Rightmove plc (LON:RMV) has announced its preliminary results for the year ended 31 December 2020.
Financial Highlights
| 2020 | 2019 | Change | |
| Revenue | £205.7m | £289.3m | (29)% |
| Operating profit | £135.1m | £213.7m | (37)% |
| Basic earnings per share | 12.6p | 19.6p | (36)% |
| Final dividend | 4.5p | 0.0p |
· Revenue down 29%, reflecting the impact of the discount(1) support offered to our customers for the period April to September 2020
· Operating profit of £135.1m, down 37%, with operating margin of 66% (2019:74%)
· Basic earnings per share 12.6p, down 36%
· Final dividend of 4.5p (2019: cancelled(2)) per ordinary share; total dividend for 2020: 4.5p (2019: 2.8p(2))
· £30.1m (2019: £148.8m) of cash returned to shareholders through share buybacks in 2020, with the share buyback programme resuming in March 2021
· Cash at the end of the period of £96.7m (31 December 2019: £36.3m)
Operational Highlights
· Average Revenue Per Advertiser (ARPA)(3) down 28% to £778 per month (2019: £1,088), with December 2020 ARPA of £1,103 (Dec 19: £1,083)
· Membership numbers down 3% to end the year at 19,197 (31 December 2019: 19,809) with 425 fewer Agency Branches and 187 fewer New Homes developments
· Over one million UK residential properties advertised on Rightmove (2019:0.9m), more than anywhere else in the UK
· Continued growth in traffic of 31%, with time on site over the year at 15.9 billion minutes (2019: 12.1 billion)(4) and site visits of 2.1 billion (2019: 1.6 billion) (4)
· Strong adoption of our premium Optimiser 2020 package, with 9% of agents subscribing to the package, up from 1% in December 2019
· First phase of digital rental journey complete, with video viewings, Rightmove Tenant Passport, viewing appointment booking and reminders and one-click reference ordering in place. Phase two development is in progress
· Rightmove remains an accredited carbon neutral organisation and living wage employer
(1) We provided a 75% discount on invoice values to both Agency and new Home customers between April and July, and a further discount to Agency customers in August and September (60% and 40% respectively).
(2) The Board declared a final dividend of 4.4p per share for 2019, which was subsequently cancelled. The total dividend for 2019 was 2.8p paid in November 2019; no dividend payments were made in 2020.
(3) Revenue from Agency and New Homes advertisers in a given month divided by the total number of advertisers during the month, measured as a monthly average over the year.
(4) Source: Google Analytics.
Current trading and outlook
Our clear purpose and market leadership, coupled with the value of our digital solutions and unrivalled data, position us well for the future.
The UK housing market has, for the most part, shaken off pandemic-related challenges to forge an optimistic start to 2021. In the absence of further economic shocks, we think it is likely that the current shortage of new listings will correct once the immediate lockdown is lifted and will have no lasting impact on estate agency branch numbers. We expect to see a modest short-term decrease in development numbers, given the ongoing high sales rate being seen across developments. Overall, we anticipate membership numbers for the year to be broadly in line with 2020.
In 2021, we believe Agents will continue to leverage our extensive suite of property advertising solutions to compete effectively and efficiently for new listings. Currently, we expect ARPA to increase from the December 2020 level at a rate of growth towards that seen in 2019. We will continue to closely manage our operating costs, although some of the short-term reductions seen in 2020 will reverse, and we will return to more usual levels of investment in our offering.
Whilst there is clearly still significant macro uncertainty, with record traffic levels, a strong product suite and our ongoing commitment to delivering more innovation, the Board is confident in the resilience of our business and the outlook for 2021 and beyond.
Peter Brooks-Johnson, Chief Executive Officer, said:
“All of our lives were upended in 2020. Looking back at how our teams dealt with a multitude of challenges and adapted to help our customers respond to new regulations, becoming a key information hub and responding with accelerated innovation to the record home hunting activity that followed, makes me immensely proud. I’m also extremely impressed by the incredible resilience and adaptability of our customers, and I’d like to thank them for their support.
