the end of last year. Market conditions and general sentiment out there often impacts our responses. So in the context of the weaker Q4 in the property market through the UK budget hesitance, that's actually an excellent result. And two, in relative terms, you can see a 1.7 times differential between Rightmove and the main portal competitors. Now, we ask for feedback at branch frontline, branch management level, and company management levels. And we also go deep on several subcategories. you can see that we lead across subcategories across business results value and inclusive services at the bottom of this chart so we rate really well in what's a competitive market yet we of course always look for opportunities to improve and for all partners part of the value and those strong scores come from our building success together program which we launched in early 2024. We invest resource in supporting our partners business objectives. We also help them to understand what happens in the market and what Rightmove can bring. And as noted top right this comes in many forms and a true scale. Dedicated account management in the field are Rightmove plus and Rightmove hub tools which are both available to all partners regardless of package levels. We're sponsoring and collaborating with several leading industry organizations across the state agency, new homes and rental operators. We continue to invest in and progress these two right move plus as an example is the business management tool for partners last year alone had new features and enhancements introduced over 25 times. And our partners engagement value from right to plus is clear 28 million sessions recorded in the year. So in summary, we deliver right move outcomes and value. from a broad range of solutions packages products data insight training dedicated servicing through our account management and support teams and we measure these results now let's move to the property and markets for a bit within sales top left here it was really a year or two halves h1 was strong building on 2024 and with successive bank of england rate calls rate cuts H2 was weaker year to year due to the fears around the late autumn budget. If you take them together 2025 as a whole, so 10% more completions versus 24. And that was in line with long term long term averages. Looking at the year ahead, top right, there's been a clear post budget bounce back in available stock, which is now at a 10 year high. This is called slower price growth, which is of course supportive for buyers in the market. Now these elevated levels of resale stock is less helpful for new homes developers. So on the bottom right here shows new homes as a proportion of total for sales stock on our site. And with approved planning action applications at an all time low, we don't expect the material recovery of the development numbers in the market in H1 this year. With the rentals bottom left, increased supply and reduced demand continues to improve the more extreme imbalance seen in previous years and which we have talked about. So the 2025 average of 10 inquirers per available property is still above the pre-COVID average of 6 to 7, though. And across all these segments, of course, mortgage rates is a key driver, and it continues on a steady downward trajectory. At the 31st of January, the average five-year fixed rate was 4.35%. That's 55 bps lower than a year earlier, and that's per Right News Daily Mortgage Tracker. So with that, let me pass over to Rory for more detail on our financials.

