Good morning and welcome to this Investor Update. I'm joined by Ruaridh Hook, our CFO, and Tarah Lourens, COO. We look forward to taking you through this update on our business today. First, if the clicker is with me... Apologies for that. I'll try the other one. Can we get some help up there? All right. It became another minute and a half before we get going. Presentation mode. It's important. We're good? Thank you. All right. Let's start with this high-level view of our journey to date and where we're heading. For over 25 years now, Rightmove has been a leader in our Core domain of estate agency and new homes, combined with an exceptional reach and connection with the U.K. consumer. We're powered by exceptional network effects, delivering great value to both partners and consumers, and we have a compounding revenue line for Rightmove over time.
We do have, and are generating still, vast amounts of data, close to 3 PB to date, and that keeps growing. There have, of course, been some big technological shifts and enablers through this period, all of them adopted by Rightmove at some stage and turned into value, both externally and internally. In 2023, we outlined the opportunity to start expanding our role in the property ecosystem through the logically connected strategic growth areas. At the same time, we accelerated our NextGen platform work to make it fully modern, faster, and AI-ready. As of today, it is clear to us that both our platform and the fast-changing AI landscape in general are at a place where it makes sense to invest and accelerate. We want to proactively cater to the opportunities and the technological changes ongoing and coming.
It's not with an eye to the next quarter. It's a trained sight on the developments over the next five years. From today, we will lean in and accelerate further, progressing strongly in our core engine and new growth areas, including the SGAs, and we will infuse AI into all we do. We continue to execute with discipline, high-quality approach, and indeed strong shareholder returns. With that lead-in, just a quick orientation to the five sections to go through today. First, a recap and scoring of the business since 2023, what's changed and how we now look upon the future opportunity, the areas of focus and execution going into that future more specifically, the financial strong outcome and long-term benefits that we generate. Finally, there's going to be conclusion, and of course, we'll get to Q&A. Let's start with a quick reminder.
Our strategy is to develop the leading digital ecosystem for the whole moving experience, powered by exceptional data and network effects. This strategic framework for growth and diversification that we set up before, and you all know, we continue to follow this framework, including the highlighted focus areas. A couple of things to note. Residential find, top left, is still very much at the heart of what we do, and that is 90% of our total revenue. For the other areas that we expand in, we have two principles. One is that they constitute attractive revenue and profit opportunities, and two, that we build even further network effects back across the Core business and platform as we execute them. Now, we presented... Sorry, there we go. We presented these five Rightmove business pillars to you back in 2023, and we have executed strongly across this period, both operationally and financially.
We're definitely a more modern, more product-led, and more future-ready organization compared to the past. In the far right column here, you can see our self-score card summary marks for each pillar. We have done well on all of these, and in some, really, really well. Calling out only a few of the highlights in each of the pillars. For consumers, we have maintained a strong leadership position and traffic engagement metrics in a competitively quite dynamic landscape. We led with product and experience innovation, and we have had an upgrade of our brand and marketing approach. We've also added meaningful amounts of users more directly connected and relating to Rightmove, all in deepening our relationships and, again, ramping our data sets. For partners in our core engine, we have delivered strongly across packages and products.
We've also taken many of our partner interfaces and tools to the next level, and we are equipped with the best account management team in the U.K. We have great confidence in the long-term runway of our Core business. The strategic growth areas, which were around 7% revenue at the half year, as you remember, have hit the operational marks that we set alongside very good revenue pace. Results and learnings have confirmed the large market opportunities we identified, and we remain excited about the segments. Now, we did set out very ambitious and quite precise 2028 targets back in 2023. We're continuously looking at the best long-term way to play in them. Whilst we see strong growth rates of around 20%-30% as sustainable, our initial absolute targets for these will take a little bit longer to realize.
Now, within platform, transitioning to the cloud of our production and data platform is a methodical, multi-year, and complex effort, and in which we have made really great progress. Importantly, along the way of this effort, we've delivered high-quality service, platform performance, and innovation. We're squarely becoming a faster, more resilient, and more efficient business. One will be able to innovate even more from. Lastly, and importantly, our people. The team has grown with many new excellent colleagues and capabilities, combining with a long and deep experience bench we have in place. We're a better and truly technology-oriented team, and our culture and performance approach have strengthened. My thanks to the team at Rightmove for what I think is fantastic delivery in an ambitious, competitive, and dynamic environment.
Now, I know there's a lot of interest in the 7% of our business that is strategic growth areas, or the SGAs, so let's just take a further look at those with a short video recap.
Building on the U.K.'s leading platform for commercial property and transforming commercial search from the ground up. With improved search by sector and first-party data powering bespoke content, Rightmove is positioned as the leading voice in commercial real estate. By leveraging our commercial-specific property data, including over 50 new data points and full integration into Rightmove Plus, we're giving partners the control to fully optimize their commercial listings. Also powering an entirely new user experience with a commercial-first property details page, including spaces and building amenities, putting commercial property firmly on the map. Rightmove Commercial: Commercial Property Search Transformed. In 2022, we built the world's first integrated Mortgage in Principle.
Replacing a simple affordability calculator and targeting a fragmented market head-on, two years of testing, learning, and optimization later, we've achieved 15% more submissions from joint applicants, a 15% increase in accepts, and a 49% increase in consumers passing screening, all underpinned by a 230% increase in Mortgage in Principle submissions in that time. We took our improvements even further in 2025, launching Property Checker. Now, 60% of Mortgage in Principle applications include a property eligibility check. We're seeing a 46% completion rate on our new remortgage calculator. More than 120,000 home hunters have already used the first release of our enhanced affordability calculator. We are making sure consumers can find our affordability tools wherever they are. We've embedded entry points right across the Rightmove experience, from key landing pages to related tools, as well as inside their account. We're just getting started.
The U.K.'s only true end-to-end rental solution, driving efficiency at every step. Before Lead to Keys, there was endless administration, disconnected systems, manual effort, and little transparency. Now, with Lead to Keys, there is automation, centralization, and efficiency for both partners and consumers. Here is what our partners are saying about Lead to Keys. Designed to streamline the entire rental process, Lead to Keys is integrated with existing partner systems and accessed via Rightmove Plus. Powered by our first-party data, it features an up-to-date dashboard and gives compliance and progression reminders, plus a new renter checklist, giving tenants everything they need to move home. All driven by our trusted, connected first-party data, ensuring accuracy and relevance for partners and renters alike, including the ability to buy home services in My Rightmove. Lead to Keys. Everything needed, all in one place.
All right. As you can see, we're leading with product and differentiation, and we're growing our position in these markets, and we're definitely driving revenue growth along with it. Let's look at some of the very notable strong operational outcomes during this period. In commercial-first, you can see the great progress we made across several key metrics compared to where we were just a few years back. We've also done a lot of foundational platform and data work in the background, fit for commercial real estate purpose into the future. In addition, it's worth mentioning that our share of time on site per Similarweb is now nearing our share in Residential, and it is high quality. Over 70% of it is unique to Rightmove. Our share of FTSE 100 company real estate functions using Rightmove rose to 84% in the period.
Our revenue growth is on a good compounding trajectory. We're now entering more of the product and package evolution part over 2026 and beyond. In mortgages, the metrics here similarly show the clear consumer interest and uptake of the MIP product. Affordability is very relevant for the 67% or so of all home buyers who need financing, and it's very obvious that they like Rightmove providing these digital, intuitive, and novel ways to help them. The two-times effect on overall site engagement by users of the MIP feature and the mortgage tools is very meaningful. It's a good example of a new consumer feature adding to the network effect for Rightmove. Meanwhile, of course, MIP users become better and contextually informed in their home hunting journey, and thus, they also become more qualified in their subsequent agent conversations.