In a year when we stayed in our homes more than ever before, people continued to turn to Rightmove for their next move and for real-time information, helping us to extend our lead in the market. The record traffic and enquiries that followed the reopening of the market led to us sending 51 million property leads to our customers. Strong activity has continued into 2021 and we recorded our busiest ever January for traffic.
Digital solutions emerged as even more important to our customers as they navigated the different restrictions and invested in our tools to help them handle the record interest in property from home hunters.
We remain mindful that 2021 may bring further Covid-related challenges, but we will continue to deliver our strategy to help make home moving easier, delivering the best solutions to our customers and the most engaging experience for our users.”
The Company will publish a pre-recorded audio results presentation at 7.30am today, followed by an audio Q&A session for analysts and investors at 9.30am with Peter Brooks-Johnson, CEO, and Alison Dolan, CFO.
Chair’s Statement
Reflecting on my first year as Rightmove’s Chair, I am struck by the resilience and adaptability of our people and business. Our ambition to make home moving easier in the UK has been undiminished by the challenges of the pandemic.
Our talented and committed teams are focused on exceeding the expectations of Rightmove’s customers and consumers to deliver a best in class suite of digital advertising products to enhance the home-moving process. Against the challenging background, I’m delighted at the accelerating pace of innovation the teams have delivered this year. Amongst many new developments, a particular highlight was the release of phase one of the digitised rental journey in November to make home moving easier in the under-served rental market. Rightmove’s restless culture continues with the development of phase two now underway.
The extraordinary challenges facing our customers in 2020 were significant and required us to take action to protect the interests of our customers, consumers and shareholders. The decisions to cancel dividend payments and suspend the share buyback programme were unprecedented in Rightmove’s history and not taken lightly. I am pleased that, thanks to the value of Rightmove’s services to our customers and consumers, we are again in a position to return free cash to our shareholders with the resumption of share buybacks in March and the dividend payment in May.
Customer support and financial position
The measures taken to contain the spread of Covid-19 have had an unprecedented impact on the UK property market throughout 2020 and into 2021. The market closures in the first half of the year prompted us to take action to support our Agency and New Homes customers, initially with a 75% discount from April to July, followed by 60% and 40% for Agency customers in August and September. Since markets have reopened around the UK, the recovery in home moving activity has been particularly strong, despite continued restrictions. Our customers have risen to the challenge of meeting that demand, using our digital solutions and data to optimise their marketing resources and increase efficiency.
Despite the significant impact of the pandemic on revenue, our business model and core value proposition produced a solid set of financial results in 2020. Operating profit was £135.1m (2019: £213.7m) from revenue of £205.7m (2019: £289.3m) with continued cost discipline resulting in an operating margin of 66% and basic earnings per share of 12.6p (2019: 19.6p). Our cash position at the year-end was £96.7m, with reduced returns to shareholders allowing us to fund our operations and customer discounts, with no drawings on the CCFF or our revolving credit facility.
Returns to shareholders and dividend
In 2020 we returned £30.1m (2019: £148.8m) to shareholders in the first quarter through share buybacks.
Given the unprecedented operating environment, the Board has approved the ongoing maintenance of a cash balance of £50 million. The Board is confident in our ability to deliver sustainable returns to shareholders and is recommending a final dividend of 4.5p per share for 2020 (2019: 4.4p cancelled). The final dividend will be paid, subject to shareholder approval, on 28 May 2021. The Board has also approved the resumption of our share buyback programme in March 2021, confirming the resilience of the Rightmove business model and our commitment to returning free cash to shareholders.
Board changes
Robyn Perriss, our Finance Director, stepped down from the Board on 30 June 2020, after 12 years at Rightmove. Robyn was a great asset in developing strong financial management and controls and keeping our investors well informed. Our thanks also to Georgina Hudson for her work as interim Finance Director in 2020 and ensuring a smooth transition from Robyn to our new Chief Financial Officer. On 7 September, Alison Dolan joined the Board as Chief Financial Officer and has already made a major contribution.
Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) strategy
During 2020, we revisited Rightmove’s ESG strategy for a sustainable business, reflecting our culture and desire to make a significant impact and be a system-positive business through a comprehensive set of initiatives.
We are committed to reducing Rightmove’s environmental footprint. We have signed up to the 1.5C Science Based Targets initiative and are working with their scientists to ensure our ambitious targets are in line with the science behind the Paris Accord. We will continue to work with the UK’s Net Zero Business Champion to support the Government’s plans for the UK to be net carbon zero by 2050, and have expanded our environmental reporting this year on our journey to begin reporting under the recommendations of the Taskforce for Climate-related Financial Disclosures at the end of 2021.
Looking ahead
On behalf of the Board, I would like to thank all our customers for their continued confidence and support through the most exceptional circumstances and to reiterate our determination to deliver the best marketplace for home hunters and help ensure property advertisers reach the widest possible audience.
Taking the difficult decision to conserve cash in 2020 has, I believe, helped to preserve liquidity while supporting the investment in the technology and resources required to create long-term shareholder value. Our commitment to continue that investment and innovate for the long-term sustainability and growth of Rightmove is embodied in our business strategy.
I am looking forward to continuing to create value for all our stakeholders in 2021.
Andrew Fisher
Chair
26 February 2021
Chief Executive Officer’s Review
Over the past 20 years, Rightmove and the thousands of local businesses who make up our customer base have changed the way Britain searches for and researches property. The Covid-19 pandemic turned everybody’s lives upside down, and the resulting uncertainty and disruption has brought challenges unlike anything we have faced since we first started. Whilst much has changed, 2020 has highlighted the trust Britain’s homemovers put in Rightmove as not only the place to find their next home, but also the source of reliable information about the housing market. That Rightmove ends 2020 a stronger business than it entered is testament to the adaptability and tenacity of our people.
Twenty years on, our focus remains on making home moving easier in the UK and that clarity of purpose has helped to guide our business and the delivery of our strategy through the challenges of 2020.
Our response to Covid-19
Our priority during the pandemic has been the wellbeing of our people, supporting our customers and continuing to drive towards our strategic goals whilst making prudent decisions amid the uncertainty to maintain liquidity.
The Government measures taken to contain the spread of Covid-19 had an unprecedented impact on the UK property market, which was effectively closed from 23 March until 13 May in England, 22 June in Wales and 29 June in Scotland. This had an immediate impact on our customers’ cash flows which took time to recover, since the average housing transaction takes around three months to complete. We responded by supporting all our customers with discounts between April and September, conscious of the economic impact of market disruption on their businesses. The revenue impact of customer discounts in the year was nearly £90m, contributing to a fall in Group revenue of £83.6m to £205.7m and a fall in operating profit by 37% to £135.1m. Despite the challenging operational and economic conditions for our customers, Agency and New Homes customer numbers ended the year down just 3% at 19,197, with the number of Estate Agency members growing slightly in the second half of the year.
Our customers have shown great resilience during 2020, responding to the new rules and adopting new digital tools to allow home movers to continue to find their dream next home in safety. We believe that the adoption of these tools will also make their businesses more efficient over the long term.
Beyond supporting our customers financially, we rolled out a number of practical initiatives. These initiatives included over 2.2 million ‘kick start’ alerts to home hunters to refresh interest in properties that had been available for sale or rent before the first lockdown, helping agents to replenish the pipeline of property transactions as the market reopened; a new bespoke local market data tool to help agents target resources most efficiently and a new platform for video viewings of properties.
We have worked to keep our customers informed of the rapidly changing market conditions and to help them to adapt. We hosted close to 100 webinars for agents in 2020, which were attended by over 29,000 property professionals from over 5,700 branches and viewed by a further 17,000 people using the catch-up facility. Attendance at our webinars trebled in 2020 compared to 2019, and customer engagement through the Hub increased, with over 1 million pages viewed during the year.