Thank you, Johan. Good morning, everyone. I'm delighted to present our financial results for 2025. Overall revenue grew 9% compared to 2024 with strong growth across the business. Starting with agency row one in the table revenues increased by 9% to 305 million. If you look at the chart on the right, the light blue bars show that this growth was driven primarily by ARPA led gains, which continue to be mainly discretionary. An additional contribution of 6 million came from increased agency membership numbers. And moving down the table to new homes, revenues here also rose 9% to 75 million. This was in spite of continued headwinds in the new homes and market with new builds coming to the market remaining subdued. You can see the impact of this in the chart with a dark green showing revenue growth contribution of less than 1 million from higher average membership increasing by 1%. The ARPA growth contribution remains strong, contributing 5 million. At the bottom of the table, our strategic growth areas delivered another strong performance. Revenue increased by 5.7 million, up 25% to 29.1 million. Commercial revenues grew 13% to 15.3 million as we continue to focus on customer acquisition with membership increasing 29% year on year. Mortgages revenue was up almost 50% to 6.8 million. This was weighted towards the first half of the year, mainly reflecting the timing of interest rate changes and hesitancy in the property market around the budget impacting activity in H2. rental services made up of our lead to keys product, referencing and ancillary services. So revenues up 35% driven by strong growth across the lead to keys products. For completeness, the non SGA parts of other revenues being data services, overseas and third party advertising grew 2% year on year. revenues outside the core represented 11% of group revenue up from 10% last year. compared to december 2024 across agency and new homes membership increased by 225 up one percent to 19 272 this increase was due to growth in agent agency membership which increased by 261 up two percent on december 2024 this was due to high agency retention of 90 continued growth in agent formation as well as current partners opening new branches Within new homes, we saw a year-on-year decline of 36 developments, down 1% at year-end. You can see in the bottom right chart a decrease of traditional developments in orange of 113, offset by an increase in housing associations in teal of 77. New developments coming on site remain low. We are not seeing a pickup in build rates and have seen traditional developments fall to their lowest level since January 2018. We do not see this changing in H1, but continue to be optimistic that developers will be encouraged to build more by H2 and in future years. Overall ARPA increased by £97 to £1,621. 60% of ARPA growth was product-led. with similar percentage in both agency and new homes as our partners chose to upgrade or purchase incremental product. The remaining 40% of ARPA growth came from contract renewals, which all proceeded as expected. Given partner engagement with our strong suite of value adding products, we expect a similar split this year. In terms of product ARPA growth, we saw upgrades in agency come from multiple sources. ranging from upgrades through the package ladder from lower threshold packages to new joiners joining straight into the top package you can see this in the pie chart for optimizer edge joiners in the middle of this slide the migration of the old top package optimizer 2020 has gone well and will be fully retired by h1 joiners and new homes to the advanced package shown top right similarly came from upgrades and new joiners We had a new top package, Ascend, launch in May, with 818, 28% of developments live at the end of the year. We expect a similar split of upgrades going straight into this top package, but flag that the advanced package remains highly attractive, especially for smaller developers. So expect to still see good inbound into advanced next year. taking these two pie charts together you can see that key for both new homes and agency is that we do not rely on a single source of joiners to the top package and expect penetration to continue to increase in both the other driver of arpa grove comes from incremental product purchase you can see from the charts at the bottom for both estate agency and new homes arpa increases at the initial upgrade in month one this is the column marked upgrade Then we see ARPA increase across the first year and the second year. In both estate agency and new homes, you can see that ARPA keeps growing far past the initial upgrade. This happens as partners choose to purchase more of the same products or add additional products to their package mix. We've shown the previous top package in agency optimizer 2020 and a new homes advanced to illustrate how we have seen this before. and that the initial months of the new top packages in both agency and new homes are performing as we expect and have seen previously we know that continuing to provide great value and superior outcomes to our partners through continually evolving and new products sees them choose to engage further also at the end of last year we added online agent valuation exclusive to optimizer edge partners and with an average price of 170 pounds providing both another reason to upgrade to the top package and also encouraging existing partners to increase their current product spend. Moving on to costs underlying operating costs increased by 11 million year on year resulting in a 70% underlying margin as we invested with discipline and within our cost framework. The main driver of costs remains our investment in people, up 4.6 million or 7%. The other main cost component was our continued investment across technology, with an increase of 4 million. In the year there was 9 million of internal labour capitalisation, with total capex at 10 million. As guided in November, we expect to see an increase in labour capitalisation in 2026, with total capex to be around 16 million, less than 4% of revenue. In 2026, we will see investment as outlined last November, which will mainly be in people. We anticipate over 100 joining before the end of the year in roles across data, product and engineering. A few of these roles will be through our new flexible resource provider, which will provide us with the flexibility of headcount over the investment phase. other material increase in cost will be the ai powered operations area with work on the back office initial phase already commencing all in post capitalization this incremental investment is expected to total around 12 million in 2026 as guided in november we remain highly cash generative with a cash conversion ratio of 107 percent of operating profit As we continue to grow the strong cash generation of our business, this leaves us well placed to return surplus cash to shareholders. This year, a total of 220 million was returned to shareholders, 141 million via share buybacks and 79 million via dividends, an increase of 21% year on year. We reduced our share count by 2%, meaning over 40% of issued shares have now been repurchased and returned 6% of our year-end market capitalization in the year. This morning, we announced a final dividend of 6.59p, bringing the total dividend to 10.64p. There will also be a share buyback program of 90 million until the 31st of July. This will be funded by the growth in earnings, but also reducing cash reserves from December's 43 million to around 20 million by half year, which we see is sufficient to manage the working capital of the business going forward. Our capital allocation policy remains prioritize investment in the business, evaluate value accretive M&A and return all surplus cash to shareholders via progressive dividends linked to earnings and buy back thereafter. turning to financial guidance this remains the same as set out in november looking at the right hand of this slide revenue growth in 2026 will be between eight and ten percent we expect h1 growth to be lower than the full year 2026 growth with a higher growth percentage in h2 this is due to the high comparator in h1 last year particularly in mortgages which saw significant activity in h1 2025 due to the stamp duty changes and falling interest rates and in new homes due to the full year impact of 36 developments fewer developments contributing a negative revenue comparator of around one and a half million for core we anticipate that membership will grow around one percent and we lifted ARPA growth to between £110 to £120. At an overall level for the SGAs, we anticipate growth to be around 20% to 30% range. Underlying operating profit will grow by 3% to 5%, resulting in an underlying operating margin no lower than 67%. With no change to our longer-term target set out in November, we anticipate underlying operating profit growth in later years to be at similar levels to revenue growth as we still see no reason for a margin lower than 67%. That concludes the financials. I'll now hand you back to Johan.

All right.

