Rightmove plc

So good morning and welcome to the presentation of Right Moves results for H126. I'm joined today by Rory Hook, our CFO. First, four key takeaways. I'm pleased with our first half results and the strategic progress we've made. Our state agency business delivered solid growth and strong retention, and the smaller strategic growth areas are on track for full year targets. New homes market development volumes have softened over the period, though with good product and ARPA uptake. we delivered an accelerating number of products across the entire business many of them powered or complemented with AI building on our reach and our data the tech platform is in a strong position we continue to shape a leading agentic powered property marketplace for the long term our confidence is reflected in the increasing increased capital return that you've seen news about this morning over 400 million pounds expected over the next 12 months so let's start with the h1 key results Revenue growth of 7% was supported by ARPA and membership increases in the core business as well as contribution from growth in our strategic growth areas. Underlying EPS grew by 6% and we increased capital return by 11% in H1 with a 90 million pound buyback completing yesterday. Now moving on to selection of our operational KPIs. The share of time on site, as measured by Comscore, grew in the period and stood at 9 out of every 10 minutes in June. Over 85% of our traffic comes direct and organically, and in June that also was over 90%. Meanwhile, less than half a percent of our traffic came through LLMs, unchanged from 2025. For our estate agency partners, we are successfully rolling out our latest online agent valuation product, OAV, and retention was the highest in over 10 years. We increased penetration of our top packages in both estate agency and new homes to 36%, and we introduced new complementary training and certification programs for all estate agent members. We continued delivery and growth in our smaller strategic growth areas. I'll come back to this later. We advanced quite a bit further on our leading tech platform, our data sets and our AI innovation. And my credit really goes to the Rightmove team for great execution and hard work in the first half. 89% of our people describe Rightmove as a great place to work. And as you can see here, in a competitive and always evolving market, our position remains stable and strong. Our share of consumer portal time spent, 75 and 90% by the two external measurement providers, is powered by our quality consumer experiences and growing adoption of many new features. That trust and engagement from consumers drive volume and quality of leads and ever richer data signals for product development going forward. We continue to create strong outcomes and value for over 19,000 estate agents and new homes partners. Now moving on to some review of their property and markets. Starting top left here with home transaction levels. We expect 1.05 to 1.15 million sales transactions in 26. That's slightly below last year and the long-term average, but it's in line with 2024's 1.1 million at the midpoint. Looking top right, while mortgage rates remain elevated, around 5%, and the outlook remains subject to the ongoing macro, affordability relative to the average house price is steadily improving for many buyers, shown in the middle set of columns. And on the right, lenders are willing to lend and to slightly higher leverage following some regulatory changes last year. Bottom left, you can see that available listings remain at a record high, leading to full pipelines for estate agents. Completions are also up year-on-year and above historical averages. Looking ahead, new listings, demand, and sales agreed are broadly in line with long-term average, which reflects the interest rate backdrop, buyer versus seller price expectations, and also some short-term consumer distractions or uncertainties that we had during Q2 and the summer. Finally, bottom right, the rental market continues to rebalance. There's been a bit of a tick up in demand more recently in June and July, which may be a side effect of the slower resale market. Now, I want to expand a bit more on the new homes market given the market volume softness. And that, of course, has been well publicized over the recent months. So here, we've outlined a historic market condition comparison by time periods in the columns and by supply demand factors in the rows. And you can see that through most of these time periods there's been some green tailwinds on either the supply or demand side. But at the moment in 2026 there is really not one. Now 2026 conditions are of course very far from the economic credit freeze and recession in 2008 when you similarly had a lot of red. But the sector nevertheless today face a number of headwinds as a summary. This year started tentatively optimistic, and builders expected it to gradually improve. However, and particularly through Q2, on the back of a stretching out Middle East conflict and higher for longer rates, combined with persistently high resale stock competing for buyers, things got more challenging. Build cost and risk, weakened consumer confidence, more political uncertainty, and too little planning reform effect to date has not helped. For reference, we show here Rightmove's new homes business revenue growth over these periods. A reminder though, our revenue is of course a combination of volume and product-led ARPA. And finally, compared to the full tailwind year of 2019, a lot of green, in 2026 now you can see the volume difference for the large and well-capitalized developers and a much more pronounced volume difference for small and medium-sized players. We continue to focus to deliver products that are useful for builders in all segments and all markets, including when it bounces back, which we've seen happen of course in the past as well. Now the volume softness is a market issue. Rightmove, we have continued to generate ARPA growth through strong products and ongoing innovation. As mentioned earlier, 36% of developments are on our new top package Ascend, and our top two packages are at almost 80% penetration today. At a product level, on the left, we keep introducing and enhancing individual products. Together with our large consumer reach, that drive results. And especially in the soft-end market, higher quality leads are essential. Our direct appointment booking product has generated a tripling of appointments and the virtual tour request drove close to 50% more leads per development. And finally, as usual, we operate for long-term partnerships. Under our Building Success Together program for partners, we supported homes developers additionally in this period with dedicated consumer surveying, marketing and lobbying engagement activities. So in conclusion on this piece, while it's a tough volume spell in the market, we got great value generating products. There is still a shortage of modern and affordable housing stock in this country, and inflation print is cautiously trickling downwards. So we do anticipate volumes to pick up as conditions improve, and we've seen this several times in the past. And with that, I will hand over to Rory to go through some of the financials.

