Rightmove Stock

All right. Five seconds to go. Let's conclude that everyone is in the room. So good morning, and welcome to the presentation of Rightmove's results for H1 '26. I'm joined today by Rory Hook, our CFO. First, 4 key takeaways. I'm pleased with our first half results and the strategic progress we've made.

Our Estate Agency business delivered solid growth and strong retention and the smaller strategic growth areas are on track for full year targets. New Homes market development volumes have softened over the period, though with good product and ARPA uptake.

We delivered an accelerating number of products across the entire business, many of them powered or complemented with AI, building on our reach and our data. The tech platform is in a strong position. We continue to shape a leading agentic-powered property marketplace for the long term.

Our confidence is reflected in the increasing -- increased capital return that you have seen news about this morning, over GBP 400 million expected over the next 12 months. So let's start with the H1 key results. Revenue growth of 7% was supported by ARPA and membership increases in the core business as well as contribution from growth in our strategic growth areas. Underlying EPS grew by 6%, and we increased capital return by 11% in H1 with a GBP 90 million buyback completing yesterday.

Now moving on to a selection of our operational KPIs. The share of time on site, as measured by Comscore, grew in the period and stood at 9 out of every 10 minutes in June. Over 85% of our traffic comes direct and organically. And in June, that also was over 90%.

Meanwhile, less than 0.5% of our traffic came through LLMs, unchanged from 2025. For our Estate Agency partners, we are successfully rolling out our latest Online Agent Valuation product, OAV, and retention was the highest in over 10 years.

We increased penetration of our top packages in both Estate Agency and New Homes to 36%, and we introduced new complementary training and certification programs for all estate agent members. We continued delivery and growth in our smaller strategic growth areas. I'll come back to this later.

We advanced quite a bit further on our leading tech platform, our datasets and our AI innovation. And my credit really goes to the Rightmove team for great execution and hard work in the first half. 89% of our people describe Rightmove as a great place to work.

And as you can see here, in a competitive and always evolving market, our position remains stable and strong. Our share of consumer portal time spent, 75% and 90% by the 2 external measurement, providers is powered by our quality consumer experiences and growing adoption of many new features.

That trust and engagement from consumers drive volume and quality of leads and ever richer data signals for product development going forward. We continue to create strong outcomes and value for over 19,000 estate agent and New Homes partners.

Now moving on to some review of the property end markets. Starting top left here with home transaction levels. We expect 1.05 million to 1.15 million sales transactions in '26. That's slightly below last year and the long-term average, but it's in line with 2024's 1.1 million at the midpoint.

Looking top right, while mortgage rates remain elevated around 5% and the outlook remains subject to the ongoing macro, affordability relative to the average house price is steadily improving for many buyers, shown in the middle set of columns.

And on the right, lenders are willing to lend and to slightly higher leverage following some regulatory changes last year. Bottom left, you can see that available listings remain at a record high, leading to full pipelines for estate agents. Completions are also up year-on-year and above historical averages.

Looking ahead, new listings, demand and sales agreed are broadly in line with long-term average, which reflects the interest rate backdrop, buyer versus seller price expectations and also some short-term consumer distractions or uncertainties that we had during Q2 and the summer.

Finally, bottom right, the rental market continues to rebalance. There's been a bit of a tick-up in demand more recently in June and July, which may be a side effect of the slower resale market. Now I want to expand a bit more on the New Homes market given the market volume softness.

And that, of course, has been well publicized over the recent months. So here, we've outlined a historic market condition comparison by time periods in the columns and by supply-demand factors in rows. And you can see that through most of these time periods, there's been some green tailwinds on either the supply or demand side. But at the moment in 2026, there is really not one.

Now 2026 conditions are, of course, very far from the economic credit freeze and a recession in 2008 when you similarly had a lot of red. But the sector, nevertheless, today faced a number of headwinds as a summary. This year started tentatively optimistic and builders expected it to gradually improve.

However, and particularly through Q2, on the back of a stretching-out Middle East conflict and higher for longer rates, combined with persistently high resale stock competing for buyers, things got more challenging. Build cost and risk, weakened consumer confidence, more political uncertainty and too little planning reform effect to date has not helped.

For reference, we show here Rightmove's New Homes business revenue growth over these periods. A reminder, though, our revenue is, of course, a combination of volume and product-led ARPA. And finally, compared to the full tailwind year of 2019, a lot of green, in 2026 now, you can see the volume difference for the large and well-capitalized developers and a much more pronounced volume difference for small- and medium-sized players.