We'll continue product development and increasing our ability to segment the huge user base for the right mortgage process and products, with nurturing paths and data loops with lender and broker partnerships. Lastly, for rental services, same thing here, very strong metrics, great progress in penetrating this opportunity. We double our volumes of enhanced leads, tenant leads, and we then have a full digital product suite behind them to handle it. We're making life clearly more effective for agents. In late summer, we started to embed the two upfront part of Lead to Keys, which are the Enquiry Manager and the Enhanced Lead modules, into many of the market CRMs used by agents, making workflows more effective yet again. Lastly, during this fall, we're trialing and enabling those two upfront modules to more dual agents within the Core subscription, something that will continue over the next year.
It's an exciting penetration step-up opportunity, bringing efficiency to agents, landlords, and tenant applicants at true market scale. For clarity, the other Lead to Keys modules will be sold separately as they are, and over time, of course, to that enlarged base. Let's turn now to the Core estate agency new homes, again, 90% of our revenue, with a bit more detail. We delivered a lot here in the past two years. On the left, you can see our ramping product innovation pace for both consumers and partners. Often, we actually build to both sides directly, like we did with the Ascent package for new homes. Many of our consumer-only features, which drive utility, frequency, and engagement with the site, are also building up data signals that we use in future product builds, either for Core partners or that can provide other monetization opportunities for us.
We have delivered a number of packages and products to our Core partners. We built market product segments like Agent Accelerator for brand new agents or Axis for housing associations, and we now develop more tailored solutions to partner cohorts like multi-branch or corporates. On the right, with the Building Success Together program, we have continuously and meaningfully upgraded our business partnering toolbox and training support to the industry. The key outcome here is strong retention and sentiment scores. We're excited about the data-driven value creation and, again, long runway of our Core business opportunity. Now, I'll show you another video. This is going to be of the OAV product, Online Agent Valuation. It's the latest and quite recently launched product for estate agents, which is going into roll-up mode. It's a unique digital product.
It helps both consumers and agents in one go to save time and build a relationship. Plus, it's adding information about the most recent features and state of a property onto our platform. Tellingly of our times, it comes with an AI component built in from the start. OAV complements our existing suite of valuation products for both consumer and partners, and that's, of course, one that we built out quite meaningfully just in the last two years as well.
Introducing Online Agent Valuation, making accurate home valuations faster and simpler. Vendors can add details about their home, upload photos, then submit their request, giving agents everything they need to provide a valuation. They can add a personal note and a link to their premium price guide before sharing their estimate. The vendor then gets an email and visits the agent's branded page. Here, they can see their valuation and get in touch about next steps. Online Agent Valuation: smarter, faster, simpler.
To summarize the business progress and what we've been up to, Rightmove's consumer-driven network effects are strong and are a powerful engine for growth going also into the future. The strategic growth areas have delivered against operational milestones with good financial performance. Execution and product development plans continue towards what we believe are meaningful revenue opportunities. Engagement with Core partners has strengthened. We've upped the game on product and relationships and see a long runway for growth. Now, let's look forward. You also recognize this picture. It's important. We remain excited about the large and growing GBP 10 billion total revenue pool in U.K. property and home moving services. It can undeniably be much better digitized, more connected, more efficient, and we do have a role to play in that. As you might know, Rightmove just turned 25 years.
Happy birthday, of course, but mostly, we're excited about what we can do over the next 25 years. Now, what brought us here won't take us there. We want to accelerate into this. Again, our strategy is to develop the leading digital ecosystem for the whole moving experience, powered by exceptional data and network effects. We're guided by the vision at the top of our house, our three business pillars underneath, leverage and build the network effects that create value for consumers and partners, and definitely generating a lot of value for Rightmove. Note that what we call new growth here includes the SGAs, but the name also signifies that we have several ideas and opportunities in the hopper for the future. As you can see from the symbols across the house, AI has already taken a place in our home.
It's increasingly gone into how we think, plan, and execute the entire business. Let's do a very quick backdrop on AI. The truly big change in strategic context since we set out our plan in 2023 is the pace of AI developments. Massive amounts of money are invested across infrastructure for compute and in applications. Now, these numbers are large, yet all in are actually forecasted to grow into trillions over the next five years. Consumer usage from being served shorter answers and conversational interfaces in both existing and new platforms has grown to very large volumes already. There, of course, there are predictions of agents replacing or maybe complementing humans in any facet of browsing or buying. What's the upshot of this? For sure, is that the innovation cycle is on hyper-speed. There is creation, adoption, and growth at scale.
Far from everything, though, is ready, mature, or high quality, as pointed out in many reports and, of course, discussions. Nobody can quite tell what the true adoption curve will be and for what exactly, but there is undoubtedly a real paradigm shift and a curve going on. That is what we believe, that being the fundamental context change for us since we set out our 2023 strategy. We are taking a balanced, yet decidedly forward-leaning approach to this. We want to future-proof, and we want to accelerate our business with AI in mind and in doing. The point is, this is not about today or even next year. This is about potential implications for consumer behavior, software, and property services on a three, five, ten-year strategic horizon. I would say probably the only constant over that time is that we all still will need physical homes to live in.
Let's, though, consider the starting point for property, our sector, and for us. First of all, Rightmove has a phenomenally strong, over 90% brand awareness, 85% direct and organic traffic. Our experience is tailored, fit for purpose. There is a lot of contextual relevancy and built-up credibility. That deep specialty and aggregation is also what we deliver to partners. There are no signs of consumer disruption in any real sense of the word. Second, keep in mind the consumer process of making it into a new home. First of all, it is a long and very comparison-oriented process. Comparing is actually not a necessary evil. It is something consumers want to do. Two, a home is a very heterogeneous product, and nearly 10,000 new homes to discover go up on our site every day. They are comparable, sortable, discoverable on many parameters. That is also where these strong habit loops come into place.
Three, the location of a home is not something people just try to easily decide for with an online answer. They know quite a lot about where they look, and often they do it in real life. In the U.K., the average moving distance is 5.5 mi. Four, a home is a big ticket item whether you're buying or renting, and getting to one ultimately is quite complex. Since you're going to spend two-thirds of your time there for years, finding the one is important, and therefore, the process is long, it's discovery, and definitely also opportunity-driven. Finally, a home is a decision where emotion and truly personal preferences play a big role. With over 60% of households having more than one person, it's actually a double-up of those preference considerations and a nurture process. Personal choice and comparison making is how people eventually get there.
Powering up all that choice, comparisons, deliberations, home opportunities in the right place, at the right time, with the right tools, that is what our specialty is. Ultimately, it is done really well and mainly through data. I think I have said this before, but I really do think of us as a data company. Data is scaled, it is connected, and to very large extents, proprietary. If you look across all the data points here, you realize the power of having all of it with memory and learning patterns in one platform. Of course, LLMs have both started to democratize product development, and they really started to give really condensed and precise answers to queries for consumers. We have the advantage to also use the power of LLMs or AI applications, but we can derive reinforcement learning and sector-specific value with our live and whole-market data set.
We do not just hold static property data. We hold the U.K.'s living map, property intent and behavior, signals for pricing, supply and demand dynamics, and geographies in our platform. Now, let me just give one example of how we leverage this with AI already now. We start with all that scaled proprietary and connected data. At the data modeling stage, we use off-the-shelf ML or LLM models in our data hive, and now we augment them with proprietary Rightmove AI models that are based on our much more contextual data. For example, for our vendor prediction model, which feeds a few of our existing products to partners, we've seen over 50% higher accuracy doing this by applying our data models, and that is, of course, a very substantial lift.
Over time, the model will build up into scoring engines for different entity sets, and we can use both models and engines for products. In this case, the AI-powered prediction model gets orchestrated and piped into existing product opportunity manager and Discover, improving its performance for partners. This went live only six weeks ago, and over time, it's going to drive usage uptake, package migration, or spend-ups as part of our subscription model. Finally, and importantly, these improved products will generate even more and new signals from both partners and users, and in a closed loop, there will be further adding to the data sets. That is going to drive new ideas about innovation down the road. It's a virtuous cycle and indeed a compounding effect. Investing more in these AI power-ups of what we have drives reinforcement learning and value that simply otherwise wouldn't have happened.