Thank you, Johan. Good morning, everyone. I'm pleased to present our financial results for the first six months of 2026. Overall, group revenue increased by 7% compared to H1 2025, reflecting strong growth in agency and the SGAs, offset by subdued growth in new homes as a result of fewer developments being advertised. Starting with agency, revenues increased by 9% to 164 million. Looking at the charts on the right hand side, the light blue bars show that this growth was predominantly ARPA led, which continues to be driven by package upgrades and product adoption, including the new online agent valuation product launched at the start of the year. We're really pleased with this ARPA growth and is a great proof point of the returns on investment in the platform. An additional 2 million contribution came from higher agency membership numbers, which were supported by record agency retention. Moving down the table to new homes, revenues increased by 2% to 38 million. This was achieved despite continued headwinds in the new homes end market. As Johan has given color to already, the new homes market is challenging from a development number perspective. You can see the impact of this in the chart, where the orange bar shows a reduction in revenue of 2 million compared to H1 last year. Still, in challenging conditions, developers continue to turn to our products to support their marketing. ARPA growth contributed approximately 3 million increase year on year, of which the primary driver was product and package upgrades. At the bottom of the table are strategic growth areas delivered as we expected in H1. Commercial property revenues grew 13% to 8.4 million as we continue to focus on customer acquisition with membership increasing 15% year on year. Leader advantage, a new product suite launched into our top package in Q2 and will be chargeable from H2. Mortgages revenue decreased by 1.1 million to 3.4 million, although compared to H2 2025, revenue was sequentially up 1.2 million. Performance reflected the March 25 change of stamp duty and interest rate cuts last year. Despite lower mortgage market activity, ongoing optimization of our consumer journey and proposition helped mitigate some of the impact. Rental services comprising our lead to keys product, tenant referencing and ancillary services saw revenues increase by 67%. As we mentioned back in November, we rolled out inquiry manager to dual customers across the start of the year. Around 7,000 partners now have inquiry manager with 1.7 million of the increase coming from this higher lettings product revenue. This activity is largely complete, so our focus going forward will mainly be on driving referencing and ancillary revenues. Overall, we continue to expect SGA growth of 20% to 30% in 2026, as we expect year-on-year revenue growth in H2 to be more than double that seen in H1. This is as we expect commercial H2 year-on-year percentage growth will be higher than H1, In rental services, H2 revenues will be similar to H1 revenues, resulting in strong year-on-year growth. And in mortgages, we expect H2 revenues to be similar to or above H1. Turning to membership. Total membership remained broadly stable during the first half, increasing by 85 to 90,357. This was driven by continued growth in agency membership which increased by 206 branches during the period. Growth was supported by record partner retention. Agency formation settled back to normal levels compared to the highs in 2025 with over 50% of new joiners coming from existing partners continuing to expand through new branch openings. Within New Homes membership declined by 121 developments since the start of the year, with over 80% of that decline in Q2. The chart on the bottom right shows that new developments coming to market are at the lowest level seen since our records began. While we do not currently see evidence of a near-term improvement in build rates, we remain optimistic about the medium-term outlook. The government's continued focus on increasing housing supply combined with improving market conditions over time should support a recovery in development activity. Moving on to ARPA. Overall, ARPA increased by £117 to £1,726. Around 60% of this was driven by upgrades and strong product uptake across both new agency and new homes. The remaining 40% of ARPA growth came from contract renewals, which have proceeded as expected. In agency, we continued to see upgrades to our top package, almost 100 net upgrades since December. Partners on Optimizer Edge had almost more than double the incremental ARPA growth in their second year of membership compared to what we saw with Optimizer 20 partners. This was underpinned by the new product online agent valuation. This demonstrates the options we have for monetization from new products, either from new packages or as standalone products. We expect sales of online agent valuation to continue to drive upgrades as well as incremental product purchases across H2. Our other products continue to deliver great outcomes for our partners. Since June 2025, the average number of products per branch has increased by 14% and more than half of our partners purchase product above their committed contract levels. In new homes, the top package, Ascend, launched last May saw an