My name is Johan Svanstrom. There we go. I'll have to lower my voice. My name is Johan Svanstrom, and the CEO of Rightmove, as you probably know, since about five months. It's a pleasure to be here for, for my first results presentation of Rightmove, and doing that together with Alison, CFO, and we also have Rory from the Rightmove team. I was gonna start with a bit of introduction. Not gonna go through the entire presentation, but cover a couple of the key pieces for myself, and then we'll move into Q&A as soon as possible. Just wanted to also verbally overlay a little bit of the introduction of myself. I've been in general management positions in, in tech companies for a good part of 25 years.
Vast majority of that on the operating side, in small companies, medium-sized tech companies, and, and pretty large operations spanning the, the entire world. Also been on the investor side, and, and board side of technology. And I have been with companies, many of them that are in, in, sort of in the space of running commercial subscription models. Quite alike, Rightmove, obviously, but generally speaking, within marketplaces and B2B, B2C, operating environments. The first period here that I've really spent a lot of time digging into the operations, meeting teams. I think I, I, got calendared 62 introduction meetings or something like that, which has been a true pleasure. I'm truly impressed over what Rightmove does, and the teams, the delivery.
Obviously, it's pretty, pretty clear from the outside in and before I joined, but I'm, I'm also very pleased to have that confirmed for myself, actually joining the company. Having that said, I think there's opportunity, as always, to do more, and to do certain things faster, and we'll get back to that later in, in the conversation in terms of future opportunity. I think the, if we cover, just a couple of the highlights here, just to make sure everyone's remembering them. We came in with a very solid 10% year-to-year growth on revenue. It really, I think, goes to show again, particularly maybe against the more backdrop, that this business is very consistent.
It's got a lot of resiliency, and the foundation for that really is a strong network effect that, that has been built up in the platform. We've seen ARPA growth come very strong, GBP 121 growth year-over-year versus June last year. A lot of that is driven by the ARPA growth on the new home side, and we'll get back to more details on that. Membership, also very stable. I think it also speaks to both the resiliency, actually, of the agency market, but certainly also the products and services that we provide to customers. Underlying profit then came in at 9% year-on-year.
Again, that's, that's driven by, not just things that we did this, this last quarter or last half year, but things that we've been working on and continue to work on for, for quite a while. We do already invest in building out, particularly the product and tech and data teams. Again, we'll talk a little bit more about that from a go-forward perspective. We're happy that we can continue our established progressive dividend policy and raise the interim dividend to 3.6p, up from 3.3p last year. My final remarks then, and I'm sure we'll get back to it a little bit, but wanted to be, be clear and outline at a high level, a little bit of how I see the business going forward.
The first thing to say, again, underscore, the performance is awesome, a-as it is, that we're coming from a real position of strength. I coin this an accelerated evolution rather than a revolution. We will focus on the U.K. property market. It's quite massive when you think about it, in all its, its vectors and areas. We're not going after something abroad. There's no imminent need for that whatsoever. Today, we, we basically are in, to a large extent, in the leads and advertising side of the business, which is very healthy. We've built a strong position and so forth from that. It also means that there are quite a few vectors of opportunity that we can go after.
I'm gonna touch on a few of those, and again, pointing also to the investor day that we're gonna have in November. I think November 27 is the exact date, so please pencil that in. We're very excited to tell you more details about this. The sort of approach to the business going forward and from my perspective, is to do this in a very balanced way. We simply want to make sure that we go after and consistently can deliver a double-digit, both revenue and profit growth. At the end of the day, there is quite a lot of opportunity out there. It can come at very healthy margins. We have good line of sight of them, and I think we have an opportunity to now execute on them.
It will take a modest investment compared to the margins that we're running right now, and we've also announced that. The areas are probably the ones that you would suspect, and I think the underscore here is that all of this we essentially already do to one or the other extent today. We're not standing all of a sudden in, in a green field and say, "Hey, let's lay down a new road over here." We are on these roads already. We wanna make sure that we continue to widen those roads and make sure that they become longer and longer. There's gonna be a continued, very strong focus on the core business. No doubt about that. We have things to do in terms of deepening our relationship and provide even more services to consumers.
The consumer experience of particularly, well, actually both renting and certainly also buying a home today, is not exactly a great experience, right? It can take up to six months to actually get, get a house closed, and lots of fall throughs and so forth. To be honest, the U.K. sticks out in the world for not being particularly efficient. Again, where there's pain, there's business opportunity, and I think technology can play a big part in that. We're also in a number of smaller business units today. Commercial real estate is one. We have insights into the market. We're operating it, we have good reception, but we can absolutely put more effort behind it. Big, big sector, and again, can come with very healthy profit margins.
I think overarching, the, the data that we have, is, is a great asset, and our investment is a lot around just leveraging more and even better the assets that we already have. Again, evolution, not revolution. We then can really start, and we will explain a little bit more about what we mean with data and what we mean with platform and how we will evolve that. We can build ourselves much deeper into the ecosystem and support that ecosystem as it goes through a digital and technology transformation. There are quite a few areas that are much further behind than consumer behavior today. Finally, the green transition, we call that out. We've also launched our 2023 edition of the Greener Homes Report today.
Don't know if you have time to read that one as much as you read our first, H1 results. I encourage you to take a look. We all know why this is important. It's quite stark how consumers take an even greater interest in it. They are, at the same time, challenged by the costs, and just understanding what to do. In this report, there's plenty of examples of how that interest is growing. What we're trying to do is not to tell anyone exactly how to action this. We're simply saying we have lots of data, we have lots of insights. We can put together a great analysis. This report is one example.
We want to provide that to anyone, any stakeholders, including consumers, in the industry, so that they're more informed and hopefully they can, you know, move, and take action on, on that green transition. That's the role that we want to play, but I want us to play an active role in that. It's quite exciting, to be honest, regardless of how big a problem is and how long it will take to fix it. With that intro done, let's move over to, over to Q&A. Boom! Rory.
Adam.
Got it. We'll, we'll start with questions on the floor, and then we'll move to those online. Anyone online who wants to submit a question, please do. Adam from UBS, do you want to start?
Yeah. Good morning, it's Adam Berlin from UBS. If I can, three questions. The first question is, you've scheduled this Investor Day for November to talk about some of these new initiatives. Can you give us an idea of what kind of information you'll be providing at that Investor Day that you couldn't just provide today? Kind of what are we waiting for, in terms of underpinning the double-digit revenue growth? The second question, again, about the Strategy Day, is I noticed when I read this morning that you focused on commercial product and data and mortgages, but you didn't talk about tenancy, which was obviously a, a focus around Van Mill. Why is that not one of the key areas?