Thank you, Rory. so our investment case outline here will be familiar to most and this summarizes our approach to value creation at rightmove on the left rightmove has exceptionally strong foundations we have established a differentiated leading platform at the heart of the uk's large and structurally growing property market the platform is digital low cost capital light driving higher returns in capital the subscription-based b2b model has a proven ability to deliver and generate value in all market conditions Moving to the middle of the diagram, we're using powerful data and profound network effects to deliver that value to all stakeholders. And with it, we're executing an expanded growth strategy with targeted investment and delivering data and AI back product innovation. And that is done through a high caliber and very energized team. We're entering now our 27th year with confidence to deliver a larger diversified yet very connected writing platform. All said, this will continue to deliver compelling financial outcomes. Now our strategy is to develop the leading digital ecosystem for the whole moving experience powered by exceptional data and network effects. And our people, data and platform really are the foundations and strong differentiators for the three business pillars of core partner, consumer and new growth. The property market is a huge economic activity, and we think there's a long runway to deliver more digital value and grow our business. And that, of course, includes the use of AI. Now, there's been a lot of debate who the winners and losers might be, both for classifieds and more recently across a range of industries, really. So I want to talk to property classifieds specifically. In my view, there are really four components you need to win to compete effectively also in an AI world. Consumers, partners, data, and AI capability. We're really well positioned across all of these. We were well positioned before Gen AI, and we will be with the next generations of AI as well. And here's why. We're a technology company. we built up market leadership through deep knowledge digital leadership and deep layers of servicing our industry in the first three of these four components and that's been done over 25 years and at an increasing pace we keep doing that day in day out improving all the time the numbers are leading and they're deep now the most recent components of these four is of course ai capability ai models and tools they're fast developing it's dynamic and they're not fully defined yet here's the thing though Anybody can get a hold of AI capability It's an enabling technology that you can buy skills you can hire and that you can learn to operate We've done exactly that and for several years already So what right move has is a very very solid performance And performant platform a business model. It's creating the fundamental attributes that are mentioned here important to any business success and and in turn they all boil down to two things which again deliver true business results and sustained leadership trust and vertical innovation now we obviously thought a lot about this in our view in the case of property classifieds is that LLMs or startups running on LLMs are missing or quite far away on three of these four components that matter so much in this particular vertical ChatGPT has been around now for three years Yet referral traffic to us is still under half a percent. Actually, their UK app downloads and traffic has leveled off in the last five or so months. But more so, I don't think they or other horizontal LLMs can or want to service our vertical as deeply and focused as we and others do, nor to innovate as relentlessly and deep in the specialty of it. Now, I'll be very open-eyed and give the large LLMs the upper hand of AI capability and AI innovation overall. But remember, again, they actually enable and sell that capability to buyers like ourselves. So as we add this AI capability to Rightmove, we combine it with the first three components that we already have and that are so strong. We're in the best place of anybody to innovate and service this vertical in new and even better ways. I'm actually going to go and cover these four components in a bit more detail because it's so important and so topical. Let's start with consumer and partner. You're familiar with network effects and how they're part of a great business like Rightmove and how we invest in them. But I think it's very important to understand that in the case of home exchanges, there are three special aspects of these network effects which make them even stronger for property classifieds and certainly in the UK. So first, in the middle, property transactions, they're high value, highly personal, take a particularly long time in this country, and they're very often done in joint deliberation with another person. There's also an incredible amount of browsing done on properties because of two things. Homes are fun to dream of or to be inspired by and also because finding the right one and really deciding when it's time to move is such a serious and important life decision that comes at a high price. So the habit loops are therefore massive. This is very different from a number of B2C categories like e-commerce or research of different kinds where AI or agents can provide an alternative and shortcut path. And secondly, to the left here, the same consumer actually plays multiple roles. If you consider the four key roles who use Rightmove and their multiple use, very often a buyer is also a seller and a seller is also a buyer in the same chain of events or at different points in life. There are two and a half million private landlords in the UK renting to tenants. And those landlords, of course themselves, live and move. There are parents who help their kids with a rental or a first-time purchase while they themselves might be downsizing or buying a second home. So here's the point. The individual gets value from the same property platform for many different needs. They've seen it in the past, they know what the quality is, and they are being in different roles. So the platform is trusted, it's specialized, and it has all these different audience roles. So in a way this forms like a consumer side individual individualized network effect in itself not just across to the other side of the platform again that's very different to for example e-commerce and other verticals where the consumer might only be a buyer and thirdly of course in the uk property vertical there's a diverse nature of our partner base estate agents new homes developments developers rental operators commercial and smaller niches and even in a single branch estate agency you can have sales weddings commercial potential financial services a business owner and branch staff the UK partner is very fragmented and with low barriers to entry and there are many many different roles that benefit from being on the platform agents are local property experts and they can access a highly effective audience platform and with a lot of services included to power their business goals So in our view, when you combine these three points, property complexity, consumer multi use, and agent diversity, you realize that the trusted and vertically specialized UX of the portal will not be replaced by generic or horizontal AI interfaces. Now, let's talk about the fourth component AI capability. We've been building a great tech and data AI capability for a few years now, as we reported on several times since 2023. and the simplified and i know it's simplified tech stack view on the left here outlines how our core platform is built on google cloud with logically connected enterprise tools like bigquery looker model armor vertex ai and so forth and is running ai models from google like gemini nano banana and so forth now we have a closed strategic and product team collaboration also with google and we are actually working together and we have a good view on what's coming in the future And we have orchestrated the platform, the stack, the pipelines, to nevertheless be flexible, performant, and trustworthy. So we have relationships with, and we also use, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, and a host of smaller solutions. Some of those smaller ones are pure play AI. Some of them are AI-enabled existing software. Our data science team, they can build and connect proprietary right-move data models, or external models, or a combination of them. in November we showed you one example of the proprietary model and how it uplifts the results something that is only possible for us because we're in the stack at the end the stack enables us to deliver more value and differentiated outcomes for partners and consumers and of course gain operational leverage and productivity for ourselves the 31 strategic initiatives plus a whole host of many more AI tests across the business today will soon be less of a number counting exercise and rather, it's going to be completely infused in an organic way of operating. We're perfectly set up to leverage AI capabilities. Now, I'll come back to a very crucial component, data. We estimate that over 90% of our data is proprietary. It's also interconnected and we leverage it with human expertise and usage in mind. This data is not available anywhere else and it keeps compounding inside our ecosystem. we've shown you many examples of large data sets in the past here just outlining a few examples but to illustrate how unique and valuable this data is for property as an example we have over 28 million unique properties on our right move optimized uprn address framework and someone might say well that's all scrapable isn't it fact is that over 50 of the metadata underpinning a right move listing is not scrapable from the face of our site for partners we have for example built 57 000 defined geographic agent patches we dynamically optimize them with our data and also with input and tailoring from our partner agents that drive unique insights products and great outcomes for consumers for example again the 69 billion first party signals they don't only provide that strong habit loop that i mentioned before but they of course convert outcomes through moving auction strength of buyers and sellers again they also drive unique products insights and recommendations and provide fodder for what we develop next now the real magic and protection is how those and many more data points are interconnected in the platform