increase of around 200 developments since the start of the year, taking penetration to 36%. After 18 months, even with record low new developments to target, we have reached a record high number of developments on the top package. The largest driver of this is the enhanced Leeds product that is exclusive to the Ascend package. and at its end we saw an ARPA increase of £400, up 12% in the first 12 months following an upgrade. So similar to agency, post-upgrade we continue to see ARPA grow as partners engage and purchase more product in their new package. So whilst we can't control the developments coming to market, we are delighted to see developers continue to turn to our products to help them in this challenging new homes market. Moving on to costs, underlying operating costs increased by 10 million year on year, resulting in a 69% underlying operating profit margin as we continue to invest with discipline and in the capabilities that support our future growth. Our largest area of investment remains technology and product development with a continued focus on enhancing our platform, expanding innovation capacity and strengthening our data and AI capabilities. The largest component of the increase was people related costs, which increased by around 5 million, up 15%. Contractor spend, mainly via our new flexible resourcing partner, was also higher year on year by 1 million, providing additional flexibility and specialist expertise in key delivery areas. As we look ahead, these investments remained focused on increasing our innovation capacity and building capabilities that support future growth. Let me now turn to capital allocation. We review capital allocation regularly with our board and advisors, as well as reflecting input from a wide range of our investors. The result is the announcement you have seen this morning. Our allocation priorities have not changed and we remain focused on delivering long-term value creation. First, we will continue to invest in the business to support organic growth. Second, value accretive acquisition opportunities will be evaluated. And third, consistent with our longstanding approach, we remain to progressive dividend linked to earnings growth and will continue to return surplus capital to shareholders. We are not changing our capital allocation strategy as these priorities of investing for growth and distributing excess cash to shareholders remain. What we are evolving is how we think about the balance sheet. Rightmove today is a larger, more diversified and more cash generative business than at any point in its history. We have predictable earnings, low capital intensity and a strong cash conversion. And we have a balance sheet that can support leverage. We have decided to target a modest level of debt on an ongoing basis. We have therefore entered into a 200 million revolving credit facility. At full drawn down, this would equate to roughly 0.5 times leverage. Whilst we believe that the group could support a higher level of debt, the board is focused on maintaining a strong balance sheet and retaining financial flexibility. This level preserves headroom in an uncertain macro environment. It allows us to manage any potential contingency facing the business and allows capacity to support future growth investments, including M&A. This morning we announced an interim dividend of 4.17p. Our share buyback program following the completion of 90 million in the first seven months of the year has already started. Our expectation over the next 12 months, subject to market conditions and alternative uses of capital, is to purchase over 330 million of shares. along with the dividend our expectation is to distribute over 400 million to shareholders over these next 12 months. This package of returns reflects our commitment to delivering sustainable shareholder value through a balanced approach of investing for long-term growth while returning excess capital to shareholders. Now lastly on financial guidance. Due to the impact on new homes development numbers in H1 and prudently assuming no recovery near term, we move revenue guidance for this year to 6% to 8%. We anticipate development numbers to continue to decrease in H2, finishing the year with development numbers down 6% to 10%. In agency, we currently anticipate membership to finish the year around 1% to 2% higher versus last year. The lower end of the guidance range assumes a further deterioration in current market conditions, creating a more pronounced decline in new homes activity. Based on what we are seeing today however, our expectation remains that trading in the second half is broadly consistent with the first half. We anticipate no other changes to the other guidance metrics, reiterating 3% to 5% growth in full year underlying operating profit as a result of continued cost discipline. Turning to exceptionals, we incurred 2.3 million of third party advisor and other costs in the first half directly relating to the proposed legal claim. For the year, we are guiding to a range of between 4 and 7 million. Finally, as discussed earlier, we've already recommenced our share buyback program. We reiterate our expectation of at least 5% EPS growth for 2026. That concludes the financials. I'll now hand you back to Johan. Thank you, Rory.