This is but one example of why we think now is the right time to go after this and doing it meaningfully. A little bit more broadly than on that half technical slide, AI is now becoming central to all we do. Internally, we will create, complement, and enhance all our existing capabilities and the workforce. Externally, from consumers and partners on our platform, we will connect, predict, and personalize to much greater levels than today. In short, we plan to be an AI winner. Now, we're building on an existing base of activity, and we have reported continuously on some of these. We now have 27 top-down prioritized AI projects and many more smaller individually built applications. As you can see, they are right across the entire estate of the company. Four external-facing ones went live just recently. Yet, what we see here is absolutely early stage.
Is a lot of ongoing exploration that needs to happen, keeping track of that very fast-changing tool landscape, production isolating pipelines, data, and architecture, deciding what to buy versus build, figuring out how an opportunity that we have in the market or have identified might actually change with AI in mind and when and so forth. With the fast pace of technology itself and also how search might evolve, we are convinced now is the right time to invest a bit of our very strong cash flow into this over the next few years. We leverage the position we have. We do it for future-proofing and for value generation. The value will manifest itself both in revenue opportunities as well as cost or productivity. I will add very clearly that Rightmove is out for quality, usefulness, production grade, security grade. Those attributes have made us a market leader.
There will be things that we discard, but we'll learn faster. We wrap ourselves as usual in diligent assessments. We have financial discipline, and we have an always-on requirement to prove value in what we do. We're excited, but we're certainly not in the era of AI for fast PR drops. Concretely, our investment plans target three main areas. First, consumer innovation, in particular the app and AI-powered search, as well as progressing faster in the beyond-find space. We'll create more utility, data loops, and monetary opportunity. Second, AI-powered operations bringing seamless experience and productivity benefits internally as well as externally from our back office. Third, strategic R&D capability for new growth areas. With it, again, we'll deepen Rightmove's ecosystem role and value creation. It's going to be through revenue growth.
It's going to be through operational leverage, and we aim to hit double-digit profit growth on a sustainable and truly long-term basis. We will become an increasingly fitter and opportunity-ready organization along the way. With that, I'll pass over to Tarah, who will explain these three focus areas in a little bit more detail.
Thank you, Johan. Good morning, everyone. I'm Tara h Lourens, COO. Today, I'm going to walk you through our plans across our three investment areas and how they will benefit Rightmove, our partners, and consumers. I'm sure many of you here currently live in homes that you found on Rightmove. Our mission is to make the home-moving journey easier and simpler for everyone. That is something we do exceptionally well. Rightmove is already synonymous with finding a property, and we're extending our brand down the life cycle so that we become even more indispensable to consumers.
This will unlock significant new revenue opportunities, which we are very well placed to capitalize on. We've made good progress over the last few years, releasing several new tools that support our users across the home-moving journey and many key improvements to the Core search experience. As Johan's just mentioned, the landscape is evolving rapidly. AI is raising the bar for what consumers expect, and we want to go faster. We're going to accelerate our progress, in total nearly doubling the product capacity that we have focused on consumer development. This significantly scales our efforts, allowing us to stay ahead of evolving needs, deepen our relationship with users, and accelerate the building blocks that will deliver new revenue.
Everything we do to engage our consumer base provides value to our Core partners, whether directly by driving more leads or indirectly through enhancing the data signals that power our products or creating new ways for our partners to showcase their brands. We know that consumer behavior is changing quicker than ever before, and we will be at the forefront of that change. We're going to fundamentally transform how users engage with our platform. First, we'll reshape our search, delivering a hyper-personalized experience that leverages AI and helps users find the right property faster and with greater confidence. This will include conversational search that, among other benefits, will create new ways for our partners to engage with our audience. We'll also deepen the connection with our users through property inspiration and insights, keeping our casual buyers, who are future buyers and sellers, on our platform.
Next, we'll lean further into the home-moving process, creating an assisted experience to support both buyers and sellers as they navigate the complex and lengthy journey. We'll continue to develop our suite of integrated mortgage features to help users better understand their affordability and financing options. Finally, we'll complete the life cycle with a curated homeowner experience. We've already built a market-leading instant valuation tool informed by first-party data that no one else has at our scale. The recent launch of online agent valuations, which Johan just showcased, provides homeowners further insight and confidence to take the next step through a fully digital and Rightmove-delivered experience. We'll continue to build out this space, creating a dedicated My Home area on the platform, positioning Rightmove to be top of mind when homeowners are ready to sell, and delivering more leads for our partners.
Our ultimate goal is to provide a world-leading AI-assisted experience, going above and beyond when it comes to property search and the rest of the home-moving journey. To bring all of this to life, I've included an example of one of our new AI-powered features. Through Style with AI, users can transform any listing on Rightmove. It's part of a broader suite of tools that we've launched this year, all designed to help users understand the potential for home improvement, whether you're a homeowner or a home hunter. We want to be the place that consumers come to for all property-related decisions, to increase platform stickiness, give us even more data signals, and create those revenue opportunities that I mentioned earlier.
Yes, it's a fun tool to play with, but through our early research, we found that over half of users who would use this tool are high intent, either visualizing if they could live in a space before progressing to a viewing or assessing the property for renovation potential. As with everything we do, we've taken time to truly understand user needs, which has led to unique features like being able to remove furniture or adjust the lighting. In the background, we've been trialing various models so that we deliver the best quality renders and reduce hallucinations. We want this to be a genuinely useful feature, so we've also included a real-time feedback loop, allowing us to monitor how the model performs at scale. This, again, is a unique aspect of our tool.
As I'm sure you all know, apps are incredibly powerful when it comes to platform stickiness. Once users download and start using the app, they're far more likely to return, stay engaged, and make Rightmove their go-to platform. What's really interesting is that users who use both app and web are our most engaged, driving twice as many sessions and generating three times as many leads. When searching for property, larger format screens play a crucial role. Users want to compare properties side by side, view detailed floor plans, and carry out in-depth research, all of which is often best supported on desktop. Going app-only is not the answer. Our goal is instead to elevate the app experience we provide so that whichever platform user chooses, they have a consistently great experience. Our first step will be to align the core search features across all platforms.
We'll lean into device-specific features like offline mode and biometrics. Finally, we'll introduce app-only features. We know that our app plays an important role for our highest intent users, so we'll play into that as an example with new features that support the property viewing stage of the journey. Investing in our app now will strengthen our long-term position by increasing user engagement and enabling our strategy to move further down the home-moving journey with our most serious users. Now, onto the second investment area, our platform and operations. For simplicity, I've broken up our platform into four layers. First, the proprietary technology that we've built to deliver our consumer and partner-facing experiences. Then, the underlying data platform that powers our entire business. Next, the back-office systems we use to deliver day-to-day operations, for example, for onboarding new partners or actioning product purchases and package upgrades.
Finally, the technology infrastructure on which we deliver our entire platform in a secure and scalable way. We have been upgrading the platform over the last several years and are now well progressed in migrating to the cloud. We have built over 100 microservices within the experience layer, and this has led to a four-fold increase in code deployments in recent years. We now also have a unified data platform bringing together ever-growing volumes of data that we are generating every day. Going forward, we will continue to invest in all these layers, but with two distinct focus areas. First, we will invest in the operational layer of the platform, which has been a lesser focus until now. Here, we see significant potential, and I will cover this one in a bit more detail on the next slide. Secondly, we will build on our early learnings and create an AI-powered developer experience.
The goal here is to reduce cycle times, eliminate repetitive tasks, and enable our teams to deliver faster and with greater quality and consistency. The plan is to rebuild our operational layer from the ground up. For our partners, we'll provide faster and more digital service. AI will play a key role, delivering an intelligent and responsive experience powering all partner touchpoints, whether human or digital. Internally, we'll work more efficiently with streamlined processes and reduced manual workload. These new AI-enabled interconnected systems will also give everyone at Rightmove access to more data and create new ways to improve the partner experience. The work to modernize our operational layer is substantial. Again, we want to go faster. We're at the very early stages of planning and design, but I wanted to demonstrate just how transformative this investment will be for our partner experience.