there are a few more examples in the middle the data compounds and it fortifies And finally, in the third column, but not to be forgotten, we overlay our human expertise to enrich this data, being completely vertically focused. We also make sure it delivers real outcomes and value for humans that is using the data. All said, we hold the living map of UK property moving. The value is not in AI itself. It's what AI can deliver when it sits on the best property data in the UK. So to sum it all up, we combine these four components. What we have is one connected ecosystem already powered by data, and it's enhanced by AI. All right, so over to some of the concrete product delivery that drove the 2025 results and a bit of a glimpse towards 26 and onwards as well. We increase the pace of delivery in 25 with only a few of the features illustrated here. I'm going to talk to the renters checklist on the left. It's an important example because it's part of our rental market solutions to digitally enable more of the moving journey. We see some strong growth metrics in 2025. A few of them are noted here. And with this renters checklist for consumers, we put all the tenancy admin in one place on my right move, seamlessly integrating it with things like open banking and verifications on what to do next. The average user revisited their checklist eight times. The information is stored in the right movie account so it can be reused. That of course builds a lifetime value opportunity for us. Like many other products, this product also helps the other side of the platform. In this case, lettings agencies. They benefit from operational efficiency through the enhanced leads and seamlessly have those in their CRM. Now they can also operate the entire flow digitally in the right move plus environment from referencing deposits and many more things all the way to contracts. Quick step back to the outline from November of how we're accelerating the consumer demand going forward. Number one is that we're adding and enhancing ways of searching. Number two is that we're accelerating our services in a consumer home moving journey, what we call beyond find. And here are about two examples of what we're working on. The move journey assistant set up for sales and the expansion of my right move into my home, a full service hub for homeowners. Now across the consumer domain, we have around 25 key releases or so planned for 2026. And for context, that's more than the entire platform consumer and partner sites together delivered in 2023. Now I want to expand a bit on conversational search, no surprise, which were launched only a few weeks ago to limited amount of traffic. So here's just a demo of what it looks like. I'm going to talk over while you follow this. So this experience and feature is built through our partnership with Google Cloud using Gemini models. It's trained on and interrogates our listings, text, and images, and we use our over one billion proprietary image database and many attributes that goes into the listings. As of today, it links straight into listings on the main site. we'll evolve this tool led by the data that we see and our design expertise and we're going to make sure that we deliver a high quality experience data so far from thousands of conversations tells us that users seem to have a pretty good idea of what they're looking for they continue to explore and engage with tools in the main flow of listings and on the site and so far those who engage with conversational search are almost three times more likely to send a lead versus a control group overall feedback has been very positive now I want to consider a little bit the conversational assistance and searching a bit more strategically now first on the left here this is really in many ways it's just a continuum of changes however you discover we have you covered right so we're entering another search modality or paradigm for consumers and our position is the same as that has been with previous changes discovery is key right The classic behavior, visual scrolling and comparing properties, I believe will always be there. But longer term, I also think this holds a real amplification opportunity for Rightmove. Conversational search will enable hyper personalization and new utility for consumers on our platform that I couldn't get before. So AI assistance will be useful up and down the funnel and seamlessly provide complementary information along a complex moving journey on the platform. This will drive two things higher platform engagement and substantially more intent and behavioral data signals. And we can convert that data signal to increased value and targeting for core partners and for diversified revenue opportunities, just like we have done in the past. Now we have already started a few years back to build many more of these consumer features with exactly that in mind. And you can see some of this in the graph and in the table metrics here. Impressive growth, and a lot of that comes from well-defined features and, of course, the scale of the audience and traffic that we can apply them to. Every feature we build is research and data-backed. It brings utility, frequency, and data to us on an ongoing basis. And with it, as noted right here, we create enhanced partner value and, of course, revenue opportunity for Rightmove. some of these improve or enable new products for core partners for example the enhanced leads to lettings agents with the appointment bookings with the new homes ascent package others are monetized separate through commercial relationships that we have like for example mortgages or ancillary lettings products and here's the thing as we scale and compound this data we just increase the revenue and profit opportunities now over to the department side We released significantly more product and optimizations also for partners in 25. A few key ones are set up in this slide. And I want to highlight online agent valuation on the left as we mentioned before. It's soft launched in the fall. It's off to a great start. This tool works on both sides of the platform. It enables consumers to receive a digital valuation estimate from an estate agency with a quick turnaround and it's an opportunity for agents to start a new online relationship with a potential vendor through our platform it leverages and reinforces our existing valuation domain of various tools slotting in very logically with instant valuation locum valuation alerts best price and premium price guides and so forth and agents in this case can also choose to use an ai tool to support the responses in oab And for those that do, we have seen so far in data that the response times are 16% faster on average, and the cohort actually books 20% more visits. So OAV, I think is a good example of where AI is an enhancer of an already great digital product with real value. But AI is not the entire product itself. Finally, with OAB, Rightmuse platform also gets more data signals through up-to-date photos and property attributes supplied by the consumer. And this is before the property becomes a listing and gets put on the market. That, of course, can feed into our AVM, which is a business line on its own, and also powers many other things internally that we can build on for the future. both 25 and 26 show how we are developing across several product lines and segments much more in parallel than in the past and with ai bringing more efficiency and marketing opportunity to partners moving on from core to the strategic growth areas these grew as you heard from rory by 25 as a group that's close to 3x the core growth rate operationally we've taken some great strides forward in the year for commercial we added 275 new members to the platform This year we will launch our new search pages and at that point every aspect of the user web journey will have been completely overhauled to commercial first experience. We'll also be launching our first chargeable product in the segment during the year. In rental services revenues grew by 35% and as we set out in November we started to roll out the upfront modules of enquire manager and enhance leads to dual agents within their core subscription. It's a process that is ongoing over 26. This is an exciting market penetration step up. It brings efficiency to agents, to landlords, and to tenant applicants, and it's at true market scale. In mortgages, we saw strong growth overall. You will have seen that we announced a new exciting partnership with NatWest, the UK's leading digital mortgage lender, which will be introduced in April across both sites and our apps, and will also continue to build out the broker opportunities over the course of this year. And finally, again, and importantly, a reminder, the SGA's all strategically reinforce the core platform, drives user utility and frequency, and again, thus the great data sets that we have. Now, this slide is a reminder of the three focus areas that we described in November. We are positively stepping up the pace with an eye to the medium term opportunity of a more diversified and technically advanced platform. driving towards that larger digital opportunity in the UK property ecosystem. Now, also as a reminder, we set some really ambitious midterm target KPIs for these initiatives. And I'm glad to report that all of this is mobilized in one way or another, and the capabilities will build and realize throughout 2026. We're going to see results along the way. One example, of course, being the successful launch of conversational search, already in the very beginning of the year so we'll come back to these areas and the kpis over time and i hope you can see that we drive this business with discipline high quality and our goal is to deliver strong value and returns so in conclusion here are the key takeaways i showed you at the start of the presentation and i want to repeat them we're happy with the strong results in 25 it was a record year for innovation for rightmove we look forward to an exciting 2026 And as you can see in the graph, we're stepping up our innovation and delivery considerably yet again. We will grow revenue and profit in line with guidance, adding to strong financial returns in both the short and medium term. And with that, we're going to go to Q&A. So Rory's going to join me up here. please raise your hands. Yes, some already did. Say your name when you're past a microphone and let's aim for two questions in the first instance. We can double back if it's fine.