Sorry, Adam, go on.
The third question I wanted to ask is just more of a short-term question. You did GBP 121 of ARPA in the H1, and you're guiding for GBP 100+ for the full year. Can you just explain why there's that slowdown in the H2 of the year on ARPA growth? Thanks.
Sure.
Why don't I do one and three...
Yep. Great.
Thanks, Adam. On the, on the Strategy Day, what we will take you through is, is the opportunities that we see that we're, that we're investing behind. We'll talk to you about what we see the addressable market being in, in each of those, what we see as, the, the short and medium-term path for us, into that addressable market, and specifically, what it is that we will do in order to, to address those opportunities. We'll also talk to you a bit more about evolution and continued growth within the core business. It will give you a really good overview of, of what our plans are. It will also give you a chance to meet some more of the management team and, and meet some of the people that are responsible for running these business units.
I'm sure it won't surprise any of you to hear that a big part of this investment will be in product, and in bespoking products and tailoring user journeys to meet some of these opportunities. Hearing from Tara, our CTO, and some of her key product people, will also be part of that day. On ARPA, on your third question, yes, you are absolutely right. H1 ARPA growth, very, very strong. Part of the reason why we're walking it back a little bit for the full year is nothing to do with what we see as the growth across the H2, and it's got far more to do with what we saw happening in the H2 of last year.
If you remember, we saw very strong ARPA growth in H2 last year, particularly in new homes. We added GBP 67 of ARPA in H2 last year within new homes, GBP 24 in total, which is almost double what we would typically see in the H2, and we just think that that's unlikely to continue in this H2. It's more about the year-on-year comp than, than what we think will happen in the H2. What we're seeing, and what we will think we will continue to see, is ongoing marketing from the new homes developers. We'll probably see full year-on-year ARPA of about 2/3 of the GBP 330 that, that we've seen in the H1, and probably reasonably flat in agency.
Got it. Adam, on your questions about lettings, I think specifically, as a potential growth area, it absolutely is. This was mentioned in, in, in the presentation, it's interesting, if you think about the residential moving market in terms of just units. There's roughly a million this year on the sales side, and there's roughly a million, probably a little bit more, on the lettings side. It obviously just comes in, in a, in a different nature, in a commercial model, and you have multiple stakeholders, so it's slightly different, right? There's four million or so renters, or rental dwellings in the market. They turn over roughly every four years. There you have, you know, the rough number of events every year. It's quite fragmented.
It is, to some extent, even less digitized than what has been achieved on the sales side. What we're doing on the back of the acquisition of the Van Miller company, doing references for agents, we have now built products that really put together sort of a digital end-to-end solution. Absolutely, our customer here are agents, right. That's our core customers. We go into a couple of examples of that with in the presentation, in terms of adding now one of those modules.
I think what's interesting, or a couple of things, A, if you look at the market today, sales agents that are seeing slowing transactions, particularly in, in, in the last, two months, many of them who are dual agents actually see a pretty healthy business on the lettings side, right? Rent levels have gone up, 36% since 2019, and 10%, 11%, 12% since last year. It's a back-book business that is pretty, pretty solid. The demand vastly outstrips the supply, right? There, there's a challenge structurally in the market. We think we are sort of under-penetrated in actually helping that market to become a more effective market. I think it's also interesting that there are about 2,000 or so lettings-only agents that we don't have, as customers today, because they're typically quite small.
Again, it's a very fragmented sort of market. Again, putting a real digital solution in their hands is exactly what we're building on. We're soft launch- launching this Lead to Keys during the fall, and we see a real, real opportunity to grow that business over the next coming, coming years. Now, the other piece, apart from those 2,000 agents that we don't work with today, which is a growth opportunity in itself, of course, is that a lot of our existing sales agents also have lettings arms. About 80% of all sales agents also have lettings arms. And that's an opportunity also for our business, obviously, to continue to grow product and sell services to them on the lettings side. A little bit more on that, as we come, but I appreciate the question because it's definitely an opportunity.
Andrew, Barclays.
Thanks. Morning, all. I, I wanted to ask about the investment in more detail. On the top line, to kind of dive into a bit as to when we see the acceleration to double-digit growth, if you could be more specific as to how to think about kind of 2024, 2025, 2026 as this builds. On the margin, are we talking about a reset in 2024 to 70%-72%, and then kind of flat margins thereafter? Are we talking about it going to the low end of that range, and then margins kind of starting to tick up once the one-off investment is in the numbers? Just help, help us out how to think about this in a bit more detail over the next couple of years.
Okay.
Wanna have a go?
Yeah, sure. Look, Andrew, we will share more detail on all of this in November. There are areas in which I don't particularly want to, to get drawn today. I mean, in broad terms, what we're talking about is an acceleration of investment of about GBP 20 million in total over a three year timeframe, starting in 2024. As things stand, 2023, all of the guidance we've given you for 2023 remains, so 70%, 73% margin, et cetera. The, the investment, as I say, about GBP 20 million in total, starting in 2024. The majority of it is front-loaded into 2024, so eight to 10 of the 20 will be invested in 2024.
The areas that we are calling out, commercial real estate, data services, and mortgages, are the three. I mean, this, this is investment on top of BAU investment in the core business, which we have always done and which of course we will continue. Investment in the consumer journey and making sure that it is as enjoyable and effective as it currently is. All of the thousands of innovations that Johan called out in the presentation, all of that will continue. With the three areas, as you know, they're all at different stages of maturity. The majority of the revenue and profit growth that I've, that I've talked about was some of it will start to come through in 2025. More material revenue and profit acceleration from 2026.
Part of what we will talk you through in November is showing you the financial profile of that investment, and what, and what it does to the shape of the business going forward, and exactly, you know, what sort of acceleration we're talking about, by, by 25 and 26, and beyond. For now, that's, that's the view over the next three years. Then, sorry, on your, your question on a reset. Look, it's a, it's a really good question. I think, we've always been quite specific with our guidance on margin. I mean, almost, I would say, too specific. We've pointed you, for the most part, every year at a, at a single or, or a single %, range.
What we're now saying is that for the next three years, we are in the face of this investment, we're committing to maintaining the margin, at 70% and beyond. That's a more likely normal range for us going forward. If you take 2026 onwards, and what will be a slightly differently shaped Rightmove at that point, you know, you will have six or seven revenue lines, which, which are all more material than they are today. Nurturing those journeys, continuing to innovate in product, and in the consumer, experience on the side, I think will, will inevitably require more investment than we have done to date. I think 70%-72% is just a more realistic run rate of margin going forward.