The team have prepared a brief concept video that brings the thinking to life.
T oday's property professionals have more competition, higher expectations, and less time. In response, we're building a centralized suite of tools to help propel our partners into the future. Agents will be able to manage all aspects of their Rightmove subscription as well as their activities in a personalized dashboard powered by AI. This includes planning a prioritized daily to-do list, rapidly surfacing quality leads and property alerts, and sharing listing performance metrics. Let's take a closer look. AI Assistant, trained on our vast bank of home hunter data signals, makes insightful suggestions for better engagement. Agents can share listing performance data with home sellers to keep them up to date, build trust, and nurture the relationship. What used to take days can now take minutes. Agents can buy online and add new marketing products instantly.
Additional marketing opportunities are automatically identified. For instance, when recognizing a brand has not been refreshed in a while, it suggests booking a design consultation with the Rightmove design team to strengthen their brand and elevate their ads. Multitasking becomes easier for the agent. When someone calls, AI identifies who is calling, says which property they are interested in, and provides real-time conversation prompts and post-call analysis for training. No time wasted, just high-quality conversations. While agents are out at viewings or valuations, we handle the calls they miss and build a to-do list for when they are back online. We are using AI to power efficiency, freeing agents to think big and create the partnerships that matter. The Rightmove Plus of the future, built for agents, powered by intelligence.
This is an exciting step for us that will transform our partner experience and allow us to quickly innovate going forward. Our final area of investment will be to increase the capacity we have in our strategic R&D function. Until now, we've had a small internal team tasked with exploring new ideas. They have a keen eye on ROI, whether that be in terms of revenue, strategic benefit, or enhancing the network effects. The bar for consideration is high. Some ideas are never taken beyond analysis. Others are stopped after initial pathfinding when learnings suggest that the opportunity is just not significant enough, like we did in auctions a few years ago. Others have shown significant potential, and that's when we lean in. A good example is rental operators, which has scaled to generate around GBP 10 million annually. We're in a fortunate position.
We have so many opportunities we could invest in if we choose to. We're adding more capacity to explore ideas faster and create a larger pipeline of future growth areas. Many of these ideas are at very early stage and have competitive sensitivities, so we will not be covering the specifics today. What I will say is that a key theme going forward will be exploring new wallet areas across the home-moving journey. We see the eventual opportunity here both sizable and additive to the network effect. We will, of course, provide more details when an opportunity comes out of incubation and starts scaling, which we are committing to do by 2027. To summarize, investing in these three areas will deliver significant benefits. For consumer innovation, we are aiming to double our pace.
We will significantly grow our app user base, strengthening our long-term position and delivering a great experience wherever a user chooses to engage. We plan to triple usage of our home mover and homeowner features, extending our relevance across the life cycle. All of this creates new opportunities for our partners to engage with the largest home-moving audience in the U.K. For our internal operations, replatforming our operational systems will transform the partner experience and deliver substantial internal efficiency. AI will allow our technology teams to work smarter and faster, unlocking even more capacity to innovate. For strategic R&D, as we extend across the life cycle, we unlock new opportunities. We'll double our capacity to research and test more of these in parallel, generating a strong pipeline of future growth areas.
Ultimately, this is about speed, scale, and shaping the future, bringing forward initiatives that strengthen our position and make us even more valuable to partners and consumers. Now over to Ruaridh, who'll be covering the financials.
Thank you, Tarah. Good morning, everyone. Now turning to the financial considerations. To deliver the opportunity which Johan and Tarah have just outlined, we plan to accelerate investment by approximately GBP 12 million in 2026 and a total of circa GBP 40 million over a three-year period. Looking at the chart, this provides a split of the GBP 12 million P&L investment. GBP 3.5 million in consumer, supporting initiatives across the consumer domain as outlined by Tarah. GBP 2.1 million in apps, with a proportion allocated to short-term burst to bring app functionality to parity with the web. GBP 3.1 million in operations, which includes a new back-office system. An additional GBP 2 million will be invested into new growth to expand ideation capacity and delivery, with the assumption that one or more initiatives will be backed with product and operational support, which we will provide details on going forward.
Finally, we have included anticipated scaling support costs of GBP 1.3 million across the business. The majority of this investment will be driven by headcount growth in technology roles and AI-related costs. The roles will mainly be in product, engineering, and AI. These figures are the P&L impact of the investment after capitalization. Total incremental investment will be around GBP 18 million in 2026, as we estimate around GBP 6 million will be capitalized. This capitalization will be in addition to our existing GBP 8 million of internal labor capitalization from BAU activity and will rise in line with salary inflation and applicable initiatives. There is significant rigor and discipline around our approach to investment. There has always been and will continue to be a healthy internal competition for capital. Every pound invested in our platform must deliver tangible business impact. We have embedded committees across Rightmove covering AI, product development, revenue planning, and people.
These groups are there to drive prioritization, identify risks and opportunities, and ensure accountability to budgets and targets. Both Johan and I sit on these committees, which use tailored frameworks to measure success and guide decisions. For example, new initiatives are supported by ROI business cases developed by the requesting teams, tested by the program and analysis team, and scored using a blend of commercial, financial, and strategic metrics to determine investment priority. Some indicative examples of the level of internal scrutiny are set out on the slide. The committee frameworks feed into group planning through leadership meetings, quarterly reviews, and ultimately board approval. Importantly, we operate these structures in a streamlined, high-frequency way, allowing us to remain agile and responsive. The investment set out feeds into our main financial performance metrics: growth in revenues, underlying operating profit, and earnings per share.
Starting at the revenue level, our execution has been demonstrated regardless of the macro or property market. At a group level, we aim to maintain our current level of 8%-10% revenue growth through the investment stage to 2028, aiming to increase sustained double-digit growth by 2030. As today, that will be driven by growth in the Core business of 7%-8% through the investment stage and beyond. This will be underpinned by an exciting array of products, continually enhanced and extended by our experienced product development team, leveraging our world-class data and AI capabilities. On top of all, the investments made since 2023 in the strategic growth areas will continue to diversify our revenue and support our ambition of double-digit revenue growth. We expect the SGA to contribute between 1%-2% of incremental growth to total group revenue.
Together, we see a robust growth rate of between 20% and 30% as an achievable run rate going forward and into the long term. They are still on early journeys, and unlike Core, they are unlikely to see a linear line of growth. As Johan discussed, we are very excited about what these businesses could become, and we will not make short-term decisions that impact their long-term prospects. In aggregate, Core plus the SGAs should deliver robust 8%-10% growth through the investment stage. We want to be firmly in sustainable double-digit growth territory, which is why some of the investment outlined aims to contribute further revenue growth from new wallets or from existing areas.
Moving to underlying operating profit, as I've explained, we anticipate a focused investment with operating profit growth lower in the early part of the period as we invest, then increasing as that investment begins to deliver returns, meaning we'll be nearer the higher end of the range towards the end of the investment period. As we look at our plans today, we see a floor margin of 67%. This is before any impact of the U.K.'s digital service tax, which we would expect to apply once eligible revenue passes GBP 500 million. We expect to see profit growth ahead of revenue growth again after year three as operating leverage kicks in for the initiatives outlined today. Our clear priority is sustainable underlying operating profit growth, moving from high single-digit to sustainable long-term digit growth. That's why we haven't provided long-term margin guidance.
Our focus is on profit, and we will have options to deliver that growth through either cost efficiencies or using the operating leverage to grow revenue faster. Throughout this period, we will remain highly cash-generative and continue to deliver substantial returns to shareholders. The share buyback program will be EPS accretive, adding 2-3 percentage points to underlying profit growth. Together with a progressive dividend, the business should be capable of delivering mid-teen returns annually through the cycle. Before we move on, a few words on nearer-term guidance. We have introduced 2026 guidance today of 8%-10% revenue growth and underlying operating profit growth of 3%-5%, which reflects the investment outlined earlier. These are both within the ranges shown in the middle of this slide and assume a stable macro environment and no inorganic activity. Turning to our capital allocation policy, this will remain consistent.