We continue to focus to deliver products that are useful for builders in all segments and all markets, including when it bounces back, which we have seen happen, of course, in the past as well. Now the volume softness is a market issue. Rightmove, we have continued to generate ARPA growth through strong products and ongoing innovation.

As mentioned earlier, 36% of developments are in our top -- new top package Ascend and our top 2 packages are at almost 80% penetration today. At a product level, on the left, we keep introducing and enhancing individual products. Together with our large consumer reach, that drive results. And especially in the soft end market, higher quality leads are essential.

Our direct appointment booking product has generated a tripling of appointments and the Virtual Tour Request drove close to 50% more leads per development. And finally, as usual, we operate for long-term partnerships. Under our Building Success Together program for partners, we supported homes developers additionally in this period with dedicated consumer surveying, marketing and lobbying engagement activities.

So in conclusion on this piece, while it's a tough volume spell in the market, we got great value-generating products. There is still a shortage of modern and affordable housing stock in this country and inflation print is cautiously trickling downwards. So we do anticipate volumes to pick up as conditions improve, and we've seen this several times in the past.

And with that, I will hand over to Rory to go through some of the financials.

Thank you, Johan. Good morning, everyone. I'm pleased to present our financial results for the first 6 months of 2026. Overall, group revenue increased by 7% compared to H1 2025, reflecting strong growth in Agency and the SGAs, offset by subdued growth in New Homes as a result of fewer developments being advertised.

Starting with Agency, revenues increased by 9% to GBP 164 million. Looking at the chart on the right-hand side, the light blue bars show that this growth was predominantly ARPA led, which continues to be driven by package upgrades and product adoption, including the new Online Agent Valuation product launched at the start of the year.

We're really pleased with this ARPA growth and it is a great proof point of the returns on investment in the platform. An additional GBP 2 million contribution came from higher Agency membership numbers, which were supported by record Agency retention.

Moving down the table to New Homes. Revenues increased by 2% to GBP 38 million. This was achieved despite continued headwinds in the New Homes end market. As Johan has given color to already, the New Homes market is challenging from a development number perspective.

You can see the impact of this in the chart, where the orange bar shows a reduction in revenue of GBP 2 million compared to H1 last year. Still, in challenging conditions, developers continue to turn to our products to support their marketing.

ARPA growth contributed approximately GBP 3 million increase year-on-year, of which the primary driver was product and package upgrades. At the bottom of the table, our strategic growth areas delivered as we expected in H1. Commercial property revenues grew 13% to GBP 8.4 million as we continue to focus on customer acquisition with membership increasing 15% year-on-year.

Leader Advantage, a new product suite launched into our top package in Q2 and will be chargeable from H2. Mortgages revenue decreased by GBP 1.1 million to GBP 3.4 million, although compared to H2 2025, revenue was sequentially up GBP 1.2 million. Performance reflected the March '25 change of stamp duty and interest rate cuts last year.

Despite lower mortgage market activity, ongoing optimization of our consumer journey and proposition helped mitigate some of the impact. Rental services comprising our Lead to Keys product, tenant referencing and ancillary services saw revenues increase by 67%. As we mentioned back in November, we rolled out Enquiry Manager to dual customers across the start of the year.

Around 7,000 partners now have Enquiry Manager with GBP 1.7 million of the increase coming from this higher lettings product revenue. This activity is largely complete. So our focus going forward will mainly be on driving referencing and ancillary revenues.

Overall, we continue to expect SGA growth of 20% to 30% in 2026 as we expect year-on-year revenue growth in H2 to be more than double that seen in H1. This is as we expect Commercial H2 year-on-year percentage growth will be higher than H1. In Rental Services, H2 revenues will be similar to H1 revenues, resulting in strong year-on-year growth. And in mortgages, we expect H2 revenues to be similar to or above H1.

Turning to membership. Total membership remained broadly stable during the first half, increasing by 85 to 19,357. This was driven by continued growth in Agency membership, which increased by 206 branches during the period. Growth was supported by record partner retention. Agency formation settled back to normal levels compared to the highs in 2025 with over 50% of new joiners coming from existing partners continuing to expand through new branch openings.

Within New Homes, membership declined by 121 developments since the start of the year, with over 80% of that decline in Q2. The chart on the bottom right shows that the new developments coming to market are at the lowest levels seen since our records began.

While we do not currently see evidence of a near-term improvement in build rates, we remain optimistic about the medium-term outlook. The government's continued focus on increasing housing supply, combined with improving market conditions over time, should support a recovery in development activity.