So we are indeed excited about our long-term strategy to build out to the digital property ecosystem, leveraging our strong platform and reach. Starting with some of what we do already, we made some good progress advancing the SJs in this half. and you heard some from Ruaridh Commercial launched the Leader Advantage Package rolling out over the course of this year. We keep adding partners and listings to the platform and we're implementing more CRM channel integrations. For rental services, we rolled out the Inquire Manager and Enhanced Leads to core partners. We spent quite a bit of time preparing products for the significant Renters Right Act regulation starting on May 1st, generating time savings and assurance for agents and tenants alike. over 60 percent of our millions of rental leads are now sent in an enriched format helping agents prioritize tenants and of course therefore save time in mortgages we successfully completed our lender partner transition to netwest we saw really strong user growth of our mortgage content and mip tools overall all bite in a choppy end market for purchase mortgages So let's move on to how we're evolving Rightmove, being superbly set up for the future. We have been very busy executing in the first half and I'm going to start with sharing a short video sampling of some of that work. All right, good bit of energy, hopefully, next to the morning coffee. Let me get through some of the important capabilities and strength of our execution in played slide format now. So first, we have a fully AI-capable and leading tech data platform. We've invested in it over several years by now. We use Google's powerful cloud solution stack. We operate a flexible architecture using models from all LLMs. and as I said out already in November, we use a lot of our own data and proprietary models creating Rightmove AI Alpha. Our applications are now 100% cloud enabled, a project achieved ahead of plan and we have over 5 petabytes of data in our unified data platform. Our production teams are AI enabled, and we shipped over 35% more tech releases on an absolute and also per developer basis, which means cycle times are going faster. We continue to be very principle about building products with trust, quality, and outcomes in mind. So in November, we set out a plan to accelerate our position further across these three areas specifically. And we're showing some early results right out of the gate. For consumers, we launched AskRightMove in Q1 and we've been scaling and expanding the product since. I'll share a little bit more on that shortly. Within AI powered operations, number two here, we're on track with a multi-year next generation project for our partner facing operational services. We deliver wins along the way and as one example in customer support, our agentic services resolved 3,000 tickets with zero human involvement. In product development, 84% of code changes were AI enabled and the amount of code written agentically increased over 3x between April and June alone this year. We see big forward opportunities to drive agentic workflow efficiencies for partners and for Rightmove itself. And finally, we started up new growth projects, adding team members and some early product designs. We continue to aim for launches in 27 and beyond. Overall, I'm very pleased with the rate of progress. It's fast, it's disciplined, and it has a focus on quality and outcomes. We target good ROI and profit growth from these, from both revenue and cost opportunities across all three. Now on to AskWriteMove. We launched the first version of this conversational AI search experience in the beginning of the year and today it's a multi-agent architecture with very solid guardrails and eval models. As of now we have two core use cases search assistant to discover properties and evaluation assistant to drill into a specific property more deeply. For the search assistant, a couple of data points to date. Over 6 million users have been exposed to it, and we're ramping up traffic ongoingly. And based on data up until end of June, those who engage spend around 40% more time on our site. They save twice the number of properties, and they're almost twice as likely to send a lead. We've gotten very positive feedback on the feature. In ladder Q2, we then added the evaluation agent so consumers can explore and evaluate by chatting directly with Rightmove to get deep and personal insights across three areas. Property details, local area context, and this is where we leverage Gemini and Rightmove data together, and local pricing and market dynamics, leveraging Rightmove's proprietary data set and models. conversations we've seen they can flow intuitively and quite personally across all three of these early data tells us that when consumers use ask right move combining both the search and the evaluation agent in the same session we see a strong multiplier effect meaning even stronger uplifts on the metrics i just noted on the left side now if we level up a bit here the top left box which we showed before is important. We keep following our principle of however you discover, we have you covered. This has happened over time and it's happening now. And of course, we've added the AskWriteMove format on the right as I just went through. We expanded controllably and we're taking guidance from adoption data and offering multiple interfaces to consumers. Now, we can do several exciting things going forward. First, looking at the lower left box here, we have some examples here of existing and quite scaled assistance tools on Rightmove, like the close to 1 billion property alerts that we send each year, personally asked for by consumers. will eventually merge these into an even fuller and user-contextual agentic rightmove interface, bottom right. So, literally, there will be swarms of agents running within it, answering questions, keeping track of things, but they'll also be able to execute tasks for the user. And the second