Rightmove Plc today announces a number of changes aimed at increasing focus on its core UK property advertising business.
In the context of a challenging housing market, Rightmove will significantly increase its consumer marketing spend and make organisational changes to even better support those estate agents who are embracing the switch to on-line media.
Commenting on the organisational change, Miles Shipside, commercial director, said, “Rightmove has strong coverage in every part of Britain, representing 90% of all agents. Now the focus is on ensuring that our members use the Rightmove service to deliver the best possible results for their own clients and also for home hunters. As a result we are moving from a sales-oriented structure to an account management structure to allow all our capabilities to be delivered to individual member estate agents.”
The key changes are:
1. A reorganisation of the existing estate agency sales force and customer service teams into account management teams, each covering a region of the country;
2. Greater focus on the national and regional house builders as well as the growing housing association market, with less focus on more speculative individual developments and property conversions;
3. A scaling back of the Rightmove Overseas business to reflect a decreased demand for property in continental Europe;
4. Exiting from direct selling of banner advertising on the Aboutmyplace mapping website reflecting the general excess capacity for on-line generalist banner advertising;
5. A general reduction in overheads in line with the tough trading conditions being experienced by the property industry as a whole.
“We will be able to substantially increase our investment in consumer marketing during 2009 as a result of these changes,” said Shipside. “Some free-to-list sites have seen activity on their sites fall by up to 30% since the middle of the year. Rightmove’s own site traffic has been far more robust, but we will not run the risk of our member agents missing out on reaching serious home movers.”
The costs involved in implementing these changes are anticipated to be incurred in the 2008 financial year without an impact on market expectations for full year results. Rightmove continues to invest and grow its business in Holiday Lettings (through its holidaylettings.co.uk subsidiary), in its Automated Valuation and Data Services business as well as a number of areas of the rightmove.co.uk advertising business such as its lettings service.