OnTheMarket plc (LON:OTMP) Chief Executive Officer Ian Springett caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss their rental listings on Facebook Marketplace, building their agent base & traffic and what he believes will disrupt “the duopoly” of Rightmove and Zoopla.
Q1: Ian, you’re announcing today that your rental properties will be available on Facebook Marketplace, how did that come about?
A1: Well, it was a natural partnership really. We wanted to work with Facebook to offer people an easy way to find our listings on Marketplace which globally is a huge platform for buying and selling for the very large number of users Facebook has worldwide.
Roughly, 800 million people use Facebook Marketplace every month, they have 40 million users in the UK so it’s a big and very engaged audience and we have very large numbers of high-quality rental stock being updated all the time on the portal, so it would seem to be a natural match.
So, the integration with Facebook brings considerable scale and reach for us, for our listings, and it obviously adds to the richness of the content on that platform for them.
Q2: So, what are the commercial arrangements between you and Facebook?
A2: Facebook doesn’t charge listing partners for distribution on Marketplace, we’re very excited to have become a listing partner, we see strong benefits for us and for people on Facebook looking to rent.
The enquiries generated by prospective tenants finding suitable OnTheMarket properties on Facebook will be transmitted by us to our agents listing the properties by email in the usual way and that will allow them to connect immediately with that Facebook user group.
So, I think really, it’s a mutual partnership with benefits to both sides but no money changing hands.
Q3: You’ve talked about the need to build your agent base quite rapidly, how is that going?
A3: Well, I’m pleased to say actually that since our admission to AIM on the 9th February, by the 22nd August which is the last time we announced, we’ve already increased the number of contracted UK offices from 5,500 to more than 10,500.
As a result of that, we now carry more than 600,000 UK residential property listings, that’s roughly 60% of the stock listed on Rightmove and approximately 75% of the stock listed on Zoopla. Bear in mind that both of those portals carry direct listings from new home developers, we haven’t yet begun to address that market and so, actually our penetration of agent listings is still higher than those two percentages I gave you.
In general, momentum in the business I very strong, we’re taking on more and more agents all the time.
Q4: How about the other side of the coin, are you succeeding in building traffic to your portal?
A4: Yes, we are. We announced back in July that traffic from the 1st February to 30th June reached 56.6 million visits which was more than double the traffic, 27.1 million visits, generated in the same period in the prior year. That’s Google Analytics data by the way which is also what Rightmove and Zoopla quote in their published statements.
What we’re seeing is as our property stock continues to rise and the traffic grows, we’re receiving more and more good feedback from agents across the UK about the good quality leads we provide and obviously we can see that in the data. It’s really the network effect building up, that we’re showing more good quality properties to more active property seekers and therefore the conversion to leads and enquiries to agents is going up.
Q5: So, what do you think is going to make the difference as OnTheMarket aim to disrupt what you’ve referred to as “the duopoly” of Rightmove and Zoopla?
A5: I think our ownership structure and the business model are key really, we’re the industry’s response. We’re an agent-backed business, agents own around 70% of OnTheMarket, they are well aware that they provide the key content and most of the revenue to property portals. Our strategy allows agents to benefit in two ways, through fair and sustainable fair pricing and the ability to invest in and benefit from the success of their portal and we’re keeping agents at the heart of the property transaction to leverage their local knowledge and expertise.
So, as part of their backing for the portal, agents are displaying thousands of new properties every month on our portal, 24 hours or more before they’re on Rightmove or Zoopla which provides a very compelling reason for the most active property seekers to visit, to generate leads, to sign up for property alerts with us which is in itself a big driver of activity on the portal.
It’s a virtuous circle, the agents through owning and supporting the portal in practical ways can give us an edge which helps us break that duopoly and we’re extremely pleased with the strength and momentum we’ve got.