We'll come back if we've got a chance. Great.

hi morning it's jessica pot from peel hunt um two questions please um the first one just on the arpa guide um rory 110 to 120. um can you give us a idea of how we should think about that uh agent versus new homes given the trends that we've seen last year and then the second one maybe on mortgages the new relationship with nat west any colour on what triggered the change and what we can expect from that relationship in the near term.

second so on ARPA guidance £110 to £120 is the blended ARPA guidance expect estate agency to be towards the bottom end of that and new homes well above the blended rate I would flag that in both EA and new homes we expect their ARPA growth to be higher than they saw in 2025

All right. And on NatWest, yeah, we're very excited about entering a new partnership here. We've had a great partnership with our other partner for the last couple of years. NatWest is really the number one mortgage lender in digital channels. So that tells you, I think, something about the vision alignment that we have. We continue to work deeply with one partner. because we're quite keen to both build a business of course give more consumers more utility on the platform but really also try to innovate along the way in this in this industry which is still very fragmented and analogous and offline and so forth so those are really the the few simple reasons behind it well

Hi, it's Will Pack from BNP Paribas. A couple of questions. Firstly, could we talk a little bit about agent relations? So from today's update, the survey data looks very encouraging, although I know we didn't see the absolute numbers, but that would be interesting. Retentions at record levels, you've got new agent additions. But then in contrast, if you read the trade press, it all sounds a bit grim. you've got the court case coming um and i think there's a perception that your relations with your customers are all adversarial versus some of your peers globally um how do we square that circle is it there's a few loud adversarial agents but the median agent is getting happier can you just give us a bit of color there and then secondly the you're framing around the labor intensity of right move is a little bit different to some of your peers within classifieds and other platform businesses um you're growing headcount aggressively it sounds like that's going to continue for a little while um could you frame that for us is that catch-up investment because the previous management team didn't hire enough people uh when can we see the labor force to stabilize any color there be useful thank you

i'll take two you can jump in look the first one you mentioned some of those kpis which i think are standout right high second highest retention in the decade highest take up of uh of our new product oav we had record uptake of optimizer edge that shows customers are engaging with our products and really happy with the outcomes you know that that for us is a real sign of strength in terms of the relationship we have with customers of which over 80 percent are now with us for five years they know us well they know our products well and we work with them to grow their businesses you're always going to have uh you know a small minority might be louder than the majority but i would say that those kpis what we look at to show the strength of our products and the value that we provide our customers we also as we showed today do monitor sentiment and we're delighted to see that sentiment not only much higher than competitors but growing um so you know we don't rest on our laurels we take it very seriously and we we keep our finger to the pulse in terms of how agents are feeling and we support them as the property market ebbs and flows and ultimately for us key coming back to providing those great products and i think that take up really shows it in terms of the labor intensity yes we are we're adding over a hundred um and those hundred people are going to be building some fantastic products and fantastic assets they're going to make right me stronger and on our path to higher growth you know that that for us is a short-term investment it's going to allow us to build many of the things that will enable us across the domains that johan talked about um and you know we've provided a flexible resourcing partner as well to help us uh you know accelerate or pull back in that recruitment as we see fit for us this is about driving higher profit growth and this is about us building things that we're really excited about that we see great rois from and that requires some head count in the short term but what you will see what we look forward to bringing to you on a regular cadence is some of the really exciting products that they're going to build well

thanks uh will lowered from berenberg um firstly just obviously integrating a lot more ai functionality um going forward consumer with like conversational search etc how can we expect sort of the cost profile of the business to shift particularly thinking about sort of using more compute going forward and then secondly you mentioned it very briefly in terms of the mortgage broker side of things but if you could provide an update on that that'd be great yeah yeah i'll start with ai so

