Rightmove: how a listing portal earns a 70% margin

Context

Rightmove is the UK's largest property portal. It was founded in 2000, listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2006 and sits in the FTSE 100. Estate agents, lettings agents and new homes developers pay it a monthly subscription to list their stock. Buyers and renters use it free.

On paper, that is the same model as 99acres, MagicBricks and Housing.com. In practice, the economics look nothing alike. For the year ended 31 December 2025, Rightmove reported revenue of £425.1m and underlying operating profit of £297.7m, a 70% underlying margin. Seven of every ten pounds a UK agent pays Rightmove end up as operating profit.

Two events in the past two years show how outsiders value that position. In September 2024, Australia's REA Group made four takeover approaches. The last one, made on 27 September 2024, valued Rightmove at 781p per share, which press reports put at about £6.2bn. Rightmove's board rejected it, and REA walked away on 30 September, citing "the lack of meaningful engagement" from Rightmove. Then in November 2025, Rightmove told investors it would slow profit growth to fund AI and platform work. The shares fell sharply that day.

This case is about why the margin exists, and what a builder or channel partner in India can copy without trying to build a portal.

What they built

Rightmove did not win on features. It won on three things that compound.

Complete inventory. Rightmove says it has the UK's largest selection of homes for sale and to rent, and that it uploads around 10,000 new properties a day. Every listing is logged against its own unique property reference number, which lets it match properties, consumers and agents over time. A buyer who opens Rightmove expects to see almost every home on the market. That expectation is the product.

Direct traffic. In 2025, users spent 16.8 billion minutes on the platform, up from 16.4 billion in 2024. More than 85% of traffic was direct or organic, per Google Analytics data the company cites. Rightmove does not rent its audience from search engines or social ads. People type the name.

A software layer agents use every day. Rightmove Plus is the back office agents use to manage listings, leads and performance. The company reported 28 million sessions in 2025, which it says works out to every agency branch logging in about five times a day. Around that sit paid products: package tiers (Optimiser Edge for agents, Ascend for developers, launched May 2025), featured placements, and newer tools such as Online Agent Valuation, which captures homeowners who want a valuation and routes them to agents as seller leads.

In 2025 and 2026 the product work shifted to AI. Rightmove launched conversational search built with Google Cloud and submitted an app to the ChatGPT ecosystem. By June 2026 it reported 46 AI initiatives underway, up from 31 in December 2025.

The numbers

All figures below are from Rightmove's own results. ARPA (average revenue per advertiser) is monthly revenue per advertiser, averaged over the period.

Full year 2025 (to 31 December 2025) vs 2024:

• Revenue: £425.1m vs £389.9m, up 9%
• Underlying operating profit: £297.7m vs £273.9m, up 9%
• Underlying operating margin: 70%, flat
• Agency ARPA: £1,530 vs £1,440 per month, up 6%
• New Homes ARPA: £2,135 vs £1,987 per month, up 7%
• Agency branches: 16,385 vs 16,124, up 2%
• New Homes developments: 2,887 vs 2,923, down 1%
• Agency retention: above 90%
• 35% of independent agents on the top Optimiser Edge package (31% in December 2024)
• More than 50% of independent agents bought products above their package commitment

Half year 2026 (to 30 June 2026):

• Revenue: £225.8m, up 7%
• Underlying operating profit: £155.1m, up 3%
• Underlying margin: 69% (H1 2025: 71%)
• Agency ARPA: £1,636 per month, up 8%
• New Homes ARPA: £2,247 per month, up 7%
• New Homes developments: 2,766, down 121 since December 2025
• Full-year 2026 revenue growth guidance cut to 6–8%, from 8–10%, because of weaker New Homes

The pattern is plain. Membership barely moves. Revenue grows because each advertiser pays more each year, through tier upgrades and add-on products. In 2025, total membership grew 1% while total ARPA grew £97, or 6%.

On consumer attention, Rightmove reports its share of time spent on UK property portals at 89% in December 2025 (Comscore) and 75% (SimilarWeb, Data.ai and Sensor Tower). Those are two different measurement panels and they disagree by 14 points. Either way, the nearest rivals split what is left.

