Rightmove Resistance 2

I try really hard each week to not return to previous topics too quickly. However, there’s only one real subject this week and it’s a progression of the one from last week – Rightmove and its plentiful problems.

For those who missed it, there’s a potential £1bn bill coming their way if a class action lawsuit is successful. It’ll take a while, it’ll disappear from view for ages, but it will be simmering away in the background, furrowing the brows of those well-remunerated execs in RM Towers.

It'll also be weighing heavily on their retirement plans. Much of CEO Johan Svanstrom’s senior squad’s salaries include bonuses for Rightmove share performance – and, indeed, shares themselves – that they earn for steering the ship in an investor-friendly (profoundly NOT agent-friendly) direction.

When each share was worth (a record) 823.80p in the sunshine on 6^th August this year, the cigars and champagne must have been evident from Soho Square to Caldecotte Lakes. Fast forward just 14 weeks and an astonishing 33% has been wiped from the business as winter starts to take hold. Is this the start of a permanent fall in Rightmove’s value – or just a blip as it faces a number of unique headwinds at the same time?

The facts:

1. Svanstrom announced his big beautiful AI bet on 6^th November, as the share price showed a 3-month decline of over 20% already. It felt knee-jerk. This had not been expected by the market; Rightmove had spent the previous two decades shunning ‘trendy’ new tech and just grinding ever-more into agent wallets with the same website functionality and the same user journey. Why was this any different? What had driven the share price 20% down already – and could Svanstrom reverse it? The market was unimpressed and the share price fell (a lot) further.

2. During the preceding three months, as the share price dived, an unusual combination of amber lights were starting to be seen on Johan’s hitherto relentlessly (minty) green dashboard:

   1. CoStar’s acquisition of OnTheMarket had been brushed off back in 2023 but now they were talking big about global domination - and putting their considerable money where CEO Andy Flowers’ mouth was by acquiring Australia’s number two portal Domain.

   2. REA Group, Domain’s formidable Aussie number one competitor – who had bid £6.4bn for the Rightmove business in September 2024 – was back on these shores with a £3.8m investment in AI upstart Jitty. (There is a very interesting strand that we may pull on in due course about that £3.8m being a small part of saving REA Group at least £1bn when they next try to acquire RM … but that story hasn’t quite reached its climax yet …)

   3. I was fresh back from the 60-day, 60-location ‘Rightmove Resistance Tour’, hearing first-hand from hundreds of agents how RM was punishing them relentlessly. Every business was at its mercy when it came to cost control and their ability to afford to expand, to recruit, even to create the right incentive schemes and pay for proper Christmas parties. As we’ve built MyPorta out to be the ‘free-to-list’ portal of choice for thousands of agents over the last three months, we’ve seen constant, increasingly devious attempts from RM (and others!) to get into our webinars and events and see what we’re up to (hi, Imogen!)

3. Then the big one dropped last week – a potential £1bn compensation demand from some serious legal players, including an ex-member of the Competition and Markets Authority who knows exactly how to spot malpractice where it lies (a smugly-promoted 70% margin helps flag this too, of course; just how they’ve been able to get away with it for so long might well become an issue that we scratch our heads about in the years to come …). Credit has to go to Shaun Adams of Cooper Adams, whose one-man petition campaign, to get the CMA to look into RM’s grossly offensive margin, must have flagged this to these legal eagles – and there is word that this claim may not be the only one to be troubling Johan as he settles down to eat his Xmas turkey.

   
   

So is this a blip or terminal? There is a lot that agents could choose to do to increase the pressure on Rightmove - and potentially make it the latter.

Rightmove has stated clearly it has plans to increase its fees to over £2,000 per branch per month on average. This could be stopped - or even reversed - with smart application of AI strategies in 2026.

So we’re announcing today that I’m heading back out on the road in January and February next year on the ‘Rightmove Resistance Tour 2: The Reckoning’.

Once more I’ll be hitting 60 locations in 60 days – one of which will be within 40 minutes from 80% of agent branches – and I’ll be showing why AI is going to change everything for agencies, for the better, with free-to-list becoming the norm.

It’s open to any agent that wants 2026 to open with hope of a better future, away from the boot-on-the-throat of Rightmove’s ever-increasing fees. The dominant portal has told its shareholders that it’ll improve its share price by locking agents in for longer, with more products costing higher amounts. But there’s another way.

Register here: https://modelprop.typeform.com/resist26

It's time.