um look we we obviously anticipate and budget for uh you know compute costs that didn't uh didn't exist in the past uh because of this but i think there are a couple of important things to remember a again back to that slide of how we set things up um we set it up in in a very organized very uh orchestrated way and we have you know fantastic control over this just like we have on on other costs um here's the thing it's it's a cost to deliver opportunity right um and if you look at token cost overall i mean they keep coming down by 80 90 on an annual basis across the world right both because models become more efficient themselves and because there's a lot of competition out there so it's it's it's an item to keep track of but it's not not something that concerns us particularly right yeah so uh mortgages i'll go to that one as well So we are, I think we talked a little bit about this before. So we have brokers on the platform, but it's a small part of what we do today. A lot of attention has been on the MIP product, building awareness for consumers, seeing what that does and obviously deliver great results. What we did last year was prepare a little bit more to be able to scale the broker side of the business as opposed to one-to-one relationships with brokers because there's literally 5,000 of them in the UK. um and it's also really about uh you know looking at this as i i think of this as an inevitable trajectory kind of thing because of who we are the interest in properties the fact that two-thirds of properties needs to be financed us having some kind of service in this space makes sense and that's evidenced already but it's a long-term thing to build there's still awareness um they're still optimizing it they're still um or still but what we're trying to do again is build a better experience and an experience that doesn't exist anywhere else that takes some optimization it's two percent of our revenue today we're happy with the growth but there's going to be a you know test test and learning as we go along with it and we're executing on on it really well so over time there will be broker options as well and it's about understanding the consumer um and again because of all the consumers that we have uh what's their mindset right are they close to transaction or they're really out shopping and still want to get an affordability check so segmenting that and dissecting and making very logical for them and therefore funnel them to you know different opportunities for financing is important and and that doesn't you know come just from saying we do one thing on the website right but again fantastic opportunity going forward lots of money in this space and i think we have a real right to play thank you

thanks uh andrew ross from barclays i've got two on ai first one's about the conversational search you've rolled out on platform what are you observing in terms of the you know the conversion rate from search into leads or any kind of outcome based metric for you track um from that and kind of what impact is it having on clicks onto featured and promoted listings uh as part of it that's the first question and then the second one is you guys obviously apply to put an app into Can you just give us some context as to what the thought process was as to why do that? You know, on the one hand, you're kind of feeding the beast. On the other hand, first move advantage is where the users are. What were the kind of puts and takes? How are you thinking about them?

Yeah. So when it comes to conversational, again, I outlined a few stats, right? Because of our traffic. and in spite of having it on on a minority of that traffic already we've seen you know thousands of conversations lots of messages uh very good flow through in terms of people getting the results that they wanted and and also you know as expected coming back over to the main site And digging around and using different tools and so forth we have seen that optic of about you know three times that the sort of lead sending Propensity, but you know to be honest is that causal correlation could be the most qualified Users that be in the right move before and so forth or is it is it another way and therefore they become interested I think it's it's too early to say and and Anyone who talks about these data points, I think it's important to get that kind of context. Now, again, I point back to this as an opportunity, right? The fact that how consumers experience the site and the listings and what they do with it. First of all, this is a first version of integration. and how partners you know show up in that that will of course evolve over time right it depends on how much of attraction this will see from consumers you know small minority or complement to for a lot of people to to what they do it's just simply too early to tell but again the opportunity if you think about it it's a much more personalized and engaged consumer in different ways doing this and that further qualification of someone's behavior has value so the fact that there's potentially new or for short different commercial opportunity around this is also there and that goes through our heads right but it's early days and the second one in chat gpt uh yeah i think you you maybe outlined it well you know person takes uh consideration look today they're just they're meaningless in terms of a feed or a platform for you know people actually looking for and you know going after homes so as we said with those stats right and i think most of the peers report the same numbers very very small But look, it is a tool that lots of people use for different things. So for us, this is a test and learn. right we want to be where some consumers are and see what we can learn from that and uh very importantly of course it's it's uh it's an app that we created it basically displays listings and um consumers then go back and do much more of the experience where they have all that experience and again all the data and tools and their own history and so forth on white move and that's that's what we expect going forward as well you keep all the data right yeah joe

Hi, Joe from UBS. Two for me. First one, a technical modeling one, but I think it's important for the interpretation of ARPA guidance. So historically, forecasting agency was simple as ARPA times five, the average membership. But we now have a growing proportion of non-ARPA revenue within agency. So can you just clarify which revenue streams within agency are non-ARPA, how big they were in 25, and how you expect that to change into 26? And the second question is just on buybacks. We see you're effectively restarting and spending excess capital generation beyond dividends and spending half of the 40 million that you've accrued whilst you weren't buying back. Can you just give a bit of color on why you aren't spending all of the excess cash to get you back down to zero and a sort of general commentary on sort of the merits of running a net cash balance sheet given where your share price is? Thank you.

Sure. Yes, you're right. ARPA used to be much easier. You took customer numbers multiplied by ARPA and you got roughly our revenue number. There is a non-ARPA element, which is because we don't count agent accelerator in our ARPA calculation because it's a program rather than a package. and also insurance revenue in the rental service as part of the business because that's insurance to consumers and landlords so therefore it's not counted under the average ARPA those two together used to be almost zero a few years ago great to see them grow and they're around about three million so that's what you should add on once you take your average ARPA times by your customer numbers In terms of the share buybacks, great. First thing to flag, we return all of our surplus cash to shareholders and we don't see that changing. We've reduced our cash reserves from 40 to 20 million, which we think is sufficient to run the business from a working capital perspective going forward. For those that have been with Rightmove for a long time, 20 million was always the number that we used to have and feel very comfortable that that's a manageable cash reserves for our working cap. So flag that. in terms of looking at debt for share buybacks since what you're asking we're not philosophical about no debt on the balance sheet same time we see there's many pros and cons of having no debt on the balance sheet it's something that we continually evaluate and discuss with our advisors and with the board at the moment we don't have plans to leverage up but I would say as always nothing is off the table and we'll continue to evaluate all of our options

Just one follow-up maybe on Agent Accelerator. On Agent Accelerator, obviously with what we're seeing with new agent formation, is it fair to assume that Agent Accelerator will grow faster in 26 than the average of agency?

