What’s new. As at 8 April 2019, OnTheMarket Plc (LON:OTMP) has over one million people using its property alert service.
Property alerts are an important indicator of consumer engagement with a portal as they are used by property-seekers who wish to be notified immediately when a property meeting their search criteria becomes available or is subject to a change such as a price reduction.
A key reason for serious property-seekers to sign up for an OTM alert is that the property seekers will be first to see any relevant “New & exclusive” properties: OTM displays thousands of new properties every month 24 hours or more before they are on Rightmove or Zoopla.
To place OTM’s 1m active alerts “milestone” in context:
In 2018, over 2m people received a property alert from Rightmove.
In 2018, Rightmove sent 781m instant alert emails.
Over the past year, OTM sent 526m instant alert emails, which is 67% of the Rightmove 781m emails. Recently, OTM revealed it displayed over 600,000 UK residential property listings, which is c. 60% of the number claimed by Rightmove.
While many visitors to property portals are “just looking”, a high proportion of those using the OTM portal appear to be active property-seekers. Feedback from agents evidences both the volume and the high quality of OTM leads
Ian Springett, OnTheMarket CEO, observed: “OnTheMarket is continuing to close the gap with Rightmove in terms of engagement with currently active property-seekers.“That over one million people are already using our property alert service indicates the agent-backed portal is delivering an increasingly relevant service for the property-seeking public. This is creating growing value for our agent advertisers and is an important step towards providing them with a market-leading alternative to Rightmove and Zoopla.”
Zeus view. OTM is well established, being used by 1+ million property-seekers, looking at 600,000+ UK residential properties listed by 12,500+ estate agents’ offices. OTM is gaining utility, as Rightmove’s utility falls.
Valuation. At 96.5p OTM has an equity market cap of £60m (<£5k per office), while Rightmove is valued at >£240k/office. In our opinion, by 2020/21, we would expect OTM’s EBIT margin to exceed 30% and for it to trade on over £20k/office, which is consistent with a share price of over 300p a share.