Will , Exane.
Hi, it's Will Packer from BNP Paribas Exane. Three from me, please. Firstly, could you update us on agent health and your expectations for H2? It seems like there's quite a lot of noise in your numbers with hybrid agents. You know, what's the underlying change? What are you seeing currently, and where do you think we get to the end of the year for estate agents, specifically? Secondly, I suppose implicit in your margin assumptions are revenue assumptions. Could you talk us through how you see the property market for fiscal year 2024? Is consensus revenue growth of 8% realistic in the context of some of the cyclical challenges that the end market's facing? Then finally, could you just talk for a little, some, you know, initial perspectives on how you're gonna spend the GBP 20 million? Is it primarily people?
Specifically, a lot of your peers have gone and made some quite expensive bolt-on acquisitions. How do you see the sort of landscape there? Is that something you'd consider, or do you think that organic investment is the only needed requirement? Thanks.
Yeah.
All right.
Let me take the last one.
Yeah. I, I can start with, with the agent health. Then we can talk a little bit about the particular swings between the H1 and H2 on some of the stock count. Thank you, Alison, and so forth. Overall, agents are healthy. We've got to remember that they came off, have come off, some very strong years. Generally speaking, they are in much better shape, let's say, compared to when, when there's been crises in the past. I think we've been reporting on that before. I think what I and the team have heard in the market is, of course, nobody is happy if transactions are slowing down, right? That's, that's obviously due to some of the financing cost issues going on out there.
They see a lot of activity. You can see that in our numbers as well. Traffic is healthy, lead generation is healthy, basically sitting on a slightly up versus 2019, but down versus 2022. More listings are coming into the market, which is good to see. This is quite strongly up. We're still below actually 2019 levels, but it's strongly up versus 2022. That means there are a lot of people who are interested in selling, and of course, the interest in selling comes on the back of buying or vice versa, right? The listings growth is healthy. The where the challenge sits in that actually buyer-seller meeting around the price point, that's where we have, I think, a little bit of mismatch at the moment.
I think that's back to the either the, the, the cost or maybe more the uncertainty of the, the, the curve, right? Look, if you're, you're sitting there trying to figure out what mortgage to take, it's a complex process, as it were, and now things are moving up and down. I mean, in the last two days, four of the biggest lenders started dropping the rates, right? Some of them advertising 0.3 or even 0.5, which is big. That, that hesitation is a little bit there. I think that the clarity of that will obviously increase during the fall, but it will, it will still be there for a while. Agents know that, and I think they, what they are doing as well, is obviously pushing for valuation, the right valuation expectations, right?
There might be further price adjustments. We think there's gonna be another, or we're gonna be about -2 by the end of the year, and I think those price adjustments will certainly also help the transaction volume. Then I'd, I'd call out, generally speaking, everyone's had, you know, a much better spring than they anticipated, and then it got a little bit tougher. But again, also worth remembering that 80% of the sales agents also have lettings arms, and that business is doing well. I think Foxton's reported just very recently, and you can see, see that as one example of, of how their business is going, leading to overall good results, right? I think there's no, no particularly, you know, big concern. Everyone is keen to move away from the uncertainty.
There's nothing that says we're in a for sale or stop a credit or any particular slowdown. Again, engagement from, from buyers and sellers is remarkably high. Wendy, you wanna maybe comment on the, on the H1 and H2 and a bit of the refactor?
Yeah. Yes. I mean, I think when, when we spoke in March, we said that for the full year, we did expect agent numbers to be down, a couple of 100, which would, would mirror what happened last year. Nothing terribly material, but a couple of things are worth pointing out. I'd probably start with just the agent retention number, which, which we published this morning, so it's almost the highest level of agent retention that we've seen, 95%. Agents are not leaving Rightmove. But there are always agents that leave the market, and that is probably the, the, the 5% or so. Really, what we're not seeing is agent formation, new agent formation. There's some. We're capturing it right now with the new agent accelerator package that, that we talked about. Happy to talk a bit more about that.
But there aren't... You know, it's, it's not there in significant numbers, so the agents leaving the market are not typically being replenished in full. That's the first thing. Then we did, we did see a growth in the branch equivalent of hybrid agents, which is a stock-based recalculation that we do couple of times a year, which, which added to the numbers. You're right, that is noise, and that will probably unwind in the H2. Structurally, if you look at what's happening, I think we will, we will see agent numbers down a few hundred year on year by the end of the year, but nothing really to worry about, and nothing that reflects on agent sentiment relative to Rightmove.
That few hundred is your reported number or the underlying number? Do you see what I mean? Both.
Both. Yeah.
Well, maybe on your second question, I think around, excuse me, the margin assumptions and what to spend that, as we call it, modest additional investment. It's largely people, resources. We, we, Rightmove is, is, you know, a very well-run ship, but a little bit tight, at least vis-a-vis its opportunity, right? That's, that's my assessment. We will continue to ride it, run it tight. Cost discipline is, is a virtue. I'm fully, fully a believer in that. It basically comes down to, to resources, to be able to execute on, again, literally a lot of things that we are already in and have, you know, very good ideas and, and pretty quantified ideas about what to do with. There's of course, a bit of technology and tooling and so forth along with that.
Most of that is BAU. It might be that some of it also gets a little bit accelerated because or against an opportunity, again, very well business cased. You know that we are in transition from being on-prem data centers into the cloud. That's tracking really well. We have, I mean, one of my observations is the richness of data that we have in this company, great, we do use it, but also that we can do a lot more with it, right? Some of that, again, comes back to people who can work with it, some of the tooling that you put in place. It's all, again, coming from a really leveraging the assets that we already have in a much better way.
Yeah.
Balanced growth.
There, there'd be a bit of, of marketing. You know, I think one of the things at the moment that we see is we're, we're heavily associated with the residential property market, and some of the challenges we look to, to grow, you know, areas like commercial real estate, for example, will be stretching the brand to increase the association of Rightmove specifically with some of these other areas of activity. I mean, Johan is right. It's, it's primarily people, and within that, it's primarily product and tech people.
I, I was I, I have to say on that one, I was amazed of the, the actual awareness, and also penetration in the commercial market with having a link in the header of the website, right? Of course, we've been at that for, for quite a while. Again, we have, have a team up and running and lots of, lots of happy customers. Obviously, we think there's opportunity to package that further and do more education and do more penetration. It's pretty obvious from the team that, on, for example, a geographical basis, we're well penetrated in, I'm making this up, Manchester. Birmingham, for some reason, we're not. We haven't had a time. We know we have the product to, to sell, so it's a matter of doing that in that particular example.