Our first priority is investment in the business against the framework set out earlier. Secondly, we will continue to evaluate value-accretive inorganic opportunities. We would look at opportunities that accelerate us towards our strategic ambitions quicker or provide us with products or services that we could not build better ourselves. As with our organic growth, we have a disciplined and high threshold. Any M&A would be expected to drive incremental growth to that outlined earlier. With remaining excess cash, we will return this to shareholders via a progressive dividend, which will grow aligned to earnings growth and share buybacks thereafter. I will now pass you back to Johan to wrap up.
Thank you, Ruaridh. All right. Next five years then in headlines, what is changing and why? With an eye towards the world playing out with a whole bunch of different changes and we talk through them, we see things on the left here being very stable. We'll continue to drive progress on the back of our strong position in the market. We have opportunities and foundations in the context that we operate. We run a very strong and compounding business model. The themes of change and the opportunity are set out on the right. First, LLMs, applications, usage of AI are unfolding at pace. Someone said that AI today might be at the equivalent stage of dial-up of the internet itself. Imagine what happened in the ensuing years.
Nobody actually knows, again, what that curve of technology will evolve to, but we assume it will be rapid and we want to be in a strong spot on it. Second, for Rightmove, AI does become central and foundational for all what we do. Third, we are specifically investing near-term in consumer innovation, AI-powered operations, and R&D for new growth. We'll become an even stronger platform than we are today. We're going to drive strong total shareholder returns for the near, medium, and long term. With that, let's turn to Q&A. If you could please use the microphones in front of you, if you have them, or we can get them, and press and hold the button to speak. Ruaridh will help to direct questions.
Okay. Morning, everyone. It's Jessica Pok from Peel Hunt, for free, please. The 8%-10% growth you're guiding towards the next couple of years, just to be crystal clear, you're suggesting the core is it's not a case that you're suggesting 8% to begin with kind of rising to the 10% over the next three years. Is it that matter of actually it could be choppy next three years depending on how quickly the SGA is in the given year? The second thing I just want to ask in terms of the top line is the three growth areas. I guess the less predictable one is the new R&D spend. So within that top line guidance, can we assume that you're probably not assuming anything that comes out of those new growth areas in what you've suggested?
The second one is just on the peers. What are you seeing that they're doing on the AI front? Any color around that would be good. The final one is you've pushed the SGA kind of targets out further. Can you just remind us what are the pain points that you've seen so far?
Sure. Very fast, team.
Yeah. Look, the 8%-10% absolutely is a range. We've delivered 10% in the first half. We've guided 9% at the full year. We absolutely see opportunities to get towards the top end of that range. We may do in the investment period. We're giving you a range like we have done for next year because there might be some things that influence it. For instance, just the pace of what we want to do in terms of the SGAs, in terms of tailwinds or headwinds.
Look, if we get a push in new homes developments, which we haven't had for the last couple of years, absolutely we'll be towards the higher end of that guidance. It is absolutely a range. We think there's opportunities to get towards that within the investment period. We are giving you what we think is a really robust, reasonable range for that period. In terms of the new growth, it has to be quite material to make a percentage impact on our revenue growth given revenues are coming up to GBP 500,000,000. That is going to take a bit of time with these new areas. What we are talking here is not a product that will flywheel off Core like the OAV or Optimizer Edge. Therefore, it will take a bit of time for it to come through.
That is why effectively that new growth will be incremental to effectively the current growth that we are seeing past the investment stage. We will do everything to accelerate that and to push it forward. We think that is a reasonable time frame from what we are seeing.
Sorry, this third question, if we get to that, I think. AI and peers. Yeah. U.K. peers. U.K. peers. Yeah. I think I can comment quickly on the overall peers piece as well. I think you actually have a bit of grouping of active players, and you have some that seem much less active amongst the many actives. I know that you all track them. It is definitely a healthy ongoing activation, definitely classified still as, I would say, experimentation stage. Some great interesting pieces out there.
I do not think there is anything that sticks out necessarily at the moment, at least. In the U.K., I would say it is the same thing. Zoopla probably a little bit more active than the other competitor on the stage, but no doubt everyone is looking into this. Also, OTM and CoStar, obviously, they have just announced a bunch of things around this, at least in the U.S.
The SGA targets. You had a question on the SGA targets. Do you want to repeat that, Jessica?
Just to remind us of the pain points of the SGA so far. You have reached a lot of milestones for that, but the targets have been pushed out to the right slightly. What have you seen which has challenged?
Yeah, maybe I will start and you are going to chip in. I mean, I think there are a couple of things with the SGAs to flag. If we take Commercial as a good example, we've had some headwinds in that sector. It has been impacted more so than Residential. We have also made decisions for the long-term value, which we have not wanted to sacrifice for short-term wins. The example of that is that as we grew customer numbers, you saw the fantastic growth we have seen since 2023 in that. Going forward with a price increase or a product now for us was not the right move. We wanted to continue to build that network effect, knowing better than anybody what a powerful network effect can lead to. We have seen that in Residential.
Therefore, rather than pushing on price and product now, continuing on that customer acquisition, growing consumers and growing customer side gives us a much better platform for the future. Therefore, we were prepared to take that growth in Commercial down a few percentage points. I think that's an example within the SGAs that we are seeing all of these areas as real opportunities with large TAMs where we absolutely see our sales being able to play a big part of that. That hasn't changed. What we aren't prepared to do is take short-term wins to sacrifice that long-term value. I think there's a little bit of that in terms of us providing that range of 20%-30%, which, to be completely frank, we will be aiming for higher.
Of course, we will do. I would like to say it's towards the high end of that range. That is what we see as a really robust, sustainable growth rate in those SGAs for the long term.
I would just add to that the 20%-30%, of course, that's not the inflection point that was needed for the previous 28 numbers. The 20%-30% is a very meaningful 3x-4x the Core business. As long as we feel comfortable with, of course, we're trying to push them very meaningfully forward also commercially. Truly, we are looking at the long term. We talked about it, I think, on an ongoing basis, of course. In some places, it's like, we're doing this, great execution. The opportunity might be even bigger if you think about it like this. In some cases, you come up against some stuff that takes time that we simply couldn't have forecasted by that time, PEPs and sanctions, regulations that need to go into all the machinery and Lead to Keys, as an example.
Look, that's par for course in doing business. I'm really happy about those growth rates and what they will lead to over time. Will.
Hi, it's Will Packer from BNP Paribas Exane. Three for me, please, as well. Firstly, to sort of frame the margin investment, we've obviously had a significant margin dilution in recent years already. We've had a 50% increase in staff. Should we think of it, the backward-looking margin dilution, as catching up where you needed to be and investing in strategic growth areas, and now this is you proactively trying to get ahead of the curve? Or should we think of it as still some of it being catch-up versus peers? We had, in the last couple of weeks, a busy results season hearing about products like [HAYIMO], etc. Do you need to catch up to that?
Second question, playing devil's advocate, why not have a much more aggressive investment in 2026 if we have such a fast-moving market backdrop? Just understanding a bit why the investment is gradual over the next three years would be helpful. Finally, I do not think we mentioned ChatGPT in today's presentation. There are very important strategic decisions forthcoming. How much do you integrate when they launch their integration, app integration in Europe? Are you planning on being a part of that? Do you have to be because Zoopla, what if you do not? How do you see that kind of risk-reward and decision-making? Thank you.
Joining the first. You can take the first.
Yeah. I will start with the investment gradual. Look, where we envisage it is the investment is pretty quick in the first year, and then it kind of stays pretty similar, growing very slightly over the three years. It is not that we are investing and then continuing to increase that investment materially over the three-year period, which is effectively why we expect to see underlying operating profit growth at the lower end of the range to start with. It then starts rising. As we exit the investment stage, we are towards that double-digit operating profit growth. We are accelerating and going fast with that investment from 2026.