Recognising our role as a trusted source of housing market knowledge for UK home hunters, we increased the frequency of our consumer email update from fortnightly to weekly. This update was read by an average of over 750,000 home hunters every week. For the first time ever, we ran webinars for consumers to answer their questions about what the market closure and subsequent reopening meant for buyers, sellers and renters.
Since the property market reopened, we have seen record-breaking traffic on our platforms and our customers responding by investing in our digital solutions to meet that demand. Since May we have had 231 record days of traffic and on 12 of those days visits exceeded 8 million, peaking at 68.4 million minutes spent on our platforms in one day.
Our focus on innovation and delivering marketing solutions to our customers led to an increase in sales of our premium packages, with 1,110 Agency customers investing in our Optimiser 2020 package launched in November 2019. We have continued to innovate to make moving easier for home hunters. Further integration of Van Mildert has enabled us to develop the next version of the tenant passport. The launch of the online appointments system, Viewings Manager, saw the completion of the first phase of our work to digitise the journey to a rental move, with the development of the second phase well underway.
As a team and a business, we have emerged stronger from 2020, with a better relationship with our customers, clear evidence of the resilience of our business and a stronger sense of common purpose. The resilience of our business during 2020 was in no small part down to the adaptability and commitment of our teams. Our employees transferred to remote working in March and have seamlessly continued to deliver excellent customer service and drive innovation. For example, our product teams have delivered nearly 50% more updates to the Rightmove platform than in 2019. I am delighted that, in spite of the difficult environment and rapid change in everyone’s lives, 93% of our people, responding to the annual ‘Have Your Say’ survey, believe that Rightmove is a great place to work.
Our Strategy – making home moving easier
The place consumers turn to first and engage with most
Rightmove is at the heart of the home-moving process in the UK, being the place consumers turn to first when thinking about their next move. Perhaps the simplest indication of this is the speed at which home hunters turn to Rightmove when conditions in the market change. Within an hour of the English stamp duty holiday being announced on 8 July 2020, traffic jumped by 15% above already high levels and went on to surpass over 8 million visits in a single day for the first time in Rightmove’s history.
Our place in the market is hard won, the home-hunting audience has high expectations of the technology and services we offer, and in turn we focus on continual improvement and innovation to make the home-moving process a simple and compelling experience for them.
In 2020, consumers made over 2 billion(1) visits to Rightmove across all our platforms and spent over 15.9 billion(2) minutes on Rightmove, up 31% on 2019.
We achieve this level of consumer engagement by delivering the most up-to-date, engaging and comprehensive property content, together with the best search and research tools. Amongst the many improvements in 2020, we completed a ground-up rebuilding of our property details pages. Improvements include larger images, integrated video content, better navigation and signposting and the introduction of property images alongside floorplans. Consumers have been quick to adopt the new style pages, with the amount of time spent per property listed increasing by over 70%. Importantly, this has also increased the number of property enquiries sent to our customers.
Consumer preference for accessing property on mobile platforms continues to strengthen, with our mobile-optimised site and apps again showing the fastest growth of all our platforms. We saw a 42% increase in mobile site sessions and a 39% increase in app sessions during 2020. We have over four times more active users on our mobile and tablet apps than our closest competitor, with each user spending nearly twice as much time on average(3). With over six times the total amount of time spent on our apps relative to our closest competitor, our unrivalled platform is even stronger with app users.
Home hunters rely on our platforms to be available all the time and we have again recorded an industry-leading level of “uptime” of 99.99%, meaning our platforms were unavailable for just 14 minutes during 2020.
Researching the property market is a key activity for landlords, home owners, buyers and sellers. In 2020, our research tools, such as sold price data, were by far the most widely used in the UK, with over 1.1 million UK properties currently listed for sale or to rent and over 55 million historical property records. Perhaps reflecting the increased demand in the marketplace, consumers spent over 497 million minutes using these tools in 2020 – an increase of 22% on 2019.