Then just to follow up on the 2024 revenue assumptions and the, whether bolt-on M&A is on the cards.
Yeah. Well, look, we've talked about a 73% margin, 8% growth in the core business this year. Absent the investment, that is what we would continue to expect next year. Part of, part of what we will talk about, is, is our growth assumptions for 2024, which again, we're maintaining the range of, of 95%-105%, and again, guiding towards the middle and upper end of, of, of that range for 2024. Which typically will deliver 7%-8% growth in the core business, and then beyond that, you'll see, you'll start to see the impact of, of some of the accelerated investment.
Default basically is organic growth. Again, execute on opportunities. M&A, of course, can play- M&A or partnerships, of course, can play a role, but it's, it's exactly the same approach as before, as part of the toolbox. We constantly monitor the market, have conversations. Out of that comes good intel, if nothing else. We're not stepping that up vis-a-vis before in, in any particular direction, let's say. Of course, it remains an opportunity.
Thanks.
I mean, for us, it has always been a means of achieving part of the strategy. It's, it's not a, it's not a growth driver in itself, and, and that element of the strategy is completely unchanged.
Thanks very much.
Rahul, HSBC.
Hello, I have a couple of questions. In terms of your new product launch in Q4, could you give a sense of what is your penciling in terms of product adoption and pricing uplift for next year? The second question around agent commission pool. Basically, just wanted to understand what is the current agent commission pool and your market share on the basis, please. Thanks.
Sure. Okay.
Yeah.
I can, I can take the first one.
Okay.
If you go for a second. Yeah, the OptiEdge new top package that we're launching and that we described, it's very exciting. It's also just a good example of what we've done several times in the past. I described, we have tested it in the market. We have soft launched it. We've started to get signups for it, beyond our expectations, to be honest, although it's, it's early, early days, but very positive reception. I don't think you asked specifically the components or what goes into the package, so I'll refrain from that, but that also is exciting. In terms of adoption, full launch really happens during the fall, of course, it's a big focus for our sales and account management teams.
I think in the past, if you look at our Opti 15 and Opti 20 packages, they have come to around 1,000 subscriptions over the first 12 months or so. Over somewhere between three and four years, they get to full penetration. That's sort of the plan this time around as well. Again, off to a very good start, so we feel quite positive about it.
The pricing of this, just in terms of it being one size?
About GBP 250 beyond the current Optimizer level, which is, you know, it's, it's not dissimilar to the uplift as we go from Essential to Enhanced and Enhanced to Optimizer. On the commission pool, Rahul, if you think about the components of the commission pool, transaction numbers is by far the single most important driver of that pool, and as you will know, those are slightly down year-on-year. 1.2 for 2021-2022, looking closer to GBP 1 million - GBP 1.1 million this year. A slight dip in the commission pool. Against that, house prices are up a little bit, and agent commission levels are largely unchanged at somewhere between 1.5%-2%. Those are the three drivers of the pool overall.
Over the course of 2021 and 2022, as you're aware, we've spoken about this, we saw our share of agents' revenues dropping a little bit as their businesses were accelerating with increased transaction numbers, and elevated house prices. We had gone from, I think, about 7.5%. We lost about a percentage share of, of agents' commission pool. In the past, we've been as high as, as 8%. Now with some of the price increases, for example, that we put through this year, we are returning back towards that 8%, but we're still, we're still lower than that. Back to where we had been, probably about 7.5%.
Catherine, Citi.
Great. Thank you. I just wanted to ask about some of the other plans you have at the other end, is it Essential Extra and Accelerator?
Yeah.
If you could talk in a bit more detail about those and how you think about penetration and again, the sort of pricing differential. The other thing was on commercial. Could you maybe just give a bit more detail about how that revenue model works at the moment, how you think about the current penetration? I know you'll give more detail at the Investor Day about how you expect it to evolve.
Yeah.
It'd be good to understand the starting point.
Sure. With, with Agent Accelerator and Essential Extra, you'll have heard us talk in the past about how 50% or so, it varies by 2% or 3% either side, but about 50% of independent agents are on our most basic pack, the Essential pack. Which means that for them, it's all about just getting their listings live on the site. They don't use any of our products, so they don't experience how effective those products can be at helping them to build their businesses. The conversation with those agents tends to focus disproportionately on price. You know, it's, it's, it, it is a cost for them, and that is how they see it.
Whereas it's an entirely different conversation with agents and on some of the higher package levels, where the conversation is all about the effectiveness of products and which products they, they use, and how to substitute different products depending on what it is that they're trying to achieve. The challenge that we set ourselves really was to find a way of facilitating some of those agents, being able to trial different products and to experiment with them, which is what has led to the creation of the Essential Extra pack, which sits between Essential and Enhanced for the agents that are using it, and there are about 250 of them right now. It's, it's, it's small, and I think it will always be small, because ideally, it's a stepping stone out of Essential and into the Enhanced pack.
It's a, it's a, it's a not much of a, an incremental financial commitment. It's about an extra GBP 150 a month or so. What we find is that it's a really good way of changing the conversation with agents away from price and onto products and the effectiveness of products. There, what we see, and you'll have heard us again talk about this in the past, is that when agents use our products and find how well they work for them, they tend to upgrade themselves and take themselves up the package ladder. That is that's the, that's the, the driver behind the thinking for Essential Extra.
Meanwhile, and again, you'll have heard us talk about new agent formation, and a, how it is depressed on what it had been pre-pandemic, how some of the market conditions have worked against the formation of new agents, but also the challenge of start-up businesses and the 50% or so of them that go out of business within six months or so of launch. Here, the challenge that we've set ourselves was to create a business model for small, new agents who can't quite manage the financial commitment of the Essential Pack, primarily because they are just setting out on the journey of winning mandates, so typically, they have very low stock. The profile of an agent on the Agent Accelerator Pack is that they've been in business for six months or less, and they have fewer than five properties to sell.
It is just a way of giving them a bit of a leg up, as they get going, try to avoid them going out of business within that first six-month period. For us, we see it as an investment in the agent of, of the future and, and, and moving them off Agent Accelerator and into the Essential pack. The way that we've structured it is that, they, they pay per listing. By the time they've got five or six properties, financially, it's actually, it makes more sense for them to become an Essential customer rather than to stay on Agent Accelerator. That's the driver there. Again, the agent numbers are small. For us, it's, it's an investment in, in the customer of the future.