What worked, what broke

What worked: pricing power from a two-sided lock-in. Buyers go where the listings are. Agents list where the buyers are. Once one portal holds both, raising prices on agents costs little in churn, because there is no equivalent audience to move to. Rightmove still kept agency retention above 90% in 2025 while ARPA rose.

What worked: selling outcomes, not listings. The company frames its products around results: it says Rightmove delivers 7 in 10 vendor instructions in resale and 8 in 10 tenants for lettings, citing third-party surveys. Online Agent Valuation became its fastest-growing product launch. It sells agents the thing they actually need, which is sellers to list, not just buyers to call.

What worked: data as an asset. Rightmove says it holds 4 petabytes of historic and live data, over 90% proprietary, run through about 200 in-house models. Every search, save and enquiry feeds pricing tools, valuations and lead products.

What broke: dependency on developer supply. New Homes is the segment with the highest ARPA, and it is the one that shrank. Developments on the platform fell from 2,923 at end-2024 to 2,766 by June 2026. That drop alone forced a revenue guidance cut in July 2026. A portal's revenue follows its advertisers' launch pipeline.

What broke: the market's patience with reinvestment. In November 2025 Rightmove guided 2026 underlying operating profit growth to 3–5%, with about £12m of extra P&L spend and £6m more capitalised on platform, cloud and data work. It set longer-term ambitions for 2030 of at least 10% revenue growth and at least 12% operating profit growth a year. Investors read the near-term squeeze as a signal that AI search could loosen the portal's grip, and the stock fell sharply that day. The margin guidance for 2026 is 67%. Even a dominant portal now has to spend to protect how people find homes.

What broke, for REA: the takeover. Rightmove's board judged a 45% premium to its trailing average share price as undervaluing a business with this margin profile. REA's own statement says the board gave it almost no engagement before the deadline.

How to apply this at your scale

You are not going to build a Rightmove, and you do not need to. Indian portals already play that role. What matters for a developer or channel partner is where you sit in that system. On 99acres, MagicBricks or Housing.com, you are the agent paying the subscription. The portal owns the buyer relationship and the search data. Your leads are rented.

The part of Rightmove's model you can copy is its traffic mix. More than 85% of its visits are direct or organic: people search for it or type its name. It does not rent its audience. For a developer or CP, the equivalent is being the page buyers find when they search for your project, your builder or your micro-market, instead of the portal listing that sits above yours.

That is an SEO job, and at local scale it is winnable. Portals rank for "flats in Whitefield" because they have thousands of pages. You can rank for "[project name] floor plans", "[project name] price" and "[builder] [locality] possession date" because you have the most accurate answer.

Practical steps:

1. One page per project, with real inventory. Configuration, carpet area, price band, floor plans, possession date and live availability. A brochure PDF behind a form does not rank and does not convert. Rightmove's moat starts from the promise that the listing is there and accurate.
2. Put RERA details on every project page by default. Section 11(2) of the RERA Act requires every advertisement to carry the project's registration number and the authority's website address, and the Act's definition of advertisement covers any publicity informing people about a project, which regulators such as HRERA Gurugram read to include websites, social media, SMS and email. Build it into the listing template so no page ships without it.
3. Answer the questions buyers actually search. Locality guides, distance to offices and metro, price trends, construction updates and loan eligibility. Each is a page a buyer can land on before they reach a portal.
4. Keep the site fast on a mid-range phone. Most Indian property searches happen on mobile data. A slow page loses both the ranking and the visitor.
5. Measure organic enquiries separately. Tag leads from search, direct visits and portals. Rightmove knows its traffic mix; you should know yours, and watch the organic share over time.
6. Treat portals as a channel, not the home base. Keep listing for reach, but make sure a buyer who searches your project by name lands on your site first.

Organic traffic is slow to build. Start with the projects you sell most. Five well-kept project pages that rank for their own names do more than fifty that don't.