OnTheMarket upgrades expectations on back of new commercial tie-ups

Property website OnTheMarket has met its enhanced forecasts for the last year, following the agreement of more commercial partnerships.

Britain’s third-largest property search portal has said that it now expects to see adjusted operating earnings of £2.6million for the year to 31 January and revenues to increase by a third to £30.8million on the equivalent period in the prior year.

It has only recently upgraded its predictions for operating profits to reach a breakeven point in the second half of the 2022 financial year and be at least £2.5million on a 12-month basis.

OnTheMarket has established tie-ups with numerous businesses, including development finance platform Brickflow, autonomous photo editing company Autoenhance.ai and application software developer InsureStreet.

The Aldershot-based group, whose predominant competitors are Rightmove and Zoopla, has also made a £350,000 investment in InsureStreet and completed an extended partnership with property data specialist Sprift.

It said that these new partnerships, when combined with the recent launch of a new website and brand in December, have meant the shift to ‘create a tech-enabled property business across the broader property ecosystem is accelerating.’ 

Like other property firms, OnTheMarket has benefited enormously during the Covid-19 pandemic from more robust demand for housing propelled by the stamp duty holiday, low interest rates, and Britons looking for more spacious locations to live.

This has driven considerably more audience traffic to its platforms, higher revenues and average monthly leads amongst its advertisers, and helped it make an annual profit for the first time ever.

Chief executive Jason Tebb said: ‘We are delighted to have achieved a year of further financial and operational progress. But there is much more to come.

‘We have received great feedback from our customers regarding our new strategy and enhanced suite of product and service offerings. We look forward to continuing to deliver greater value to both advertisers and consumers during the year ahead.’

OnTheMarket’s announcement comes just a few days after the country’s largest online real estate portal, Rightmove, revealed its annual revenues surpassed pre-pandemic volumes after jumping by nearly £100million last year.

The blue-chip listed company was aided by the termination of a discount on the fees it charged estate agents who advertise properties on its platform over the early months of the pandemic.

Operating profits also increased by more than two-thirds, while it claimed that prospective homebuyers spent a record amount of time on its platforms.

Britons’ rising propensity to search for different places to live has pushed up house prices to their highest ever levels  in most UK regions, including London, where demand has been weaker.

According to the Office for National Statistics, average UK house prices grew by £27,000 to £275,000 in the 12 months to December 2021, with Wales and England’s South East and South West regions reporting the largest percentage growth.

However, the total number of property transactions shrank by more than a fifth in January from the previous month and by 13 per cent on the same month last year, figures from Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs have suggested.

Property industry experts have attributed the drop to the cost-of-living crisis, the Bank of England raising interest rates from record lows, and the end of the stamp duty holiday last September.