Moving on to ARPA. Overall, ARPA increased by GBP 117 to GBP 1,726. Around 60% of this was driven by upgrades and strong product uptake across both new Agency and New Homes. The remaining 40% of ARPA growth came from contract renewals, which have proceeded as expected.

In Agency, we continued to see upgrades to our top package, almost 100 net upgrades since December. Partners on Optimiser Edge had almost more than double the incremental ARPA growth in their second year of membership compared to what we saw with Optimiser 20 partners. This was underpinned by the new product Online Agent Valuation. This demonstrates the options we have for monetization from new products, either from new packages or as stand-alone products.

We expect sales of Online Agent Valuation to continue to drive upgrades as well as incremental product purchases across H2. Our other products continue to deliver great outcomes for our partners. Since June 2025, the average number of products per branch has increased by 14% and more than half of our partners purchased products above their committed contract levels.

In New Homes, the top package, Ascend, launched last May saw an increase of around 200 developments since the start of the year, taking penetration to 36%. After 18 months, even with record low new developments to target, we have reached a record high number of developments on the top package.

The largest driver of this is the enhanced leads product that is exclusive to the Ascend package. And in Ascend, we saw an ARPA increase of GBP 400, up 12% in the first 12 months following an upgrade. So similar to Agency, post upgrade, we continue to see ARPA grow as partners engage and purchase more product in their new package. So whilst we can't control the developments coming to market, we are delighted to see developers continue to turn to our products to help them in this challenging New Homes market.

Moving on to costs. Underlying operating costs increased by GBP 10 million year-on-year, resulting in a 69% underlying operating profit margin as we continue to invest with discipline and in the capabilities that support our future growth.

Our largest area of investment remains technology and product development with a continued focus on enhancing our platform, expanding innovation capacity and strengthening our data and AI capabilities. The largest component of the increase was people-related costs, which increased by around GBP 5 million, up 15%.

Contractor spend, mainly via our new flexible resourcing partner, was also higher year-on-year by GBP 1 million, providing additional flexibility and specialist expertise in key delivery areas. As we look ahead, these investments remain focused on increasing our innovation capacity and building capabilities to support future growth.

Let me now turn to capital allocation. We review capital allocation regularly with our Board and advisers as well as reflecting input from a wide range of our investors, the result of the announcement you have seen this morning. Our allocation priorities have not changed, and we remain focused on delivering long-term value creation.

First, we will continue to invest in the business to support organic growth. Second, value-accretive acquisition opportunities will be evaluated. And third, consistent with our long-standing approach, we remain to progressive dividend linked to earnings growth and we'll continue to return surplus capital to shareholders.

We are not changing our capital allocation strategy as these priorities of investing for growth and distributing excess cash to shareholders remain. What we are evolving is how we think about the balance sheet. Rightmove today is a larger, more diversified and more cash-generative business than at any point in its history.

We have predictable earnings, low capital intensity and a strong cash conversion, and we have a balance sheet that can support leverage. We have decided to target a modest level of debt on an ongoing basis. We have, therefore, entered into a GBP 200 million revolving credit facility. At full drawdown, this would equate to roughly 0.5x leverage. Whilst we believe that the group could support a higher level of debt, the Board is focused on maintaining a strong balance sheet and retaining financial flexibility.

This level preserves headroom in an uncertain macro environment. It allows us to manage any potential contingency facing the business and allows capacity to support future growth investments, including M&A. This morning, we announced an interim dividend of 4.17p. Our share buyback program following the completion of GBP 90 million in the first 7 months of the year has already started.

Our expectation over the next 12 months, subject to market conditions and alternative uses of capital is to purchase over GBP 330 million of shares. Along with the dividend, our expectation is to distribute over GBP 400 million to shareholders over these next 12 months. This package of returns reflects our commitment to delivering sustainable shareholder value through a balanced approach of investing for long-term growth while returning excess capital to shareholders.

Now lastly, on financial guidance. Due to the impact on New Homes development numbers in H1 and prudently assuming no recovery near term, we moved revenue guidance for this year to 6% to 8%. We anticipate development numbers to continue to decrease in H2, finishing the year with development numbers down 6% to 10%.

In Agency, we currently anticipate membership to finish the year around 1% to 2% higher versus last year. The lower end of the guidance range assumes a further deterioration in current market conditions, creating a more pronounced decline in New Homes activity. Based on what we are seeing today, however, our expectation remains that trading in the second half is broadly consistent with the first half.

