Ian Springett, Chief Executive Officer of OnTheMarket plc, commented:
“I am very pleased to report a strong start to the delivery of our transformational growth strategy following our Admission to AIM and associated capital raise.
“We said that we would be seeking to rapidly expand our agent base and this has grown from 5,500 branches under listing contracts at Admission to more than 11,000 as at 1 October 2018. We also committed to substantially higher marketing spend to increase traffic to the website: we launched a new national TV campaign in September, ramped up our expenditure on digital marketing and have run high-impact poster advertising. This has resulted in our highest ever traffic performance in September with 17.4 million visits.
“Finally we undertook to invest in the OnTheMarket field sales and IT teams to enable us to provide enhanced levels of service for our agent customers and a premier search experience for property-seekers. As at 1 October 2018 we have grown those teams from 36 at Admission to 92.
“Compared with February 2018 when our IPO took place, OnTheMarket has doubled offices and properties listed, trebled monthly visit traffic and quadrupled email and telephone leads to agents.
“Our progress to date and the encouraging support for an agent-backed portal give us confidence that we can continue to build on this early growth to develop a market-leading, agent-backed portal.”
OnTheMarket plc (LON: OTMP), the agent-backed company which operates the OnTheMarket.com property portal, today announced its unaudited interim results for the six months ended 31 July 2018.
Financial highlights and KPIs
· Group revenue of £7.01m (H1 17/18: £6.9m).
· Administrative expenses of £12.0m in H1 18/19, up 200% on H1 17/18 and in line with the new growth strategy as the Group invested capital raised in increased marketing expenditure and expansion of the team.
· Adjusted operating loss2 of £5.0m (H1 17/18: operating profit £2.9m).
· Operating loss of £5.7m (H1 17/18: operating profit £2.7m).
· Loss after tax attributable to shareholders £5.7m (H1 17/18: profit after tax of £1.9m).
· Loss per share of 9.57p (H1 17/18: earnings per share 5.36p).
· Cash of £24.3m as at 31 July 2018 (£3.2m at 31 January 2018).
· ARPA3 £153 (H1 17/18: £194), average branch numbers listed at OnTheMarket.com 7,788 (H1 17/18: 5,909) with period end listings of 9,777 (H1 17/18: 5,618), visits4 69.0m (H1 17/18: 33.7m).
Operational and strategic highlights
· Admitted to AIM on 9 February 2018.
· Raised £30m (gross) through the issue of 18,181,818 ordinary shares, all outstanding loan notes converted to equity £ for £ and accrued interest settled in cash.
· At admission authority in place to issue up to 36.3 million shares to agents to join as shareholders in return for committing to long term listing agreements.
Post period end highlights
· As at 1 October 2018, the Group has signed listing agreements with UK estate and letting agents with more than 11,000 branches, a 100% increase since admission to AIM. The growth in OnTheMarket’s agency branch base to date has been predominantly from offering free listings under short-term introductory trial offers, with a view to converting these to full tariff contracts when the value of its offering has been demonstrated.
· Expanded the field sales team from 15 and the IT team from 21 at Admission to 40 and 52 respectively as of 1 October 2018.
· A new national TV advertising campaign has been running since September and poster advertising has been initiated in London.
· In September a record 17.4 million visits were made to the portal, with email and telephone leads 4 times the amount in February 2018.
· Listing partnership with Facebook for OnTheMarket agents’ rental properties to appear on Facebook Marketplace, as announced on 5 September 2018.