What Tarah has outlined as well is that investment is on top of, A, the current investment that we are really happy with, the ROI that we are getting across Core SGAs and Consumer at the moment, and that we are very targeted and disciplined in what that investment gives us. You heard me talk about the kind of frameworks and governance that we have gone through. That will add us a lot of firepower in order to see what we want to do. There are some things that we will get quicker wins with because that is the nature of that investment versus, say, a back office, which is going to be a multi-year time frame. That is going to take time to implement. Then it is going to take time to see some of the efficiencies come through that.
We feel absolutely that the GBP 12 million P&L investment is the commensurate value with what we want to deliver with this. In terms of the first question, is it a catch-up? No, I mean, look, I think like all businesses, we are continually wanting to invest, refresh, and evolve our business. Yeah, of course, I am sure Johan would have wished that some of that was a bit more upgraded when he started. I think that's the same for every incoming CEO. I think the investment that we outlined at this Capital Markets Day was specifically accelerating the strategic growth areas. We're not cutting back on them. We're really happy with what that investment will deliver. This is investment that we absolutely could have absorbed within our current margin profile.
We had that discussion. For us, that wasn't the right way of going this because we want to do all of this quicker. We see that if we waited like that, then the opportunities wouldn't be brought forward, and we would miss out. Us as the market leader, we wouldn't find that acceptable. For us, lowering the margin in a short period of time to be at the front of the pace for what is happening and being able to take advantage of the opportunities, of which Tarah gave some detail and flavor of them, we think are really exciting and varied, for us was the right decision. We will constantly look at margin as an output, as we have always discussed, about what is the right level of investment. As I say, very happy with that floor of 67% for the investment period.
Yeah. On ChatGPT, there is an overall premise here in that wherever consumers are, we are interested in getting hold of them, right? Also, very importantly, over 90% of them know about our brand. We have 70%-80% of consumer time spent on portals.
There is an existing search engine, which is the biggest in the world, actually keeps growing, by the way, and it is not being replaced. People have used that to some extent, but they actually go and look for our brand. Eighty-five or 85%+ of everyone actually comes to us directly or organically, right? We have a direct relationship with them already. I think a lot of that is very transferable to another medium where people might conduct some of their online activities, whether it is social media, which has turned into search in some instances, or obviously ChatGPT. Now, again, ChatGPT is powerful, right? It is very intriguing, of course, to see what they are doing backed by billions and consumer adoption, right? That goes for everybody. If that makes sense for us to play in, we are absolutely open to that, right?
Now, when we talk to them regularly, they're obviously not ready with their European sort of setup and SDK, but we expect that to come. We will entertain that idea for sure. There are still things to figure out in terms of what the setup is and where we'll go over time and so forth, right? We also have very good direct relationships with several of the US companies who went on the apps in GPT already on.
Thanks.
Marcus.
Sorry about this.
You pressed the button.
Clumsy. Sorry about this. Can we continue on the AI? I'm sure you get this in every single meeting as well. We get this as well. I mean, the concern seems to be that going forward, as you said, a large part of traffic might have a different starting point. You mentioned Google. Obviously, that's obviously day-to-day business today.
In the future, the risk is, as far as I understand, that any LLM might not prioritize. The inventory leadership that Rightmove has is not that large. It's a massive traffic leadership, but not necessarily inventory leadership. The question is, if the starting point is different and it's not prioritized necessarily, isn't there a risk if the properties can be also found elsewhere that LLMs find it? The question is, do you think about potentially limitations to what level of data you will give to the LLMs? Because at least the argument would be that if the search criteria or the search would be better experienced in, let's call it ChatGPT, it might be harder to compete. Is it really that you just say, "Okay, let's wait, but we are open to give our inventory to those sites, whatever they will look like"?
If you give us just a bit more broad answer on this, than what we just heard. And maybe two more questions. One is on the growth initiatives. I mean, obviously, you highlighted that the proceeds will just come later. I have not really fully understood why that is. Is it just that you feel with better tech, it will work better? Is that sort of like the bottom line why we should still expect the same outcome, just a bit delayed? And then thirdly, on the cost base. I mean, clearly, Rightmove is a U.K.-based cost-based company. A lot of other peers talk about outsourcing not only software engineers, but also other areas. Is that something that is starting to get discussed internally? Where are we in this context when it comes to Rightmove? Thank you.
Okay. Great. I'll start with the first one and also let Tarah chime in, being close to this. I think what you mentioned, Marcus, is actually interesting. If I got you right, the fact that we do not have a huge supply advantage, we do have a supply advantage, but it is not huge. If that is exposed elsewhere, why would not people go there? I would flip it and say, precisely because there is not a massive difference in supply and consumers go to us and keep coming to us, it is because we deliver what we deliver for them. We built that repeat behavior. I think that has real longevity. Again, in a new way of searching or finding information, it might be complementary type of information. You have to assess how you interact with that environment.
Again, if it is actually a little bit like you see on search overall, right? Again, it is not that the 850 million weekly users on ChatGPT has just sucked that equivalence out of Google. Google reported 100 billion. A lot of it was cloud, right? Actually, they see search growing. They are also obviously rapidly sort of redeploying how they serve answers. Right now, it seems to be all boats are lifting a little bit because this is interesting. It is novel. It is another way of finding information. I think that is a parallel to what we do as well. First of all, having all of that content. As I said before, I think comparison and actual visualization is extremely important. Then you combine that with all the very contextual, specific LinkedIn or logged on, etc. features.
Very, very few, Google included, Facebook included, who try to go into different verticals, actually get to that level of sophistication, right? Because they try to rule the world up here as the answering engines. Obviously, that's for sure. I think what ChatGPT is absolutely about doing right now. I think they're extremely focused on growing revenue as well, but it seems to be very B2B oriented and driving user and consumer, right? We'll see how it shakes out over time.
I'm just going to add. I guess two advantages for us that really stand out to me. One, the 25 years of data that we have that is just so much more than stock. Secondly, how deeply we understand what users want when it comes to property. We do thousands of hours of research with both consumers and partners every year. As Johan said, we're doing so much more than search. What I showed you, every part of the home moving journey, we're starting to provide value and tools that help you. We're going to be the one-stop shop for all of that.
Marcus, on your cost one, and I'll come back to it, you might need to clarify the growth one. On the cost, we continually evaluate our resourcing model. We've used contractors in the past where we wanted to accelerate and go faster. Those have always been kind of U.K. domiciled. Pre-COVID, we have used contractors outside of the U.K. We'll always look at our resourcing model in terms of what's best in terms of a measure of cost, but also efficiency and also culture. We'll always evaluate that.
I think your question was just, why is the new growth taking a little bit of time to come through? Was that the question? The reason for, as I mentioned, is, look, to make an impact on revenues of coming up to GBP 500,000,000, it has got to be anywhere between GBP 5 million and GBP 10 million. That is just going to take time. Of course, we have products within Core that can do that pretty quickly. These new growth areas, we are not counting a product like OAV or Optimizer Edge within that, right? That is just going to take a little bit of time to mature and get off the ground, which is effectively why we are saying that is past the investment period. Of course, we will try and make it quicker. We will bring more details when we have. Jos.
Thank you. Yeah, sound check. First questions for Johan. We sat here in, not this office, the office of your prior broker a couple of years ago. I asked you incoming, did you get everything you wanted from the board around investment? You'd said you come from a pro-investment cycle, a very pro-growth environment, but you respected the board's needs to balance profitability and growth. Yet, we're two years later and certainly suggested from Ruaridh's earlier answer that there's a bit of catch-up here. The question is, do you finally have everything you want to be investing in? Second question is on the Rightmove resistance tour. So many leading questions I could ask there, but I'll leave it over to you to comment on how you see fit. The one element coming out of that tour is that you're currently blocking ChatGPT.
