Onthemarket plans to set up home on Aim

PROPERTY website Onthemarket has announced plans to float on London’s junior Aim market in a bid to raise around £50m to fuel its expansion and restructure its business.

Under the move, members of the website’s parent company, Agents’ Mutual, will be rewarded with shares based on how much they have paid in order to list on Onthemarket since it was launched in January 2015.

The company is aiming for a market capitalisation of £200m to £250m.

Ian Springett, chief executive of Agents’ Mutual, which was founded by a group of agents including Savills and Knight Frank, said the restructuring would allow its 2,700 members to “remain enfranchised, aligned and fully invested” in Onthemarket.

The planned flotation marks the latest step in the website’s battle with rivals Rightmove and Zoopla. Last month Onthemarket won a year-long competition battle after a tribunal ruled that its “one other portal” rule, which bans its agents advertising on both Rightmove and Zoopla, was allowed within competition laws. The move to float would lead to Onthe Market dropping this rule.

Analysts at Barclays said: “Zoopla has been the main loser from this rule and is still [around] 3,000 agents short (on a net basis) of where it was before Onthemarket launched. In theory these agents could now be free to come back to Zoopla.”

Onthemarket is still far behind its two main rivals, according to Jefferies, with just 5,700 agent branches signed up, compared with Zoopla’s 14,271 and Rightmove’s 17,589. The float also represents a departure from its original mission statement, which was to be an agent-owned, low-cost portal that would undercut third-party platforms.

The company plans to use the money raised from the float to fund a “heavyweight” TV, digital and print media campaign, and invest more in account management and technology.