I can, I can go on the... Just to really be honest, on the commercial real estate side, because that was the second question. A couple of just structural things, and again, we will get back to, to more of this. There are essentially three main buckets of the market: office market, retail market, and industrial or warehouse market. Within office, you have regular and, and big offices, and then, of course, you also have flex offices, which is quite a strong trend, we actually play in, in, in both of those parts of the market. The other sort of important distinction is between leasehold and freehold. They're quite different. They're both sizable, but they're a little bit different in terms of how the commission structure works and, and what get, gets shared by whom.
You typically, though, have the same type of, of players involved. We think, just back to that sort of where are we starting, sorry, starting, starting point. We think we're somewhere around 20% penetration in terms of listings. Really early days. The further growth here will be underpinned by a continuous natural path towards digitalization, going online, et cetera. Of course, we're there to fuel it and build even better product. Again, our product today is essentially, essentially an extension of our residential platform. We think there's opportunity to obviously optimize that and go much deeper on the, on the particular needs in the market. The second piece is around data.
it's not just a, sorry, a different type of data in terms of the listings information, et cetera, but data, particularly on the transactional side, is paramount, right? There's a lot around yield, how the geography is doing, what kind of floor plate you have, dilapidation, blah, blah, blah, blah, all these different things, right? What, what, what kind of improvements you can do and what kind of yields you can get out of that. Again, we, we are, we're a data rich business. Over time, building out those data sets, also for the commercial sector is absolutely an opportunity. Of course, in the commercial sector, you also have a lot of the green transition, perhaps even a little bit ahead of the consumer market. Why?
Well, it's a leveraged industry. Follow the money, as usual, is a good tip. There's a distinction now in terms of financing costs, whether you have the right credentials or not. That's just going to accelerate. I think also that is an opportunity to play for us, and we already do produce and sell data services, towards the interest in, in the commercial market, at a pretty small scale right now. A little bit of flavor, hopefully, on that one, and, and more to come.
On the revenue model, is it per, per listing at the moment or subscription-based, like residential?
It's, it's almost identical to, to residential. Again, subscription-based, package-based. The ARPAs are not hugely dissimilar, a bit lower right now in commercial. ARPA is about GBP 800-GBP 900 or so across roughly 800 or so customers. Clearly, as we create better, more effective, more bespoke products, our ability not just to increase our penetration across the agent base, but to charge more for those products as well. Sorry, please. Yeah.
Giles, Jefferies.
Thank you. It's Giles here from Jefferies. I had three questions. I think they're all for Johan. The first one was, I'd be interested to hear how much time you've been able to spend with the independent estate agency base, and your take on any pain points they have around the core membership product. The second thing is, I'd be interested to hear on your dialogue with shareholders and the board, and to get a sense, Johan, is, is, the growth investment program you've announced today, the unconstrained version, or would you like to go on, I don't know, harder, faster, quicker, whatever, whatever word you'd like to use? Then the third question is around competition. You obviously have two competitors out there with similar product plans into some of the growth vectors that you're focusing on. A first take on what your competition is doing, would be useful. Thanks.
Great. Thank you, Giles. Unfair, all three questions for me? No, happy, happy to, to take them, but Alison, please chime in. I have indeed spent time with, with our some of our independent agents, given that there are quite a few of them in different parts of the country. I will continue to do that, of course, but it's always so incredibly useful to be putting on the yellow hat and, and go down, quote, unquote, "on the floor," right? Hear from the market. They've all been good conversations. They are absolutely in the know, convinced, and see the benefit of, of being on Rightmove. Consumers, their customers, in turn, want to be on Rightmove. They are looking for things on Rightmove.
Again, that comes back to the strong network effect. One should also remember that many of them are pretty small operations. They're very crafty, they're very entrepreneurial. They are many times, of course, competing with each other in, in local markets. We're, of course, you know, trying to put any and all tools in their hands to be able to do their, their best possible job. But I, I would characterize it as, they're living very busy lives. They have a lot to do, right? They're trying to be the hand holder, the salesperson, the sales progression, person, et cetera, making sure that transactions happen.
Again, a lot of it points back to actually make it even easier for me to understand everything that I can get from Rightmove so that I can appreciate also what I pay to Rightmove. No question, that's, that, that is part of the question, but it's, it's actually a lot about that. I think we've, we've taken very good strides already. We have Rightmove Plus as, as sort of our main digital interface. We have a very engaged account management team that obviously cover, cover the entire base of agents. This also goes back, and I'm definitely drawing on some of my experiences here as an operator, back to, to spending 14 years within the Expedia platform, how to constantly evolve the product to make it even easier to understand, even clearer in terms of actually recommendations to the supplier base.
We call them suppliers in that case, and obviously, they're customers here. I see a lot of we're standing on, on very good ground, but hearing that directly from the market, just their challenge is mainly how, how to have time for everything and actually utilize Rightmove even more. Of course, that's in our interest because, again, that also pegs back to the value that, that we, that we are delivering to them. I think that's, that's kind of the, the, the summary of, of the independent agents, and I will definitely continue to spend time with more of them. They're an incredibly important bunch. Over to the shareholders and the board, and the investment. Look, I, I really do believe in a balanced approach.
That's the type of approach I've taken in my past, the type of environments I've been in. Yes, if you want to ask a follow-up question, I've also been sitting in a venture capital fund and a growth fund, where there's a little bit more emphasis on growth and a little bit less on the bottom line, although that's changed. Actually, if you ask my colleagues from that time, I was mostly the police. It's like, you know, how is this really gonna play out? There is no discrepancy between what I want to do and what the board discussion has been and what the board likes to do. Of course, we hope for that same liking from our shareholders. We're gonna meet many of them next week, in the usual forum.
The only thing I would add to that, Giles, is that these are all existing business units for us. You know, what that means is the amount of incremental investment that we need in order to pursue the opportunity that we think is there, is a lot less than it would be if we were trying to spin a new business unit up from scratch. So it's continuity investment, really, accelerated into a couple of years rather than the creation of new revenue streams.
Yep. Then on, on competitors, I love to have competitors. Makes you stay a little bit on your toes. Obviously, we have, particularly in the consumer residential side, quite a big difference of daylight between ourselves and the competitors, depending on what the metric you look, look at. That's certainly true across the board. I, I, I think they're both, you know, doing a decent job. You know that Zoopla, obviously, has a slightly different angle to this business as well with CRM products, and on the market are, are, you know, running their strategy. It's not really for me to comment on the specifics of those. I think it's, it's, it's good in market where there exists several choices.