It's Agent Accelerator, low ARPA, so don't get too carried away. Great to see the agent formation come back. Wouldn't expect to see that continually rise and giving its record levels, so just be cautious about that, but great to see that market open up.

markets yeah um jp morgan and johan just one question again on all investments um i'm clearly we've seen 26 going to be a peak year again um we're going to guide for like three to five percent operating profit growth um given where the shares are and you're prioritizing obviously buybacks and those things i mean how critical is it really for you that 26 is really sort of a one-off in terms of operating profit growth and things bounce back relatively quickly um i.e do you feel that some investments that you actually had in mind are now a bit more put on on hold um longer term is that the case um just a question so what is what's the mood how critical is to to see a meaningful margin balance already in 27 and then the second question just in general because you touched on this um value a creative m a um are we then talking about sort of like investments in tech do you feel there are um some some tech assets out there out there that you should get to um any comments would be interesting because it feels there won't be much just want to be really clear on this yeah

i'll have a go maybe where you can you can fill in but look we we when it comes to the investments right as we outlined and i say it again we have a great foundation a great you know tech platform we're doing this because we think there's more opportunity in this market the look at the uk property market our position what we can do together with others over the medium term we want to step up that pace that's what we're doing and in terms of how that's shaped we've guided to 26 uh... and and what that means on on both revenue growth and an operating profit growth and we're not you know going down as we said before to be specific year by year uh... but of course you can assume that uh... the the uh... the profit growth will start lining more to the revenue top line uh... in in the years following right that's that's kind of all we can say and as usual uh... you you look at the business and you look at the opportunities or sometimes challenges ahead and you just after that but we're very happy with what we're doing right now and off to a great start with it secondly on M&A and maybe value well value creation and what kind of companies Yes, I mean, look, there's always been a plethora of prop techs in the startup space, and now many of them come with a .ai after them. So I can tell you in some conversations we've had with agents, directly some of them of course use AI already it's like hey here's a you know a quicker way to do admin or whatever it is they're starting some of the AI enabled products that we actually equip them with and they're also inundated right they get so many pitches from that dot AI and the other dot AI on an ongoing basis so it's a little bit confusing and And as usual, there's a lot of promise. Again, as I said before, I mean, AI is but one thing, right? You've actually got to build it on something. And it's a filter and automation tool, right? But it certainly doesn't provide the whole experience. So that doesn't mean that there aren't interesting companies, and we keep a good eye on them. We have conversations with several of them. But for now, our organic growth path and with the capability we have is clearly how we operate mainly.

Maybe in this context is actually quite interesting. I mean, yes, we see a lot of startups approaching agents very early, very small niche. But do you feel that the large players, the open AIs of the world also go directly to agents and asking them to upload and work closer together? Is there anything that you see or hear?

Nothing, I would say, particularly on, let's say, the big LLMs from an enterprise perspective. And first of all, because our 16,000 memberships typically consist of very small, medium-sized businesses. But the fact, again, that many of them are interested in using tools, right, whether it's a free user paying £20 a month. uh... and some of them are of course uh... you know more advanced and and trying to figure out what's uh... what's happening either on their own or or again that sold by someone else but i don't think that's a particular uh... thing that was you know

Hi, Anik Mas from Bernstein. The first one is on ChatGPT again. So can you tell us a bit more about how the user data is shared in between ChatGPT and yourself? At what point do you get access to the user and actually can follow them around and actually can collect the data exclusively? and the second one is on opti edge when agencies don't decide to upgrade generally why is that do they keep the money and they don't invest do they go for something else can you just tell us a bit through the challenges that you hear when you're meeting with agencies thank you

I'll take one. Yeah, RTT. Take two. Yeah, so on ChatGPT, again, what we built is an app, and it has an endpoint, and it sits within or will sit within the ChatGPT environment, right? And what the consumer will experience is to be able to do conversations, and answers will come partly from ChatGPT, and in the case of serving up property listings that are relevant, that will come from us. uh... what i think others were reported and what you can expect it's it's a fairly simple uh... outline right uh... yes it's possible to find our brand there if you can find it today but now we can find a slightly more organized fashion and you know consumers will be very encouraged and already know where to go and find the full experience So that's kind of the outline right now. And that means that the really valuable aspects of, you know, data and how people navigate and what they've done before and what they want to do in the future will remain in the Rightmove platform. Of course, remember, again, we're building a conversational interface on Rightmove. People already have that habit loop. It's like, hey, I can do all of this conversation, including complementary information on Rightmove. So yet another reason, I think, to not worry too much about some other alternative universe being built out. But again, interesting enough to test it. That's the way we view it.

