A series of open letters – plus some game posting on property news comments’ sections – have sought to portray CoStar’s putative takeover of OnTheMarket (OTM) as, amongst a surprising number of other things, against shareholders’ interests, against agents’ interests, against the UK national interests and (wait for it ...) against people’s “inalienable right to liberty”.
And that’s just for starters.
Invisible to most until this week, one Brett Stone – who, for reasons that remain a mystery, describes himself as committed to “the long-term development of the UK property commerce category for the benefits of agents and all its stakeholders” – has suddenly declared open war on CoStar, OTM and OTM’s CEO Jason Tebb.
"Jason has been paid more than £700,000 in cash, taken options over 2,985,412 shares and lost 1,831 agents,” Stone fumes on everyone’s behalf. “He is now trying to sell out the agents' portal to please a small group of non-agent shareholders."
Competitive chin-stroking has commenced around which of the other portals he’s a stooge for – might he be paid by Rightmove or Zoopla? – and/or whether Tebb and co’s rejection of Stone’s own investment offer from October 2022 has left him embittered and frothing about lost profits.
Whatever the driver for this somewhat over-the-top attempt to sabotage the CoStar deal, it’s gained some traction across the property-serving media and potentially caused a few to stop and think. Indeed OTM shareholder and Co-Founder, Trevor Abramsohn – whom I had the genuine pleasure of working with when he was on the Board of Primelocation – is one who thinks that the CoStar deal stinks. Not because King Charles should have a view on the deal – something that Brett Stone also appears to be angling for – but because it values the shares too low.
Perhaps if Stone had started down that more traditional route of talking to current shareholders, he might have persuaded more of them that he has a point. As it stands, the firing-off of numerous open letters, the lack of ‘skin in the game’ (Stone holds no shares in OTM), the emotional level of negativity over something pretty transactional, all this has done less to harm the progress of the deal and more to focus attention on how weird this intervention actually is.
£30Bn-valued CoStar’s arrival in the UK portal market is the first serious threat to £4Bn Rightmove’s position in about fifteen years. RM’s share price has plummeted nearly 20% in the last month. This competition +has+ to be good for agents – whether by stalling RM’s incessant scooping out of their wallets or (/and) by getting it to really think about using its cash to innovate technologically, rather than just shamelessly buying back its own shares to bump its Directors’ bonuses.
Whatever Stone’s agenda is – and perhaps we should just take a moment to think about whether a £100m offer from his single-page website entity should have merited consideration from OTM’s Board, compared with the same deal from CoStar’s rather more compelling online presence – I suspect he’s achieved peak Tebb-trolling already.
It’ll be back to obscurity for Brett from here – unless the conspiracy theorists are correct and he really is a lackey of RM or Zoopla, in which case perhaps he will reappear with something dramatically different to say before the OTM shareholder vote on the CoStar deal on 4th December. I doubt it though. Arguments about undervaluation for shareholders aside, this is a great deal for OTM’s UK agent customers.
With the rise of AI cutting their marketing, development and operational costs significantly – plus a credible portal war for the first time in a decade-plus – 2024 is going to change the game for smart, quality estate agents.
Can’t wait :).
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