We anticipate no other changes to the other guidance metrics, reiterating 3% to 5% growth in full year underlying operating profit as a result of continued cost discipline. Turning to exceptionals. We incurred GBP 2.3 million of third-party adviser and other costs in the first half directly relating to the proposed legal claim. For the year, we are guiding to a range of between GBP 4 million and GBP 7 million. Finally, as discussed earlier, we have already recommenced our share buyback program. We reiterate our expectation of at least 5% EPS growth for 2026. That concludes the financials. I'll now hand you back to Johan.

Thank you, Rory. So we are indeed excited about our long-term strategy to build out the digital property ecosystem, leveraging our strong platform and reach. Starting with some of what we do already. We made some good progress advancing the SGAs in this half. And you heard some from Rory, Commercial launched the Leader Advantage package rolling out over the course of this year.

We keep adding partners and listings to the platform, and we're implementing more CRM channel integrations. For Rental Services, we rolled out the Enquiry Manager and enhanced leads to core partners. We spent quite a bit of time preparing products for the significant Renters' Right Act regulation starting on May 1, generating time savings and assurance for agents and tenants alike.

Over 60% of our millions of rental leads are now sent in an enriched format, helping agents prioritize tenants and, of course, therefore, save time. In mortgages, we successfully completed our lender partner transition to NatWest. We saw really strong user growth of our mortgage content and MIP tools overall, albeit in a choppy end market for purchase mortgages. So let's move on to how we're evolving Rightmove being superbly set up for the future.

We have been very busy executing in the first half, and I'm going to start with sharing a short video sampling of some of that work.

[Presentation]

All right. Good bit of energy, hopefully, next to the morning coffee. Let me get through some of the important capabilities and strength of our execution in a plain slide format now. So first, we have a fully AI capable and leading tech and data platform. We've invested in it over several years by now.

We use Google's powerful cloud solution stack. We operate a flexible architecture using models from all LLMs. And as I set out already in November, we use a lot of our own data and proprietary models, creating Rightmove AI Alpha. Our applications are now 100% cloud-enabled, a project achieved ahead of plan, and we have over 5 petabytes of data in our unified data platform.

Our production teams are AI enabled, and we shipped over 35% more tech releases on an absolute and also per developer basis, which means cycle times are going faster. We continue to be very principle about building products with trust, quality and outcomes in mind.

So in November, we set out a plan to accelerate our position further across these 3 areas specifically, and we're showing some early results right out of the gate. For consumers, we launched Ask Rightmove in Q1, and we've been scaling and expanding the product since. I'll share a little bit more on that shortly.

Within AI-powered operations, #2 here, we're on track with a multiyear next-generation project for our partner-facing operational services. We deliver wins along the way. And as one example in customer support, our agentic services resolved 3,000 tickets with 0 human involvement. In product development, 84% of code changes were AI-enabled and the amount of code written agentically increased over 3x between April and June alone this year.

We see big forward opportunities to drive agentic workflow efficiencies for partners and for Rightmove itself. And finally, we started up new growth projects, adding team members and some early product designs. We continue to aim for launches in '27 and beyond.

Overall, I'm very pleased with the rate of progress. It's fast, it's disciplined, and it has a focus on quality and outcomes. We target good ROI and profit growth from these from both revenue and cost opportunities across all 3. Now on to Ask Rightmove. We launched the first version of this conversational AI search experience in the beginning of the year. And today, it's a multi-agent architecture with very solid guardrails and eval models.

As of now, we have 2 core use cases, search assistant to discover properties and an evaluation assistant to drill into a specific property more deeply. For the search assistant, a couple of data points to date. Over 6 million users have been exposed to it, and we're ramping up traffic ongoingly.

And based on data up until end of June, those who engage spend around 40% more time on our site. They save twice the number of properties, and they're almost twice as likely to send a lead. We've got a very positive feedback on the feature.

In latter Q2, we then added the evaluation agent, so consumers can explore and evaluate by chatting directly with Rightmove to get deep and personal insights across 3 areas: property details, local area context, and this is where we leverage Gemini and Rightmove data together and local pricing and market dynamics, leveraging Rightmove's proprietary dataset and models.

Conversations we've seen, they can flow intuitively and quite personally across all 3 of these. Early data tells us that when consumers use Ask Rightmove, combining both the search and the evaluation agent in the same session, we see a strong multiplier effect, meaning even stronger uplifts on the metrics I just noted on the left side.

Now if we level up a bit here, the top left box, which we showed before is important. We keep following our principle of however you discover, we have you covered. This has happened over time, and it's happening now. And of course, we've added the Ask Rightmove format on the right, as I just went through.