A specific comment on that would be useful. Finally, on the strategic growth areas, a very, very specific question about the Mortgage in Principle product. Is the launch of eligibility checker a tacit admission that there was a flaw in the original design of the MIP product?
Okay. I'll start with the first one, obviously. Thank you, Jos. Look, it's a pretty simple answer. I've always been and felt very supported by the board. We are going to go into some of the specifics, but that was true then. That is true now. Of course, the board is, it's a really great board. They are challenging in our strategic thinking. That's where they had a lot of that piece. At the same time, they're supportive of what we're doing. A year ago, same thing now.
Blocking ChatGPT.
Blocking ChatGPT, yeah. You want to take it?
Yeah. I mean, I guess, yes. I think for us, it's very much, and I think we've covered it already. I think we're open to conversations around integration, but we're also very focused on what we're doing. We see huge advantages. We're very confident that we'll continue to be the place that people come to search for property.
MIP product. Do you want to go to the MIP product? Do you want me?
You go.
I think the MIP product is one of just evolution. As we look at that Mortgage business, it's still really nascent, early business. We're continually looking at how we improve that value for our lender partner, as well as our brokers and for consumers. For us, that just looked like a good way of increasing the value. That's what effectively was born from it. We've been really, really happy with the performance of the MIP. It continues to perform really, really well. I mean, we could have had a better market in the second half. I think we'll continue to see that as we look to evolve that because ultimately, mortgages is only a business that's kind of three years old. Other things will come from it as we learn that we want to adapt and change.
There's nothing to read into the changes of leadership in the financial services?
No, not at all. David's been with us for a long time, and Lydia's been with us for just as long, really. It was a nice change for her to come in and look after that. Joe.
Excellent. Thank you very much, Joe, from UBS. Three from me, please. Firstly, it feels like you're effectively not forecasting revenue from the AI investments in your guidance. That's due to sort of conservatism, forecast uncertainty, and the time it takes for them to build. When will monetization start, even if early? Which products should we be keeping an eye on from that perspective? Second question, we can obviously flow through guidance to estimate a net investment level for future years. What we don't know is how much cost savings fueled by AI you're expecting and effectively baked into that as well. Can you help us understand what cost savings you're expecting to get from AI and whether they're baked in? Finally, on the incremental investments, you've spoken about what you're sort of producing with that investment. What's the investment actually going into?
Is this just people, or is there anything else that you're putting money into? A little bit of an understanding of that would be helpful. Thank you.
Okay. I can start with the first one, and then we'll roll on. I think as we've discussed a little bit, we are trying to look at this from a long-term perspective, right? Both on the revenue opportunity side as well as on the productivity perspective. On the revenue side, there are two kind of quite easy ways to think about it, which I think is true. One, you got to remember, we do have a subscription business model, right, at the core of, and we like a lot of the compounding aspects of that one. When we, for example, enhance a product, potentially come up with quite a new version of it, pre-AI and certainly with AI, that gives us opportunity to move that in and commercialize it through package upgrades, depending on where we put it, right?
Very similar, again, to the business model that we followed before. For us, it is a matter of just like we do with product roadmaps, generally speaking. You know it. We have ideas for many years, which fits within that sort of package structure and product model. That is a compounder. Now, can there be very interesting, very value-creative aspects because of AI, potentially? Can that move the needle in a different way than it has before, potentially? Generally speaking, you are coming back to that compounding subscription-based model. There is another side of it, which is AI driving product innovation, which is sold or commercialized in a different way. Even the MIP that we're doing, we've already actually infused AI into our own data sets, behavior on the site to target consumers that we think would be interested in that tool with some aspect around it.
That has led to some of the conversion gains, right? A good example already. It is an additional piece of revenue. For sure, there will be, or we have thoughts about, that could be entirely new pieces around it. It is a plethora of different things. I'm not going to say, here is X, Y, Z, and you should expect that in 6 months or 12 months or 18 months. It will be a rolling cadence. We will be very excited to talk about it. We will keep you updated for sure.
On the cost efficiencies, listen, you hopefully got a feeling of how much increased productivity we can come from this business in the next few years. That gives us a huge opportunity now. Yes, it can provide us cost efficiencies, but it also allows us, if we should choose to reallocate them, to drive further top-line growth. We have an option to do either. Our preference absolutely is in the first most to drive higher revenue. Ultimately, though, the game is to drive underlying operating profit growth. Once we have done some of these things, particularly the back office and some of those operations, which is why it will take a little bit of time, we will really have those levers that we can pull.
In terms of what it's going into, I mean, Tarah, do you want to give a flavor of some of the things that we'll be spending?
Yeah. I think Ruaridh already mentioned the bulk of it is on people, but also technology costs. Obviously, AI comes at a bit of a premium. We've factored that in. The back office will involve introducing new systems, new capabilities. There's some cost in that.
Andrew.
Thanks. It's Andrew from Barclays. I've got three as well, if that's okay. First one's on your assumptions on marketing costs over the medium term. I guess I'm interested both in the angle of what kind of take rate you may or may not have to pay to OpenAI, Google, etc., in the world of AI acquisition. In the nearer term, whether you need to spend more on kind of GEO, because it would look to me like your visibility within ChatGPT on search results today is worse than it is on kind of traditional Google search with SEO, security on your advance. The second question is to ask how much money you guys make out of kind of prominence or premium ads, if that makes sense.
I guess the thinking I am exploring is if in the world of AI, we are going to find our perfect house more efficiently, whether some of that kind of time spent or premium ad-based monetization is going to change and how you thought about that as part of your midterm revenue. Then the third one is there were some good slides on there about kind of getting deeper into the workflow of the agent and helping them to do a broader range of efficiency things. I guess the question is, why not go much harder? Because it feels like there's this huge pot of money of people costs with agents for AI is going to help to automate, and you could benefit from that, but it could require much more investment than you've outlined today. Could that be an area of kind of inorganic focus? Thank you.
Okay, great. I'll do one, two, three. I think the question was marketing costs over time and including to ChatGPT and the subheading of this. I mean, first of all, today, it's a pretty high degree of variability in terms of what results you get back, right?
It's clearly still immature. Mind you, way less than 0.5% of traffic. That's where it is today. We expect it to evolve. Clearly, they're moving their positions forward as well. If you look at the seven big U.S. or global brands that they announced, we talked to several of them, as I said, none of them are doing it because they see all the consumers have gone there, right? It's in the interest of experimentation. That's quite a big effort. They've taken slightly different tacks in terms of how to integrate, right? More of the full experience over there or an early lead-in, etc. It's just super early. The point is to be able to play with this and figure out what the right thing is at the right time and what your alternatives are.
I think marketing-wise, again, equally, it's like even more uncertain, right? Are they going to be focused on B2B and all of that, build a cloud or what have you? Or are they going to try to monetize the consumer side? You could expect that, perhaps. I think that's going to show itself. Same thing there. If you have a very strong brand in affinity and you stay on top of things with the consumer, you do not necessarily have to pay a lot to another platform just because some people are searching there, just like it is for Google today. That is the position we are coming from. That is the position that we are intending to stay in. That is part of what we are thinking about here over the next five years.
On the prominence point, Andrew, our package strategy really protects us from that because effectively we have an all-you-can-eat flexible product suite that customers can pick and choose from. What we see in cycles is some upweight in prominence products like we've seen in the moment where they're trying to fight for buyers. In other markets, they drop that and we allow that flexibility. If someone was to drop prominence products, they become less valuable. If you believe that, they'll sub them out because they've got a threshold to meet for other products. There will be other products that meet their needs. We have a suite now of 30-odd across all different categories that we've built over our 25 years, knowing all the different types of markets and user behaviors.
The way that the package structure is charged and monetized, it very much protects us from that subbing out in that instance.