On Optimizer Edge, we actually don't want all customers on Optimizer Edge. We cater packages for all different types of customers and different types of businesses. And we want them to have choice. And Optimizer Edge doesn't suit all customers. Low stock, low value, depending on where you are in the country, depending on competitiveness, funding, lots of different reasons. The strength of our account management team is knowing what products work for which customers. And the way that they start the conversation isn't about which package to be on, but which products are going to help you grow the business. And depending on that product mix is what then will generate a recommendation of which package to be on. and so for some essential is absolutely the right package to be on and we don't expect them to move others we'll see them move from essential to enhance to opti and others will come straight in and that was a little bit of what i wanted to show earlier was the variance of of how we see the inbound into the optimizer edge package The other stat I would flag is that over 50% of our customers are choosing to purchase products above their committed levels. So again, they can engage and see value in our product without having to move up the package ladder. So for us, it's about coming back to offering a plethora of different products that suit whatever needs a business has, but also fit whatever the property market is doing because the property market as we all know in the uk can change lots so we want products that suit them whatever is happening in the property market sean

First question, Johan, I was really pleased to hear you describe ChatGPT as meaningless at the moment, given there are 0.5% of your referral traffic. First question from me, from both a technical and market power point of view, if it came to it, would you have confidence in blocking lms not just from scraping data for training but also for the grounding process in search and sort of what would be the puts and takes and how would you look at that decision um and then secondly where you've rolled out uh modern capabilities for example in conversational search are you finding that the major lms are good enough off the shelf or are they requiring quite a bit of fine tuning customization to work with the data that you've got and that right effectively

only right-move has yeah so look on the first one technically you can choose to be in an environment and you can choose not to be in an environment and so I think that option is already there again it's an interesting environment to to test and learn in probably a very small small meaning at the moment it might grow and then it will be relevant to be there so we'll see how that goes over time simply but the optionality is absolutely there I think on the conversational side that we've done ourselves so again we operated the current version with Gemini molds from Google and again it has the benefit of it's all you know very tied up through our stack but we have also built that capability to switch that out for literally any any other large llm we have those relationships and conversations as well so it's off the shelf in the sense that the general llm is there now as you know every week or two or whatever there's another dot dot something version coming out and the three things that we optimize for is uh it's not just cost right again that that that's kind of a tailwind over time because it's going to continue to come down but it's cost it's quality and it's performance right quality is very important and performance as in you know speed and response rates and already today and even as a consumer at least if you pay right you you can see for yourself how the models act a little bit differently um and of course we have you know fantastic platform and capability uh um in the teams to to judge these older things right so we built this um stack where we can plug and play on the side and then we decide what we take take live and we run concurrent what's called evaluation models so eval models that evaluate the models on an ongoing basis so it'll continue to uh to go on along that way simply then maybe the last point yes of course the generic llm capability is one thing uh the really interesting thing to create a fantastic experience and relevant experience for the consumers to combine it with the data that we have and again the more people actually use this and or any other personalization features on our sites the more tailored that experience can be and a lot of that comes for the vast vast majority of that really comes from our own platform charles

Thank you. Giles Thorne from Jefferies. Back on mortgages, please. The attributes Johan used earlier to describe what pulled you towards NatWest I'm pretty sure were things that were used to describe Nationwide when the MIP program was first developed. So I'm still a little bit non-wiser as to what went wrong with the Nationwide partnership and what NatWest now solves. So I wanted to push you on that a bit harder.

and then the second thing still on mortgages is just to hear your latest thinking on how you solve for the problem of the broker product only appearing after a failed MIP if that's even still the case so an update there okay thank you so I'll leave you to judge your own wiseness Giles but you know we've as I said before we've had a great relationship with nationwide and what we're looking at now where are we now what our own plans what have we learned from all the data and we have selected NatWest as our partner going forward for what we think are really good reasons and on the second question yes the broker path to a large extent has been because we have been focused so much on understanding the MIP path has been focused on okay who doesn't get a MIP and for what reasons And over time, of course, as I said before, we want to expand those choices for consumers through our segmentation, seeing what they do on the site and potentially what they're outright requesting. Some of that experimentation has been going on already, and that's going to continue in the future.

Just to follow up, where is the remortgaging product? I think that was due to be second half of 2015. I forget the exact date, but I'm pretty sure we passed the original signal around when you were going to launch that.

No, it's launched. it's on the site again it's it's not the main focus remember that we have a lot of first-time buyers of course on the site and you know for lender partners often you know they want to try to get a hold of new customers now the remortgage product is absolutely there has been there for a while but it's it's sitting as we have said before logically connected so closer to the home evaluation tools for example where people might be in that mode of hey i'm tracking the value of my property that might be because i'm i'm thinking about selling or it i'm thinking about refinancing because i'm staying so that's where that is and again over time that's an opportunity to to obviously you know build out uh build that out further but it's it's going to come with uh you know in in the right placements and as we see fit right well i think that's well i'll squeeze you in andrew last one come on

so another one on ai and about kind of agentic and appreciate there's a whole separate conversation about whether you'd actually want your personal agent to be searching for a house but in a future world where that could be possible from a technology perspective what's your view about whether you'd let agents be searching on your site how you kind of set up the technology to do it do you let them crawl and do whatever they want on any sites

you make sure you have a commercial relationship where it has to be through your flow like how are you thinking about the agentic journey yeah a little bit let's say early but clearly you know the agentic opportunity you know keeps growing um but again i i i just what you said yourself remember property particularly um ai is a filter an advanced form of the filter humans make decisions right it goes for a lot of processes so the level of filtering assistant obviously taking out you know admin tasks and so forth big opportunity in ai but humans need to be in the loop still for a lot of things and even more so for other things including this one so we'll see how how that evolves over time i really can't talk to you know the technology of it or who we might have a relationship with their interesting precedents on amazon shutting down i think it was perplexities uh agentic rolling around i don't know where that sits right but it's it's um it's something that we'll deal with over time just like we deal with other opportunities that's it thank you all for your good questions today and wish you the best of the day thanks everyone