OnTheMarket pleased with progress after first week on AIM

Online property portal operator OnTheMarket announced on Friday that after five days of trading on AIM, agent support for its portal has been extremely encouraging.

The company said its sales teams had been presenting the strategic benefits of “a more robustly funded agent-backed portal”, together with specific listing propositions to independent estate agency firms.

It said the overwhelming majority of firms seen had responded “very positively”, with a view to listing at OnTheMarket.com.

The firm had already signed up 81 new listing agreements by 1700 GMT on Thursday, with a “significant number” of further listing agreements expected to be received as a result of those meetings.

That was in line with the company's strategy to grow substantially the core customer base of estate and lettings agents, whose role in the property portals market was to provide the portal operators with both revenue and property listings content.

Its board said there was a “strong pipeline” of sales team appointments booked over the coming weeks with agent firms that had expressed a positive interest in the agent-backed model of OnTheMarket, and in joining OnTheMarket.com.

In addition, its management team was in discussion with selected key agents with a view to them entering into long-term agreements to list properties in return for becoming shareholders in the company.

The company previously announced that it intended to increase the sales and agent customer relationship team fourfold, reporting that it had already expanded the sales team by 50%.

OnTheMarket said the estate agent market was made up of around 18,000 branches, and its directors said they believed that the company carried around a third of UK residential property listings at the time of admission.

The market was described as “highly fragmented” and highly local in nature, with the board saying they believed that more than 80% of UK estate and lettings agent firms were made up of between one and three branches.

Its locally-based field sales team had been concentrating resource in the first week after admission on generating new listings agreements from that fragmented sector of the market.

“The core proposition of the business remains the creation of an agent-backed, full-scale property portal to disrupt what is otherwise a duopoly of Rightmove and Zoopla by offering a premier search experience to consumers whilst charging sustainably fair prices to agents,” the board said in its statement.

“Yesterday the company announced that butters john bee, a firm with 18 offices across Shropshire, Cheshire, Staffordshire and the West Midlands, is also now advertising its properties at OnTheMarket.com.”

As it announced on 14 February, Arun Estates - the largest independent estate agency in south east England - had already begun displaying its properties from its more-than-100 offices at OnTheMarket.com, as part of a five-year listing agreement which had been conditional on admission to AIM.

Last year, OnTheMarket announced that Chancellors Group and Hunters had also signed new long-term listing agreements with OnTheMarket.com, conditional on its admission to AIM, and the properties of their aggregate 250 offices were expected to list shortly.

“The level of agent interest on the ground for the OnTheMarket proposition has been extremely encouraging, not least in terms of the number of offices which have already signed a contract with OnTheMarket during our first week of recruitment and selling,” said chief executive Ian Springett.

“The estate agent sector is highly local in character and early indications are that we are on track in terms of creating local momentum in the marketplace up and down the UK.”

Springett said the more agents which joined now, the more the company’s board believed all agents and property-seekers would benefit in terms of the increased property stock at OnTheMarket.com.

“We are focused on reaching out to agent firms across the country which can see the disruptive appeal of our proposition of sustainable fair pricing from an agent-backed portal.

“We aim to build rapidly on this early momentum as a key step towards becoming a full scale competitor to the market-leading portals.”