We expanded controllably, and we're taking guidance from adoption data and offering multiple interfaces to consumers. Now we can do several exciting things going forward. First, looking at the lower left box here, we have some examples here of existing and quite scaled assistance tools on Rightmove, like the close to 1 billion property alerts that we sent each year personally asked for by consumers.

We'll eventually merge these into an even fuller and user-contextual Agentic Rightmove interface, bottom right. So literally, there will be swarms of agents running within it, answering questions, keeping track of things, but also be able to execute tasks for the user.

And the second thing with this is the much expanded and much richer user data and signals that these conversational interfaces will generate. With it, we can personalize, predict and connect both consumers and partners and at much deeper levels than today.

Higher quality means higher value. So there are more revenue opportunities, whether to core partners or by way of new commercial opportunities. Now over to the partner side. We're rapidly powering up AI and products for partners, as you can see across the table here. And our strong foundations are a big advantage that listed at the top in summary, the scale of the first-party consumer reach we have, our proprietary data and AI capabilities and of course, also our Building Success Together program, which is inclusive in every estate agent subscription.

Hence, we can leverage AI from a very strong and vertically specialized position. We're focusing really on what we consider higher value-add opportunities, embedding into and enhancing workflows for our partners. I'll talk to just 3 examples, new here.

Number one, Online Agent Valuation OAV, which you heard of, is really where AI is a complementary part to the core use case of that product. And then two, very early-stage products that are more fully based on AI, the Rightmove Plus property performance assistant and voice intelligence.

I'll talk you through all 3 very briefly as they show very well how we now can create value, AI built in. So we mentioned Online Agent Valuation OAV, how it's scaling with a record reception and rollout pace. It was really the first of its kind in the U.K. property market. And the point here is that consumers and partners simultaneously benefit from one product, a new digital and more efficient way of connecting available only over the Rightmove platform. They can exchange information and, of course, decide the right time to meet for an in-home valuation or instruction when it suits each side.

It's a great early-stage nurturing and qualification tool for agents. And we've seen also that when an estate agent uses the AI tool built in, response times have been 12% faster and booked valuation is 10% higher. To date, some really strong results. Consumers have submitted over 45,000 valuation requests, contributing to our H1 total valuation leads growth of a very strong 50%.

We have uptake from over 1,200 branches, which is 28% of Optimiser Edge branches, and that shows both a great interest to date and of course, a meaningful runway ahead. And that parallel consumer and partner uptake has driven strong business results and indeed, new data assets for Rightmove as summarized on the right-hand side here.

Next, I am going to outline a little bit more about the newest agentic-powered products. We already built and are out testing these live in the market. They're uniquely, again, leveraging our platform reach, data and specialization. They're impossible to match for by, for example, an LLM or a start-up.

So first then, the Rightmove Plus AI Assistant. A reminder here, Rightmove Plus is the business intelligence platform available to all estate agents, and we recorded 28 million usage sessions last year. It contains a number of reports, insights and tools that agents use daily.

The AI leverages our data and provides analytical and human-style insights overlaid into the listings pure performance data. We know and further validated through research with partners that branch staff spend more time than they want on interpreting and reformulating all the data that we share. And instead, they want to spend more time meeting clients and being even better prepared when they do.

So the Rightmove Plus AI assistant addresses real-world needs and delivering real-world outcomes. We're already trialing this at near 2,000 branches and seeing strong engagement. We'll expand market coverage and iterate on the functionality of this over H2 and of course, over next year as well.

Next, an entirely new category really across both leads and efficiency for us, Rightmove voice intelligence. So the backdrop is this. Around 50% of leads to estate agents in '25 came via phone. We record all calls. And in total, we captured 65 years' worth of calls just that year. That's a huge Rightmove dataset.

Of course, that contains very valuable insights for agent frontline practices. We already offer access to these recordings as an inclusive value-add service to all members, again, an example of our building success together approach. Now many but not all estate agents listen to the recordings for training, lead qualification, staff performance monitoring.

Their biggest issue, well, just the sheer scale of the data and the time that it takes to listen through it, interpret it and act on it. Often, and actually either doesn't get done or someone has to be employed to do it. That's an operational cost.

So we will power up this data treasure trove with AI, turning into more cost-effective and smart tool for partners. Initially, it will be through transcriptions and over time, with value-add AI-powered summaries, tags, data mining, suggested actions and so forth. Longer term, the potential value is clear as it becomes embedded into our agentic back-office services.

So in conclusion, again, here are the key takeaways I showed you at the start of the presentation. H1 has seen strong product results in a somewhat challenging market backdrop, especially for New Homes. We're delivering a record pace of tech releases and product.