I tell the team, I use a good old Nike slogan, maybe not the one that you all think about, but there's another one called: Train like an underdog and play like a champion. Which is always a good motto, but particularly maybe when you're already very strong, you need to think about that even more. We certainly also apply that thinking when we think about some of these opportunities that, that where we're not so big in the moment. I think what. Again, we're focused on our own strategy and our own opportunities, and much less focused around what exactly the competition is doing.
Fon from RBC.
Hi, good morning. It's Fon Wassachon from RBC. Just one question from me, please. Could you provide us an update on agent P&L in terms of marketing spend? How much they spend, in terms of percentage of revenue on marketing, and if Rightmove, if they spend around 7%-8% on Rightmove, what do they spend the remaining portion on? Do you see any structural difference to the commercial property market in terms of their marketing spend as well?
Thanks, Fon. We haven't seen much change. We've talked in the past about a very rough average being about 15% of their commissions pool spent on marketing as a category. We have been sort of broadly half of that, sometimes a bit less. That bit, we haven't seen unchanged. The other 50% is a real mix. The majority of agents list with at least one other portal. If they're also on Zoopla, for example, that's about another GBP 350-GBP 400 a month. A lot of them spend on PPC. They will spend on Google in terms of other forms of digital spend. The rest is a real mix.
A lot of them will do what you might call analog spend, that's focused on their local area. It's not... I mean, they, they do, do some print advertising. It's not necessarily all about that, but a lot of them are active in their communities, in their areas. They'll sponsor teams, they will sponsor roundabouts, for example. There's quite a lot of that sort of area focus spend. Then some of them are still quite analog. Others aren't, but some are. They'll do things like leaflet drop in an area, for example, which we really try to talk to them about digital alternatives to that. It's expensive, it's untargetable. We would certainly see it as not particularly efficient spend, and there are different ways of them spending money.
That's broadly how the other 50% is made up. The world of commercial is, is completely different. I mean, it spans everything from very large scale operators building developments like Battersea Power Station, for example, or, or the Shard, all the way down then to, to smaller businesses focused on, on high street retail, and everything in between. The marketing budgets are much larger, typically. That whole sector is, is more analog than the residential sector. But marketing, for example, although a lot of it is, is still analog, it's, it's very, very targeted of where there are, where there are, you know, deep pockets of, of investor capital. A lot of it is focused on networks of, of contacts.
Investors obviously are a, are a big, a big target market for some of these larger developers. Once you get to the smaller end of the market, the, the, the marketing, the form of marketing tends to be similar. A lot of it is digital. Historically, that has been the, the character of the listing that you've seen on Rightmove, so the smaller, smaller businesses for sale. There is, there is still plenty of digital advertising there. Part of what we have been working to do, and will continue to work to do, is to increase the, the range of properties that are, that are on the site, but also to increase the value of those properties as well.
Sean , Panmure.
Morning, guys.Four from me, if I can. First one, on Essential Extra, you said there's roughly 250 agents on that at the moment, or I guess at any one time. Have you got a rough idea of how many have tried it and then stepped up, and roughly what the rate of turnover is on that? Second one, on... you, I think, Johan, you said you're at roughly 20% penetration of listings for commercial real estate. Roughly, how did, how does it work into-- what does that look like on sort of an agent/broker basis? How, how many of them use you guys? How many are there out there that could potentially use you guys? Third and fourth, kind of related. Johan, I think you said you were-
... talking about, Rightmove planning to plumb more deeply into the residential transaction. Firstly on that, is there an opportunity for you to monetize other customers other than estate agents, so things like surveyors or conveyancers and so on? Or would you- are you planning to keep it more strictly within the agency base? If you are sort of going beyond the agency base, how do you make sure the network effects translate into that part of the process as well?
Okay, I'll start. On Essential Extra, it's probably too early, Sean, really, to get a sense for how many of them are upgrading. We've talked in the past about the cadence of releasing new products and new packages into the market being about 18 months or so. That's the time that it takes for an agent to start to use a product, get good at using it, get more comfortable with extending their range of products. Essential Extra just hasn't been going for long enough. We'll, we'll see. Typically in the past, that is what we have always found, is that agents who use product tend to, tend to use more of it. On the commercial side, on, on the, on the percentage penetration, 20% or so of listings, about...
We reckon it's about 40% of the, of the agents. There, I would say, it goes partly back to Fon question. We're, we're very plugged in to residential agents who, who also have a commercial side to their business, you know. There is, there is an ecosystem of operators in the commercial world that we don't necessarily speak to, both on the... We speak to them, but not necessarily about commercial. Developers, for example, are a big part of that world. Investors, also a big part of that world. Expanding the range of potential customers and what it is exactly that they are prepared to use us for and what they're prepared to pay for.
As Johan has already said, data will be a big part of that offering because it is, it is so critical to the, the way in which they will assess a commercial opportunity. There, there's a lot more to come there, and again, we'll, we'll talk to you about it in November.
On the-
The, the only thing I would say on the, on the, your question specifically as it relates to surveyors and contractors, we deal with those guys already, but we deal with them primarily in our data services business, so they already pay us for these automated valuation products. That is how we make the majority of our data services revenue, GBP 10 million or so of annual revenue to date.
Yeah.
I'll hand over to you.
Good, good, good point. Just to fill in on, on that question, again, going deeper down the consumer funnel, if you want, and assist even further along the journey, we think is an opportunity. Our main way to go about it is to do that, and in parallel, provide services to our agents. Many of them are already in different types of partnerships and/or commercial relationships, or spin them up when, when needed. Again, it's very fragmented. It's quite localized. We come back to the point that the consumers don't think this is the greatest experience today, right? Can we, with scale, whether it's data or technology or other means, simply improve that, right?
Do it both directly, quote, unquote, or, or to the consumer, but certainly also in, in, in partnership with our customers, right? Again, some of them have these, for example, surveying, divisions within their own agencies, if it's likely larger. Others work with, with a local firm, or again, strike up the relationship when it's needed. Again, it's, it's quite fragmented. Exactly how that will pan out or can devolve over time in terms of the marketplace, commercial model or other things, we're yet to see. I think there's absolutely opportunity, again, just coming back to, what a pain it, it typically is today, right?
Thanks, guys. Got some questions online, so we'll turn to them. We've got Silvia Cuno at Deutsche Bank, just asking: Could you give a little bit more flavor of what's driving incremental ARPA in the H2? Her second question about costs, she mentioned plans to increase marketing in H2. Is that in absolute terms or as a % of revenues? Do you intend to revamp the brand or start driving awareness for some consumer products?