On the last question about want to go harder, I think the first thing is it's worth remembering this investment is on top of what we set out in 2023. We're already delivering more value than we ever have and at a faster pace than ever. I mentioned earlier kind of four-fold code deployments. Through this period, AI is going to allow us to go even faster with the efficiency it brings to us. The video I shared earlier, the concept around where we'll take Rightmove Plus as a result of the back office investment plays exactly into helping partners be more efficient.
I think as Johan mentioned, as we internally start to use AI more, there are definitely things that in the past would have been too complex, too cost-prohibitive for us to do with partners or consumers. Going forward, we expect that to be easier, and we will be exploring more opportunities there.
Thank you. Can I just follow up quickly, Ruaridh? Just to confirm, there's no step up in marketing costs as a percentage of sales baked into any of the guidance?
No. Kieran.
Thanks. Yeah, it's Kieran Devlin from Citi. First one, just in terms of the Core business, could you provide us an update in terms of your thoughts around new packages? You alluded to kind of Optimizer Edge being your fastest-selling product ever or package ever. How should we think about new Core products in terms of the medium-term guidance and how it's baked into that?
Secondly, could you just talk on the underlying operating profit guide for 2026- 2028? If you look at revenue, obviously it's 8%-10%, and then you give them 3%-10% for the operating profit. If we assume FY 2026 is rebased to 67%, are you implying that we could see further degradation of the margin in 2027, 2028? What scenario might that lead or lead to? Just on Mortgages, the focus was very much on the MIP product, but could you provide us an update on the broker offering that you guys alluded to in 2023?
I'll do one or two. Yeah, look, I'll do one or two, and I'll do them quickly because I just got a conscious time. No, the revenue guidance is within the range of the underlying operating profit. We expect, as I mentioned in the script, to move up towards the higher end of that range towards the end of the investment period. That is because we expect to accelerate the investment from year one, i.e., 2026. That will be the first step up in investment as it gave about GBP 40 million over the three years. You will see a small addition to that initial GBP 12 million. As revenue will continue to rise in that 8%-10%, we expect that underlying operating profit to move from the bottom end of the range towards the top end of the range.
In terms of the Core packages, look, really great to see last year the Ascent package taken up really well from developers and gone into ARPA, but it has been really exciting. The take-up of that, the online agent valuation tools being just out, but really, really positive and had great feedback. Both of those will underpin ARPA going into next year. OAV is going to be sold exclusively to OptiEdge customers. We will expect to see more upgrades to that top package, as well as those incrementally buying it above their package thresholds. As you know, we look at the package strategy kind of three years out. Absolutely, the product guys already have a really long pipeline of exciting products, of which we will at the moment decide whether that underpins a new package or like OAV comes out by itself.
The main thing for you guys is, look, just seeing the strength of those products that have come out in the last couple of years, the fantastic take-up regardless of competition or market. We have real confidence and are excited about what is coming through in that Core line in both new homes and EA in the next year or two.
Great. On Mortgages, I think a couple of points to this answer. One is that the MIP, as we have shown here, has done really well. Many aspects of that that we have evolved over time as well, including the Property Checker, are actually complete novelties, right? We are bringing things that clearly a lot of our consumers are very interested in. Part of it has been a focus on that one. We have been working with brokers, a handful, all along the way. We have quite a few conversations with customers or partners of all different sizes.
As we alluded to before, what we do not want to do and some of the groundwork that we are laying is building the infrastructure to be able to connect to several brokers in parallel with obviously thinking about what is that broker path, the right broker path for consumers who really want to go to a broker further up in the funnel, right? Actually building a layer that will make it scalable is something that, again, we have sort of said, wow, clearly we need to do that, right? We are not here to do one-offs. We were not explicit about that necessarily all the way back in the day, but not for any other particular reason, right? Again, grown very fast here.
Running out of time, if I have two questions, Annick and Sean, do you want to try and we will try and be quick? Thank you.
Good morning.
Annik Maas from Bernstein. I'm interested in understanding why you set yourselves on the investment budget that you've announced today. You could easily double it if you hear about all the investments that are happening in AI. With that in mind, have you modeled what would happen to your revenues and operating profit if you were to double your investment today? If you had a partner that would be coming along today and allow you to ramp up your investment even further, would that be something that you would be interested in looking at? Thank you.
I think we continue to look at the balance of investment and return on investment for that. As I touched upon, the governance we go through is incredibly detailed. We're really conscious of every pound that we invest, what that does to the business and to our consumers and partners. We're really happy that the investment levels that we've outlined delivers what we think is in the best interests of our shareholders in the medium and long term. We think it is a very sensible level of investment to deliver the returns that we can see. We will continually evaluate them as we've always done, but we see no reason for that change in the foreseeable future based on what we see ahead of us.
We think that that investment gives us a lot to do and what that can do to the business after the medium term is really exciting. The answer to your second question is no. If someone came across and said, you want more? No, because if it was that and we thought that was the best of the business, we would have done that now. We haven't. We think this margin profile is right. Sean, last question.
Morning, everybody. Thank you for taking questions. I have about 10. I'm going to restrict myself to two, just in the interest of time. Firstly, Johan, I wonder if we can take a little bit of a step back. You're the third company in three days to set out a bit of a stall on AI, at least in the U.K. market. Can we take a bit of a step back and just ask, how do you assess the quality of existing sort of off-the-shelf AI tools versus the need at the moment to build much more bespoke models and agents for hyper-specific applications? I wonder if you maybe talk about the sort of thresholds for deploying AI in that sort of environment, if that is indeed sort of how you see it at the moment.
I don't know. Then, second of all, there are a lot of startups out there spending a lot of money on AI products. Inevitably, the question comes, in addition to the investment you're making yourselves, do you have a budget in mind for inorganic opportunities? If any color you can share, that would be appreciated.
Okay. I'll take a crack at both. On the startups, indeed, I mean, look, the prop tech scene has always been full with many, many, many players. Of course, the same thing holds true with AI in mind. I think one of the challenges for any startups, but I would say particularly in that space, I've actually looked into it from an investment perspective in my previous life, is that it looks like it's very hard to scale for quite a few of them, right? That's just a general comment.
There are interesting ones. Of course, you can also, in many ways, get a company going very quickly today with the help of AI tools themselves. I think getting to that distribution, distribution is actually a real product as well, is challenging. To your question, though, and we have said this before, we keep a close eye on that scene. We talk to a lot of them. It could be in a potential partnership, could be an acquisition. Generally speaking, our default roadmap is we run and develop this organically. Nothing new in that sense. I think on the first one, and Tarah, please help me out here, and I know we need to finish up, will chime in. To give a first answer to quality of tools, etc., I mean, it is an incredible range.
First of all, you have 9,800 of them, literally random category. Okay, fine, a couple of big LLMs, right? That might be a handful. It is a really wide range. The other thing is that even the ones that seem to come to the fore, if you take co-development, which they have GitLab, Cursor, Windsurf, and a couple of others, Claude, the names are starting to sort of stabilize. Even between them, right? It is like one takes a step forward, and all of a sudden, that looks like the winner and takes another month, and the other ones come back. This goes back to my point before. We want to lean into this and really get the maximum benefit. That actually means being able to try and run on a couple of different tools, whatever aspect it is.
Again, the variability in terms of does it really work versus does it look very cool, or how much do you need to change or reconfigure an existing process for it to actually work, that is very much still there. That does not mean that it does not work. There are quite a few, absolutely, and we use quite a few of them already, but it is absolutely a dynamic landscape. I do not know if you want to add anything to that.
Just briefly, I guess, I think in your question was a bit around build versus buy. As a technology company, before AI, we were always having that debate. For us, it comes down to kind of cost, quality, how quickly we can do something that sort of shapes that question or decision. That has not changed. I think what I shared with Style with AI, the new feature that we've launched, there is a product out there that others are using to deliver the experience. We found we could do it a lot better doing it ourselves. In that case, we chose to build a model.
Appreciate everyone's time. Sorry we're a bit over, but thank you very much for today.
Thanks, everyone.