The shift in home-hunter behaviour when the market re-opened was noted by more people considering not only what they need from a home, but also where they want to live. Many home hunters are actively considering longer commute times as they consider their working patterns in a post pandemic world. Use of our tool, Where Can I Live?, which uses sophisticated data analysis to help people work out which locations they can afford and meet their new commute time criteria, was up by 45% in the second half of 2020 compared to the same period in 2019.
Our market-leading data and analytical capability allows us to publish the UK’s most accurate leading indicator of house prices in the UK. Our House Price Index is based on around 95% of newly-advertised properties in the UK. Whilst always a widely used property research tool for consumers and property professionals alike, the rapidly changing market in 2020 demonstrated the unique real-time trends our data can reveal, based on hundreds of thousands of data points.
For 20 years, we have invested in our brand and we continue to reinforce that with our always-on ‘Find Your Happy’ campaign. Shortly after the first national lockdown we filmed our new TV advert, ‘This is it”, to capture the moment people find their next happy home, to highlight the crucial role a home plays in creating memories, and to remind people that there is no perfect time to move home.
Our investment in brand-building includes national television, through our partnership with Channel 4, supported by online video, digital and outdoor advertising. Throughout 2020, we used our unrivalled datasets to publish positive and factual content both on site and in our housing reports, to help build consumer confidence, counter negative speculation about the housing market and give confidence to homemovers and customers based on real time insights.
Whilst over 85% of visits to our platforms come from consumers typing ‘Rightmove’ into their browser or launching our app, we have launched more initiatives, including on search engine optimisation and on engagement, recognising that the behaviour of our audience is always evolving. As a result of these initiatives and direct marketing, we have seen traffic increase by 31% and time on site by 31%, extending Rightmove’s share of time compared to other property portals.
Unrivalled exposure, leads and products for our customers
Since Rightmove’s inception, helping our customers to market to the largest possible audience and to win more business have been our key objectives. In 2020, it was also vital that we helped our customers to operate more efficiently, navigate a variety of new restrictions and meet record demand from home hunters.
The record traffic to Rightmove, coupled with the strong property market in the second half of 2020, helped our customers to recover from the market closure between March and June. We delivered 51 million property specific leads to our customers, up 27% on 2019. At over 1.6 leads every second, this is a new record for the number of leads sent from Rightmove in a year.
In late 2019, we launched our new premium package ‘Optimiser 2020’, building on the success of the existing Optimiser package. The new package includes ‘Opportunity Manager’, an algorithm-powered intelligence tool and ‘Sold By Me’ – a new dynamically-targeted product to attract potential sellers. I am pleased that, despite the challenges of 2020, increasing numbers of our agency customers chose to buy Optimiser 2020, and benefited from the success of Sold by Me and the operating efficiencies enabled by Opportunity Manager. In 2020, the proportion of our independent agency customers buying our Enhanced and Optimiser packages was unchanged at 38%, with the majority of customers upgrading to the Optimiser 2020 package from the lower-priced Optimiser package.
Rightmove is not only the largest Residential property portal in the UK, it is also the largest Commercial Real Estate (CRE) portal in the UK. Our Commercial property advertising business continues to offer the efficiency benefits of Rightmove platforms to companies interested in the acquisition, occupation or divestment of their commercial assets. Rightmove Commercial is established as the platform of choice, both for occupiers, and for RICS-qualified CRE professionals, with the majority of users defining themselves as agents/surveyors, landlord/owners, developers or investors. Our traffic to commercial properties increased by 15% and leads to CRE customers increased by 25% as the need to respect social distancing in 2020 accelerated the adoption of digital media within the CRE sector. Underlying growth in the CRE business was driven by an encouraging adoption of the Rightmove marketing platform by new customers and existing customers spending more with us.