Okay. Incremental ARPA in the H2 will be a continuation of, of what we've seen in the H1, which is new home developers, in particular, continuing to upgrade to the most premium, the advanced development listing pack. It plays well into what they are trying to achieve right now, which is all about finding buyers. Being able to showcase the whole of the development in addition to the individual units that are available for sale, is what has driven their upgrades in the H1, and we expect to see them continue to do that while they talk publicly about a slowing pace of sale.
They're also using the native search adverts product and have increased their usage of that all the way through the H1 . They don't see any sign of that slowing down. Just as a reminder, that's a video-based, largely branding product again, which they're using to showcase the developments. On the agency side, I think it will be a continued story of incremental product purchases, and obviously, we will launch the Optimizer Edge product in October, although revenues from that are primarily for 2024. Continuity H1 in terms of incremental ARPA. On the marketing side, we will spend more in the H2 of this year because that is what we do every year.
Typically, the way that we, that we weight campaigns tends to always be more weighted towards the H2. Budget, overall marketing budget for this year is largely unchanged on previous years, so just GBP 15 million, GBP 15.5 million or so. No real change on last year. Going forward, and particularly as we invest more behind some of these new businesses, marketing will be a part of that. I've already talked a little bit about increasing the association of the brand with areas beyond residential and stretching the brand, and obviously, marketing has a big part to play in that. You shouldn't expect a relaunch of the brand or a revamp of the brand. I think I would describe it as a stretch.
Again, an evolution of what we're doing and definitely, a, a part of the evolution that we've talked about in the growth of the business, but marketing will certainly be, be, a good element of that.
There might be a refresh of the brand, but it won't come with any sizable, huge difference in spend or investment, let's say it like that. It's gonna be a stretch on that side, just to be clear.
Question from Pete Kujala at Morgan Stanley: Would you consider starting to monetize the consumer directly?
As a starting point, we, we already do, to the extent that a consumer is a tenant. We talk to consumers already, about tenant insurance as, as part of, of the rental journey. You know, a big part of our rationale behind doing that was to get used to talking directly to consumers, and slightly evolving the way that our sales function works, but.
Yeah. No, we have that side, insurance and broadband, the content that you essentially need when you move into a home on the rental side. But it's of course, with underlying providers, right? We're not becoming a broadband provider, nor are we becoming an insurance underwriter. So again, we leverage the fact that we're building this digital end-to-end lead to keys product. We know that the tenant is going to move in. It's very natural for us to also provide that service or lead at the end of the day. Similarly, on the mortgage in-principle product that you all know about, it's still small, but it's growing very healthily.
It was almost a little bit astonishing to see how strong it went from April to May to June this year, in spite of what, what was going on in the market, or perhaps because of that, people had an even bigger need to understand what their affordability options were. Again, it's fantastic to see this is leveraging our assets. We have the consumers, we have a very credible brand. They've told us already before, "Yes, please assist me with not just that, but other things." Mortgages is, it's a lead generation business. It's gonna continue to stay fully digital for us. It is a big opportunity.
I mean, if you look at the mortgage market, and again, we're gonna talk about this in, in November, how we think about it, but of course, that, that can become a very sizable business over time. We stay to true to our nature. It's about leveraging what we have, assisting consumers, and do that in partnership with either underwriters, and next up is actually going to work with broker agents. Very positive conversations with several, several of our customers and agents already who have financing arms, many of them do, and so we're building out the proposition as a next step to also get into that market.
Again, good example, we're trying to provide a more qualified set of information from consumers that are on our site and help our partners to, to do better business with that, just like we do with our lender partner today. I think that's actually just a good example, just touching this for a few seconds, right? I think because I, I talk about data and products and the value of data and so forth, but think about it like the majority of our business consumers that, at the end of the day, they register as a buyer, an interest, a lead to our agents, right? We have a lot of products and intel around that, that we then sell and provision our customers with. Equally, sellers can say, "Hey, I'm interested in, in selling my property.
I can contact an agent." Now, with a mortgage in principle product, we, we get people through the MIP funnel. They get an accept. It's not an ultimate mortgage approval. That, that sits with the lender, of course. The level of deeper qualification that we get on that consumer from us doing this on our site has a value, right? It has direct value in terms of the commercial arrangement that we have on the back of that with lender and in the future with brokers. Of course, it also has a deeper value and an enhanced data value because now we know more about that consumer. Who are they? What are they in the market for? What are they looking for? Can they afford it? Can they not afford?
Interestingly enough, as well, it's not just about the people who can afford or get a MIP approval. Everyone who doesn't get a MIP approval, that's also enhanced data qualification. It might mean that they're still in the rental market. However, it might still also mean that they're looking for a house with an extra bedroom because they just had a child, right? It's enhanced data point, it's a richer qualification, and that, of course, has a monetary value in some way or shape down the road, to, to, most of our customers. I'm, I'm quite excited by how we can, enhance the data in different parts of our business, and drive growth from that going forward.
... Question from James Musker from Davy. Could you give a little bit more flavor about the movement in agency? Was it with agents canceling membership and going bust, or was it agents joining to replace them? I.e., how resilient are the agents looking through this period of low transactions? Second question, please, can you provide a little bit more color to your AI aspirations? What products can we expect first? What are the areas that it can make the most impact?
Okay, I'll take the agent, and maybe you take... well, I, I think we've given a bit of color on this already. We've talked already about agent retention being at 95% in the half, so it's, it's certainly not, agents, agents going bust. There is always an element of leaving the market, and I think we've seen a bit of that, no more, nor, no, no less than, than a typical year. It is just the case that market conditions right now don't particularly favor new agent formation. In previous markets, what you would typically see is, is one replacing the other, and that just hasn't happened. That you know, that's been a big part of our agent accelerator thinking.
Beyond that, I don't think that the H1 has been remarkable for anything really in, in terms of, of change in the number or the structure of the agent base. They've come off a couple of very strong years. You know, from, from a balance sheet perspective, the majority of agents were feeling pretty good and financially healthy heading into the year. The single biggest determinant from one year to another of agent sentiment and agent confidence is transaction numbers, and those are holding up, you know, and provided that remains the case, I think from the most, the, the majority of agents will be absolutely fine. Do you want to take AI?
