I was part of a podcast panel hosted by the inimitable Simon Whale and Kerfuffle yesterday (date of publication TBC, when I know), talking about the #Rightmove/#REA ding-dong and, very specifically, whether the deal was going to go ahead or not.
Before I say whether I think it’s going to happen or not, one of the most helpful tips that came from fellow panellists Matt Goddard, Neil Campbell and David Mintz was about the timings of property launches. We all remember #OnTheMarket’s wheeze of getting agents to put their properties up on their site, before they hit any others. Turns out that this was incredible for OTM’s SEO, as Google (and #Facebook) privilege ‘first listers’, the organisations that are seen to be pushing content out before anyone else.
It's fair to say that most agents aren’t really across whether a new listing appears on their site first, on Rightmove or elsewhere, which plays very much into RM’s hands. If you’ve ever wondered why RM appears at the top of property searches on #Google for your area – chances are that you’re making that happen with a slapdash attitude to one of your primary resources, property content.
More than the problem you’re creating right now, you’re building one up that’s going to persist longer – you’re teaching AI that these other sites are more important than your own, too.
Go ask #ChatGPT to find a ‘three bed house with a garage near a train station in [your area]’ and see what comes back. Bet it’s a portal. You need to be training AI to know that your properties are fresher on your own website than on these third-party ones. I’d never come across Neil’s system, ListingLogic, before and have no affiliation with it but if it helps to reinforce agents’ positions in AI responses (and Google SEO and Facebook/#Instagram visibility) then it’s got to be good.
After last week’s punchy REA bid of £5.6Bn for Rightmove was rejected, expectations are that REA is going to need to come back over £7Bn. The fact that their shareholders are already baulking at £5.6Bn suggests that it’s going to be hard to drag them into supporting it – that’s over half of REA’s £13.6Bn actual value right now, which is a huge risk, regardless of any rewards it may seek in the long term.
So no, I don’t think the REA deal is going to go through right now.
That being said, this isn’t all good news for agents. I think that this has suddenly positioned Rightmove as vulnerable, having appeared bulletproof up to this point. Their Board is going to want to make some big points about how it can develop some of the revenue streams that REA was talking about to make itself even more profitable.
None of that’s means lower fees. They’re going to go up even faster.
Time, as we said on the podcast, to break out the Portal Recovery Plan and work out how to survive without Rightmove. The best time to do this was a decade or so ago – the second best time is right now.
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