The platform is set for shaping the agentic-powered property marketplace of the future, and we are confident about our future value creation opportunities.

And with that, let's get to Q&A.

So please Yes, here we go. Can I just ask you what to do? Please raise your hand, say your name when called and a reminder to press the button on the microphone while you're speaking. So we're going to aim for two questions in the first instance, and we can come back if there is more time.

It's Jessica Pok from Peel Hunt. Two questions. The first is on New Homes. Clearly, very, very difficult time. Second half, you've given a clear guide. I mean, when do you expect conditions to get a little bit better? I mean, should we be thinking about a slight recovery in H1 next year? Or really, we're talking about the second half of next year in terms of the number of developments?

The second one is on SGA. 14% first half, you're guiding to a stronger second half, in particular, higher commercial real estate. I mean what's giving you the confidence of the higher growth in the second half? And how do we think in terms of the growth split by ARPA versus number of members for CRE going forward?

Sure. I'll take this. So yes, look in New Homes, it is a tricky market as we went through this morning, and it is uncertain. I think what we have guided or given a range is a fall in development numbers of 6% to 10% for the year-end. So we are expecting a continuation of a decrease in New Homes in the second half.

What we saw, as I said in my script, was that 80% of the fall in the first half came in Q2. Now where we look in July and August, it is not as bad as that. It is more in line with what we saw in Q1, but it's still a decrease. What we can't tell for certain is when the New Homes builders will come back, a little bit like I think they're trying to work that out themselves. I would add, though, that some of it is more long term in terms of build rates, but some of it can come back pretty quickly.

They have developments that they've either stopped or that they advertise developments before they're actually built. So when it comes back, it can come back much quicker. It's not necessarily a very long time, and that's what we have seen in the past.

So what we can do is control ARPA and the products and build products that when the market comes back, we are ready for it. And as we've seen is that really strong engagement in products and packages for when that does happen. In terms of the SGAs, so as I flagged, we expect revenue in the second half to be more than double that in the first half.

In terms of Commercial, it's great to see the continued customer acquisition that they're leading over 15%. ARPA has been deflated because of the mix, but we've now got our first chargeable products coming into H2. So that will certainly support ARPA growth, but more likely into 2027 as we still continue to see customer acquisition in the second half.

But as I guided to, we definitely think that Commercial growth in the second half as a percentage will be higher than that in the first half. So continuing to grow strength to strength. The other part that really gives us confidence in moving the SGAs from 14% into the guidance range of 20% to 30% is the performance of mortgages, which, of course, had that headwind of the comparator last year, as I outlined earlier. We actually grew over GBP 1 million sequentially from H2 last year. So we expect revenues to be in line or a little bit higher in H2. I think you put those parts together, that's what gives us confidence of moving the SGA growth up to the 20% to 30%. Will?

It's Will Packer from BNP Paribas. A couple from me, please. Firstly, you've cut the revenue guide for the year, but the operating profit guidance remains unchanged. It was in November where we had the big review of the cost investment. Could you just help us understand what you've decided to step back from and whether it's just a postponement or it's permanent savings?

And then secondly, thanks for the overview of all the new exciting AI products. It looks like there will be some token costs associated with that, perhaps less severe than other media Internet businesses because of the smaller dataset, et cetera. But is that within the remit of your current guidance and help us think through the challenges of token costs and managing that?

I'll take the first one. So our investment that we outlined in November remains exactly the same and on track. We haven't cut back any of that investment, and we're still really excited about what that is aiming to do and what it's already done, as you can see, some flavors of it today.

The reason we're able to reiterate the underlying profit growth, which we'd like to do today is, look, there's a little bit of just good cost discipline. There's also a little bit of -- as all businesses, we have a bit of contingency and discretionary levers at our disposal.

But also, I think we would have been very comfortable in seeing a higher -- towards the higher end of that range, if not a beat, if it hadn't been for the revenue headwind. So absolutely delighted that even with that, we're able to reiterate some strong underlying operating profit growth today.

Yes. And on token cost, just to confirm, we have taken space for this in our business plan, and that's very much following that as it is. Overall, we're also really managing this, both from what we call an AIOps and also a financial ops perspective. So we're controlling our rollouts and continuously, of course, optimize the setup itself, right? There's a lot you can do with caching. There's a lot that we can do, thanks to the flexible architecture in terms of using different models, right? -- several different model levels in terms of performance, cost and quality from each LLM and of course, across the different LLMs.