Our platforms generate significant amounts of proprietary property and home hunter demand data. The Rightmove Data Services business supports the property industry by delivering property valuation tools and insights based on our unparalleled dataset. Our Surveyor Comparable Tool, used by surveyors to make property valuations, was used in over 75% of mortgage transactions in the UK and more than 2.3 million reports were run in 2020, only a 4% decrease on 2019 despite an 11% fall in housing transactions. The importance of data-driven solutions in the socially distanced world of 2020 led to a 10% increase in the use of our Automated Valuation Model APIs by lenders and overall we valued more than £2.5 trillion worth of property in 2020. The combination of increased usage of the Automated Valuation Model and the value of our real-time demand and property data more than offset the lower usage of our other transactional tools.
2020 presented particularly difficult trading conditions for our Overseas property advertising business, with Covid travel restrictions and continuing Brexit uncertainty. The dream of owning a property abroad is still strong amongst the British public, with leads up 2% on 2019 despite the obstacles to purchasing overseas. We took the opportunity to restructure the Overseas team and prepare for the release of pent-up demand for overseas properties once travel restrictions are lifted and the post Brexit environment stabilises. Site optimisations led to more than 10% more time being spent on the overseas section of the site compared to 2019. The site optimisation, in conjunction with the pent-up demand for overseas property, led to us recording our busiest ever day on the Overseas section of the website in 2020.
Innovation to create a simpler and more efficient marketplace
Over the last 20 years, Rightmove has helped drive significant efficiencies within the property industry by providing our customers with training, support and a suite of software as part of their membership to help them in the day to day running of their businesses. However, we are restless and have much more to do, we are continually innovating to make the property marketplace more efficient for home hunters and customers. We believe there are opportunities to improve the journey from searching for a home to being ready to transact on it.
The Covid restrictions introduced by the Government led both home hunters and customers to reassess how best to progress their property journey. We responded by accelerating our plans to help the property market become more digital. We believe making the journey more digital will increase the long-term efficiency of our customers and reduce the environmental impact of wasted journeys.
Innovating for efficiency now
To help customers and home hunters adhere to the social distancing guidelines and minimise unnecessary travel, we delivered a new tool which enables customers to securely deliver online viewing videos to home hunters, in line with government advice. The integrated tool also offers usage reporting and functionality to make the process of responding to home hunter enquiries quicker and more efficient for agents.
The use of video viewings represents a significant shift in the behaviour of UK agents and consumers, and adoption has been steady, with over 40,000 videos uploaded to the platform since launch. Where available nearly 50% of home movers engage with the video content as part of the lead sending process.
We also made further progress with developing our rentals solution. Following two successful trial phases, Viewings Manager, our integrated appointment booking system for tenants began full roll out in 2020. Building on the knowledge gained as part of the Van Mildert acquisition, Viewings Manager includes the next iteration of the Rightmove Tenant Passport.
The appointment booking functionality allows tenants to request an appointment electronically whilst enhancing the lead information with the passport details. This allows agents to simply and easily assess the property’s affordability and suitability for the tenant, and potentially allow them to suggest something more suitable. Once a viewing is confirmed, tenants can cancel or reschedule the appointment at the click of a button and receive automated reminders to help avoid missed appointments and unnecessary journeys for agents. Following the viewing, feedback is automatically gathered from the tenant saving the agent time and offering the home hunter the chance to express their interest in progressing towards tenancy.
Since roll out began in November over 400 independent Agency branches have adopted Viewings Manager with over 18,000 Passports completed in January 2021 and a similar number of appointments already requested. Early feedback from agents on the improved efficiency of the process is encouraging, with a number reporting a significant reduction in wasted journeys to appointments.
Once a viewing has been completed agents can seamlessly order a full tenant reference from Van Mildert without the need to re-enter the tenant’s details, saving time and reducing the risk of error.
Innovating for growth tomorrow
When moving, tenants require a number of services such as home contents insurance and broadband for their new homes. Offering these services at the right time in the moving journey is important in making the service useful to tenants and therefore valuable. In 2020 we took the first steps to expand the monetisation of the rental journey by offering these services to tenants who had successfully passed a reference with Van Mildert. Despite our offering in 2020 being experimental and not optimised, we helped nearly 7,000 tenants with their needs. This is an area we intend to experiment with further in 2021 by engaging the Rightmove audience throughout their tenant journey.
