Rightmove's share price has had another week to forget. On 20 September the Sunday Times handed it a gift of a story - a New York activist, a headline "stake", and a neat thesis that the AI sell-off had gone too far. The shares duly jumped on Monday and peaked on Tuesday at 508.6p ... which happened to be the day a new free-to-list portal formally launched. Nobody's claiming cause and effect. We're just noting the timing.
By Friday they'd sunk to 441p - 13% off Tuesday's high, and within sniffing distance of May's low of 410p.
Cue Trevor Abrahmsohn, who helped found both Primelocation and OnTheMarket. Rightmove, he told the trade press this week, has "an almost giddyingly high profit margin", but "the AI colossus is strategically perched, waiting and watching to engulf Rightmove and its brethren". The portal model, in his view, is "on its last legs" and will "follow the Kodak and Polaroid examples".
Meanwhile, over at Zoopla, COO Rich Hayes picked the same week to leave after three years, to pursue his ambition of "leading a business again". His LinkedIn calls AI "the most exciting technology shift of my career". I agree with him. Perhaps those at Zoopla didn't.
So who's the Rightmove activist? Sachem Head, a New York hedge fund run by Scott Ferguson. Its best-known UK campaign pushed Whitbread to split off Costa in 2018; Coca-Cola bought Costa within months. According to the Sunday Times, it wants Rightmove to borrow money to buy back more of its own shares, and some investors read that as Rightmove being ripe for a bid.
The "stake" is the fun bit. Sachem Head's own filing shows it doesn't own a single Rightmove share. Its 5.96% is held entirely through contracts for difference - in plain English, a side bet with a bank or broker on the share price. Think of betting on what a house will sell for rather than buying it: if the price rises you collect, if it falls you pay, and you never get the keys. In a listed company, the keys are the votes. For now, it's a big bet on the price, not a hand on the tiller.
The buyback idea is odd too, because Rightmove is already doing it: around £330m of buybacks by next summer, helped by a new £200m borrowing line, from a company that had no debt in the first half. Sachem Head wants more. But borrowed buybacks only work if the cash keeps coming, and a portal has one dependable source of it: agents' monthly bills. If you're an agent, you'll read that and think: "Let me guess who's paying."
The activist’s conceit isn’t based on nothing. The evidence that AI is disintermediating portals is thin. In February, Rightmove put its ChatGPT traffic at under half a per cent. And when Jefferies analyst Giles Thorne spent the summer running an AI agent as a father of three hunting for a four-bed, Rightmove supplied 57% of the property links it found. Agents, directly, supplied 1%.
Trevor's AI colossus may well be perched. For now, it's perched on Rightmove.
But Rightmove’s position isn't a permanent tech moat. It's an inventory moat - built from your stock and rented back to you monthly. AI goes wherever property data is clean and consistent, and 20,000-odd agency websites, each doing their own thing, aren't that. Fixing your own site is the right instinct and the wrong unit. The 1% is a coordination problem, and coordination problems need a shared layer. It needs a discovery engine.
A traditional, paid-for portal is an audience business. It takes your stock, builds traffic on it, and bills you monthly for access - and every new product exists to justify the next fee rise.
A discovery engine is a data business. Feed it your stock, for free, and it turns every listing into a profile an AI can match against a real question - "three-bed, walkable to a good primary, quiet street, under £400k" - while buyers still get what they've always liked about portals: homes in the same format, compared like for like. It's free to list, paid for by ancillary services, unique data and consumer subscriptions to cool home-based products.
And because it isn't selling access, it links out. The buyer can land on your site, under your brand, and every listing becomes a link from a national, AI-friendly site back to yours - the kind of signal Google and AI search both treat as authority. A portal sells you its audience. A discovery engine builds yours.
A paid portal gets richer on the supply side; a free-to-list discovery engine gets richer from the demand side. One is a toll booth. The other is a road.
Nobody sensible is insisting you switch Rightmove off today. Adding a feed to a discovery engine is a hedge that costs nothing – but will generate big savings once AI search inevitably becomes mainstream.
Sachem Head may have grabbed a funky Sunday headline for its seemingly-contrarian position on AI and paid-for portals – by the end of the week, with a loss of around £20m already, it might be looking at some rather more negative ones to explain to its investors in the weeks to come.