Yes. Good old AI. We see a lot of opportunity in this, in this area. Exactly how it's gonna play out over five to 10 years, I, I think it's, it's simply too early to predict. We're leaning in very clearly into this. We are already testing things. We are exploring the different use cases. Perhaps one of the challenge with this enabler technology is that it's quite wide-spanning. There's a lot of things you can do. We wanna take, as usual, a, a very high-quality mindset. Once we release, let's say, or, or, or make a real product out of this, whether it's externally or internally, we wanna make sure it's in good shape. There's definitely a lot of hype, and it's an extraordinary amount of money going into this as well.
The whole point is to get something real out of it at the end of the day, and that's how we view it, and that's my approach as well. I think in terms of, okay, where exactly then? That's part of the evaluation, but literally 3 things. 1, we have a very large dataset. A lot of that data is very proprietary. Data is the key ingredient of any AI model, whether it's old school AI or generative AI. We're sitting in a great position to actually use it. If you don't have as much data, you're basically subject to public LLMs. That's very quickly a commodity because everyone else has access to that as well, as long as you pay a subscription to OpenAI or someone else. I think that's fantastic for Rightmove.
We're gonna make use of that. The second piece is on, on consumer search. Clearly, search has evolved over time, and it will continue to evolve over time, and perhaps quite a bit with this technology. You know, AI, or rather the NLP version of AI, has existed as an, as an assisted search for, for quite a while, or in, in form of, of chatbots. I don't know your, your own experiences with the chatbots for your bank or utility. You know, decent starts, but there, there's a lot more to wish for. Of course, this technology is more powerful. We are in the consumer search business, clearly, we're gonna add this element to the extent, it, it makes sense.
For sure, I think it's gonna be also here, an evolution, perhaps an accelerated evolution, rather than all of a sudden, everyone's gonna change their behavior. They're not at the moment. It's... The third piece clearly holds a lot of potential, just from an internal perspective, and I, I call it out as velocity and productivity. All right? AI promises, has a promise around it, for example, in software coding. Some of that we already do or test around with. If you can develop your throughput and accelerate that by X amount of percent, it means obviously you can ship more product, you can go after opportunities faster. That's just one example of the internal velocity.
Of course, there are areas like customer support and a lot of the repetitive type of tasks where you can bring speed and efficiency into that as well. Again, we're doing some of that with RPA and automation today, but AI can definitely be an enhancer. Those are probably the three key areas, and I wouldn't give any particular, you know, weighting to those right now. All of them are interesting. All of them hold potential, and exactly what we developed is something that we're working on right now. We'll be happy to tell you more a little bit later in the fall.
Last two questions online from Lisa Yang at Goldman Sachs. Could you just give a little bit more flavor around the future margin profile of the new areas compared to the core product? Which ones will be margin accretive or dilutive? Your guide to 70%-72% in the midterm, how do you think about margin in the longer term? The second question, in an environment of higher inflation, could that ARPA contribution go above GBP 105 per year going forward?
Okay. We will talk more about, about the margin, the financial profile, the consolidated financial profile in November. A couple of things. At scale, all of the business units that we're talking about have a margin profile similar to the core business. There is absolutely no reason why any of these businesses will become margin dilutive over the medium term. In fact, the opposite. Right now, commercial and data services already deliver margins that are similar to the core business. As we invest a bit more behind those, their ability to accelerate revenue growth and profit growth, we, we've already talked about. Mortgages is, is more margin. Well, it's not margin dilutive now because it's too small. It is a lower margin business, largely because it's so nascent. You know, we're only a couple of years in.
Of course, we've had to to invest behind it, and also, you know, it's a new consumer journey on the site. It's not something that hangs off either an existing product or existing agency, for example. From the very start, it had its own dedicated product team, which meant that for the first couple of years of its existence, it had a negative margin. That will obviously change as we go forward. Right now, we're, we're evolving the product, we're evolving the proposition to consumers, and so we will invest, obviously, what we need to invest in order to, to make that a good business unit. With everything else, those are, those are very similar margins to, to the, the existing core business.
I think I've already said that as we get to scale with all of these seven or eight different revenue streams, you know, we'll need a run rate of, of cost and support in order to, to maximize the opportunity of all of those. I see a, a more sustainable margin for us into the medium term of being that 70%-72% that we've already had. The other-
Um, also-
Inflation. For us, inflation has never particularly been a key driver of our pricing conversations with agents. We have, we have been a steady compounder across both product growth and with the contract renewal process with agents. I don't see that changing at all going forward. You know, whether it's inflation driven or anything else, what we are guiding towards is always a mix of the product, the nature of new, new products and new packages that we're offering to agents. Right now, the 95-105 range is the right range for that mix.
That's all the questions, unless anyone else has any others, I'll conclude us for today.
Gareth, sorry.
Just one final one for me on mortgages.
Oh, sorry.
Gareth Davies from Numis. Just one final one on mortgages. When you moved off the fixed fee with Nationwide, I think my expectation was you'd, you'd go out and get relationships with multiple providers direct. It sounds like that thinking's evolved, and, and we shouldn't be expecting a kind of HSBC or whatever it might be, to be coming onto your platform. The relationship's going to be more-
[audio distortion]
with the broker and the agents. Can you just expand a little bit on that?
Yeah.
I realize that's something for November as well, but...
Yes, indeed. Look, first of all, over 5-10 years, I think this can be a pretty substantial business for us. That might mean that we partner up with many different players of different kinds in the market, including more lenders. That might happen on a nearer timeline than that as well. We see as the next clear step for us to go and build a proposition towards brokers or broker agents, more specifically. There's, there's about 5,300 mortgage brokers in the U.K. A number of them are related to or part of, of agents again. What we don't envision is, again, to become a mortgage broker and bring on a bunch of advisors and that kind of margin profile. We want to stay digital.
We want to leverage the asset that we have. We know, and we've seen that with in our partnership with Nationwide, that the level of information that we can provide and actually just the consumer experience is very good. That's the next step. That could, of course, expand in the future. We're, as usual, holding conversations with, with many players. Some of the lenders we have a relationship with, for other reasons, they're using our ABM tool from the data services, right? To value their backbook of, of property. All kinds of reasons to, of course, continue that conversation as well. The next step is, for sure, opening up the broker opportunity.
In part, of course, that's driven by the split of consumers who are prepared to go direct and who want to talk to a broker in the middle. Right now, about 80% or so of mortgage applicants want to talk to a broker. In terms of the, the, the interest and the consumer interest, and how we prioritize, that's largely what's driving it.
Choice is important to consumers, clearly.
Okay, great. Thank you all very much. Great to see you all.
Thanks, everyone. Appreciate it.