Whilst the majority of our efforts have been focused on improving the journey to renting a home, our partnership with Nationwide Building Society continues to provide valuable insights into consumer interest in mortgage information. Through the re-design of our property details pages, we increased consumer engagement with our mortgage affordability partnership with Nationwide by a factor of four between September and December 2020. We are early in the journey of enabling a more digital approach to mortgages, but our experience in 2020 stands us in good stead. It underlines the need for more digitally led mortgage options evidenced through consumer engagement with our tools, and provides us with valuable insight into how users’ needs will evolve through the journey.
Our Environment and the Society in which we live
As an organisation we live by our values and we believe our values extend beyond how we do business. “Doing the right thing” is central to the values we espouse, and we believe Rightmove can and should be a force for good within the communities in which we operate.
Doing the right thing encompasses our response to a range of issues. It was front of mind when we were one of the first companies to choose to repay the grant from the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS) when it became apparent that we did not require it. It is front of mind when we think about diversity and inclusion and the lack of opportunities for some of those within the communities we serve, and it is front of mind when we think about the world in which we live.
I am pleased with the progress we have made in reducing the gender pay gap within Rightmove over the last four years, however we still have much more to do. 2020 has caused us to reassess how we take steps to promote inclusion and opportunity beyond our company. I am delighted that we have been able to help Women’s Aid and Childline in addition to our support for our local charities in what has been a very challenging year for all charities. I look forward to the work we have planned in 2021, both as part of our new partnership with Generating Genius to encourage more of those who are disadvantaged to consider a career in technology, and to recruit from non-traditional educational routes.
We have significantly reduced our own carbon emissions over the last three years, but doing the right thing requires us to do more. Our environmental strategy supports initiatives to make the UK a carbon neutral country using the reach of our platforms to inform and encourage consumers to improve the energy efficiency of their homes and bring these factors to the fore when considering their next home.
Our Data Services business is currently working on an exploratory project with the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Energy to assess the value difference of low carbon homes. We believe that by continuing to digitise home moving in the UK and helping consumers to understand their options around making homes more energy efficient, we can help drive the UK’s ‘net zero’ agenda.
Build great teams
From the first Rightmove team of a dozen to the current team of over 550, our people define Rightmove and create a culture which is exciting, innovative, open and supportive, where everyone matters, and every idea can be explored. Our people always strive to achieve more for our customers and consumers.
We endeavour to create one team in a highly connected organisation, with minimal hierarchy and bureaucracy creating barriers to rapid growth and innovation. We believe the key to this success is employing the right people, then giving them the freedom, tools and confidence to innovate and lead effectively.
In 2020, we have adapted our ways of working and communicating outside the normal office environment. We have learned how to stay connected with frequent all-employee online Town Halls and smaller virtual team ‘stand ups’ and social events. We were fortunate to be able to return all our employees to work after the initial furlough period and offer flexible working arrangements to anyone who needed them.
Even during extended periods of remote working, these actions and the behaviours of our people have maintained a strong sense of belonging and connection. In the 2020 ‘Have Your Say’ survey, 93% of employees (2019: 81%) agreed that ‘Rightmove is a great place to work’. I am again grateful for the direct, honest and often humorous feedback from our people in 2020, which has created an organisation with such a strong sense of belonging and purpose.
Our culture sets us apart from many organisations and is defined by each of our people, who are proud to be part of Rightmove. It is a culture which has been continuously evolving over the last 20 years and I am very proud of what we have achieved together during 2020. I would like to thank every Rightmover for their extraordinary efforts and commitment. We have been true to our values and preserved our culture through the most challenging circumstances, driving innovation and success and creating a place where everyone can thrive.
Peter Brooks-Johnson
Chief Executive Officer – Rightmove
26 February 2021
(1) Source: Google analytics
(2) Source: comScore.
(3) Source: App Annie.