thing with this is the much expanded and much richer user data and signals that these conversational interfaces will generate. With it, we can personalize, predict and connect both consumers and partners and at much deeper levels than today. Higher quality means higher value. So there are more revenue opportunities, whether to core partners or by way of new commercial opportunities. Now over to the partner side. We're rapidly powering up AI and products for partners as you can see across the table here. And our strong foundations are a big advantage. They're listed at the top in summary. The scale of the first party consumer reach we have, our propriety data and AI capabilities, and of course also our building success together program, which is inclusive in every estate agent subscription. Hence, we can leverage AI from a very strong and vertically specialized position. We're focusing really on what we consider higher value add opportunities, embedding into and enhancing workflows for our partners. I'll talk to just three examples marked new here. Number one, online agent valuation OAV, which you heard of, is really where AI is a complementary part to the core use case of that product. And then two, very early stage products that are more fully based on AI, the Rightmove Plus property performance assistance and voice intelligence. I'll talk you through all three very briefly as they show very well how we now can create value, AI built in. So we mentioned online agent valuation or OIV, how it's scaling with a record reception and rollout pace. It was really the first of its kind in the UK property market. and the point here is that consumers and partners simultaneously benefit from one product, a new digital and more efficient way of connecting available only over the right new platform. They can exchange information and of course decide the right time to meet for an in-home valuation or instruction when it suits each side. It's a great early stage nurturing and qualification tool for agents. And we've seen also that when an estate agent uses the AI tool built in, response times have been 12% faster and booked valuations 10% higher. To date, some really strong results. Consumers have submitted over 45,000 valuation requests, contributing to our H1 total valuation leads growth of a very strong 50%. We have uptake from over 1,200 branches, which is 28% of optimizer edge branches, and that shows both a great interest to date and, of course, a meaningful runway ahead. And that parallel consumer and partner uptake has driven strong business results and indeed new data assets for Rightmove, as summarized on the right hand side here. Next, I am going to outline a little bit more about the newest agentic power products. We already built and are out testing these live in the market. They're uniquely, again, leveraging our platform reach, data, and specialization. They're impossible to match by, for example, an LLM or a startup. So first then, the Rightmove Plus AI Assistant. A reminder here, Rightmove Plus is the business intelligence platform available to all estate agents, and we recorded 28 million usage sessions last year. It contains a number of reports, insights, and tools that agents use daily. The AI leverages our data and provides analytical and human-style insights overlaid into the listing's pure performance data. We know and further validated through research with partners that branch staff spend more time than they want on interpreting and reformulating all the data that we share. And instead, they want to spend more time meeting clients and being even better prepared when they do. So the Rightmove Plus AI Assistant addresses real world needs and delivering real world outcomes. We're already trialing this at near 2000 branches and seeing strong engagement. We'll expand market coverage and iterate on the functionality of this over H2 and of course over next year as well. Next, an entirely new category really across both leads and efficiency for us, Rightmove Voice Intelligence. So the backdrop is this, around 50% of leads to estate agents in 25 came via phone. We record all calls and in total we captured 65 years worth of calls just that year. That's a huge right move data set. Of course, that contains very valuable insights for agent frontline practices. We already offer access to these recordings as an inclusive value add service to all members. Again, an example of our building success together approach. Now many, but not all estate agents listen to the recordings for training, lead qualification, staff performance monitoring. Their biggest issue? Well, just the sheer scale of the data and the time that it takes to listen through it, interpret it and act on it. often and actually either doesn't get done or someone has to be employed to do it. That's an operational cost. So we will power up this data treasure trove with AI, turning it into more cost effective and smart tool for partners. Initially, it'll be through transcriptions and over time with value add AI powered summaries, tags, data mining, suggested actions and so forth. Longer term, the potential value is clear as it becomes embedded into our agentic back office services. So in conclusion again, here are the key takeaways I showed you at the start of the presentation. H1 has seen strong product results in a somewhat challenging market backdrop, especially for new homes. We're delivering a record pace of tech releases and product. The platform is set for shaping the agentic powered property marketplace of the future, and we are confident about our future value creation opportunities. And with that, let's get to Q&A. So please, Yeah, here we go. Can I just ask you what to do? Please raise your hand, say your name when called, and a reminder to press the button on the microphone while you're speaking. So we're going to aim for two questions in the first instance, and we can come back if there is more time. Jess, do you want to go?