On an ongoing kind of macro perspective, there continues to be, as you very well know, frenetic investment in CapEx. It's a competitive space. Token costs, generally speaking, are going down, continue to go down. And there's also quite interesting progress from some of the open weight competitive landscape. You've probably seen just recently Moonshot AI, Kimi K3 model, I think, I'm not going to get too technical, but we are keeping track of these things, and our teams are all over it. They're literally coming in at 2 to 3x cheaper for almost comparative performance to some of the leading frontier LLMs. So again, a competitive backdrop there with choices to go with the future, and we have a fantastic team that manages to keep track and experiment with that as well. Jo?

It's Jo from UBS. A couple from me. Other non-SGA, I appreciate it's a small part of the business, but it was a bit weaker in 1H. Could you give us some color around that and thoughts into 2H?

And then secondly, the GBP 4 million to GBP 7 million for the ongoing claim, I think the next milestone is the hearing in November. If this process progresses beyond that point, is it fair to assume there'll be further exceptional costs in FY '27? Would they be a similar scale? And any other comments you can give us relating to that?

I will take the first. You go second.

Yes.

So yes, the other business lines, so again, we call them other, right, and they are different than our SGAs, where we have put in more product resources and effort behind building them. But of course, we continue to do business in these other business lines and have great teams and positions. What's particularly challenging in those businesses is overseas. It's very market driven.

There are simply fewer and fewer Brits deciding to buy a second home, which typically it is overseas. And we don't necessarily see that situation changing materially. But again, very much a market thing for us. It's also run very efficiently as a business unit for us.

Data services, we continue to grow that pretty nicely. And of course, third-party advertising generally sort of ticks along with our business and engagement from consumers. Again, potential in the sense that the more we now get to know about consumers and the more rich data and qualifications that will give us that will probably provide opportunity to target them with advertising in a better way in the future. But we're not putting too big sort of financial expectations on that, just worth mentioning, I think.

In terms of the exceptionals, so yes, we gave guidance of GBP 4 million to GBP 7 million. That's regarding the proposed claim against Rightmove, which we reiterate, we believe is absolutely without merit. In terms of costs past this year, we haven't provided guidance. We take the process as it is. There is a certification hearing come November. And so until then, I can only give you what we can see, which is the guidance for this year. Annick.

Annick from Bernstein. You've mentioned a few times M&A, which is not really your usual. Shall we read into this that you've assessed or are looking into AI start-ups that might help you in achieving your ambitions in terms of AI?

Second of all, we keep on just talking about AI, but what about competition? Can you give us a bit of an idea of where you see the competitive landmark developing?

So look, no, we're not going to go away on an M&A spree. So don't take it from that. Simply that M&A is #2 on our capital priorities. We look at any M&A if it's accretive, but you can see from the history of Rightmove that we're very disciplined in that approach, and there's a very high bar for us to want to do M&A. So we have that as an opportunity, but nothing on the radar, Annick. It's simply one part of the pieces of our capital allocation.

Great. Yes. And on competition, I think the headline is that is pretty stable out there. Again, some of that reflected back, obviously, in the consumer traffic and engagement numbers that we shared and indeed in the results that we deliver in the business lines for our partners as well. So activities continue. We, of course, keep a close eye on that as usual, but we are really, really mainly focused on accelerating ourselves from an already strong position, and that is going really well. Will?

Will Larwood from Berenberg. Firstly, just on -- you spoke about leverage going to, I think it's about 1.7x at the peak. How comfortable are you taking leverage up further?

And then secondly, just in terms of on the Commercial side of things, partner additions relative to the end of the year weren't that high. So I'm just thinking about how you're thinking about member additions in Commercial going forward.

Sure. So absolutely delighted this morning to announce Rightmove's debut -- debt facility. A very robust process was undertaken throughout the year. We have a really strong syndicate of lenders. I'm delighted to see many of them here today. So absolutely thrilled to be able to announce that. And as we outlined in the RNS in the presentation, we will use that in terms of enhancing our returns to shareholders. So that will be incremental already on the significant returns that we provide to shareholders.

And I think it also speaks volumes for the confidence that we have in the business going forward. Just to be clear, we see the RCF, which is GBP 200 million, being when it's fully drawn over the next 12 months is 0.5x leverage. For us, that at the moment is what we see as the right level of leverage that matches kind of being able to provide returns to shareholders while retaining financial flexibility for the future as we did before today, going forward, we'll always continually look at what the right level is for the business.

In terms of the Commercial partner numbers, I wouldn't read anything into that in terms of any slowdown. Commercial market has been a little bit tougher than it was last year, a bit mirrored by a lot of the other sectors. The team still sees lots of opportunities in terms of customer acquisition, and we still see opportunity to grow in terms of the volume lever of commercial. I think what's really exciting is the new Leader product coming out in the second half, and we're really excited about seeing some of that product incrementally driving ARPA into 2027. Sean?

Sean Kealy from Panmure Liberum. First question, just on product. You've talked about the leader advantage product in the second half of 2026. How do you feel about the product cadence going forward beyond that, specifically in Commercial? And then also, I noticed, Johan, you mentioned the first products in build from your R&D investment. Any more color you can give on what you might have coming out of that in the future? And then second, you've talked about...

Isn't that two?

One in two parts. And then second, you've talked about 100% of applications now running in the cloud, which is a very specifically worded claim. So I thought I would just check. Can you confirm the monolith is now dead?

All right. Yes. So I'll have a crack. So on Commercial, and yes, indeed, the focus for '26, but also for '27 is to get penetration with the Leader Advantage product. It started really well from a reception perspective, but it's always a thing just like it is on the resi side to roll it through the market, educate and so forth.

And in terms of new things, there's nothing specific to mention right now. But I would also say it goes without saying that we keep innovating both on different package levels, products within it. Of course, down the road, there's also a conversational or AI opportunity, both on the partner side as well as the consumer side on Commercial. So it's simply an ongoing program from there.

In terms of new growth, any more color? No, no more color. We're excited about a few things that we're looking at, and we'll communicate those when we get to them. And then third, on the 100% applications in the cloud. Yes, so that's indeed what we got into when we got into it a little bit faster than we wanted. What remains of the program is to actually also decommission and get out of the data centers, right? So there's a tail end of this program, and that's going to happen for the rest of the year basically. Giles?

Giles Thorne from Jefferies. Johan, when can we expect an agentic experience on the consumer side?

And second question, there's been a big overhaul of packages at Zoopla. I'm sure you're across the details, so I won't repeat them here. But is there anything in those changes they've announced that you feel you need to respond to?

Okay. So yes, if you refer to agentic as in not.

As broad scope as you want.

I think I outlined a little bit of that, right? And I'll give you my definition of it, right? I mean, look, there's an agentic experience already today, but it's obviously human interactions that is driving that. And I think if you talk about agentic, as I outlined, we have a lot of -- you can call them agentic, if you want, just old school agentic, right, but assistance tools already today that keeps track of things, notifies people, et cetera.

And they are very strong and very scaled, right, over 1 billion property alerts, billions and millions of alerts for valuation changes on the properties. And remember, these are pretty -- that's a pretty new product for us over the last couple of years. I think we're on a run rate of 8 million of those tracks right now annually.

So actually moving that into an agentic format, if you want, right? Here's my personal, my Rightmove agentic style. And again, whether people want to get an e-mail or an app notification or have that sort of window that they come back to, and that's where it plays out agentically, we'll let consumers choose that.

And then I think the other piece, which is might be what you also referred to is like, I think, definition of agentic' like you get the agent to start executing things for you, right? And that's, of course, again, on the board of both ideation and plotting for the future. So again, we'll come to that when we come to it. But we're not going to overrun it short term because humans still, to a large extent, like to be in control, not at least when it comes to choosing a property, as we talked about before, right?

But it's absolutely possible from a technical and architectural perspective. And just like I said, on the partner side, deciding where we think the biggest value add in terms of such agentic assistant could happen.

And in terms of competition and a few changes in terms of products, look, we always keep an eye on what's happening in a competitive landscape. We also keep a very strong eye on what other peers are doing across the world as well and any interesting learnings. But I would come back to that we have an incredibly talented team at Rightmove.

And I think we continually show some fantastic innovation and often leading the market, not just in the U.K., but in classifieds and many of the products that we do. And hopefully, today gives you an idea of some in the pipeline, but also something like Online Agent Valuation and what superb take-up that was in the market.

I think the other thing I'll point to is when you look at packages and products, I guess the old Rightmove that you're used to, Giles, was a product would come with a package. What we're showing now is we can bring out products on their own and monetize them really, really well as long as they deliver fantastic value and outcomes to the partners, they end up doing incredibly well from a revenue perspective.

And so our ability to be able to create and throw out these fantastic products is, I think, is unmatched. And so I'd like to think that we're leading with others looking at us and great to see that acceleration of products still coming.

A follow-up, please, Johan. Are we talking weeks and months? Or are we talking months and years? And what's your instincts around any type of consumer monetization?

Sorry, the first part of the question referred to...

Yes, this is back on...

Agentic again?

Yes, back on the idea.

All of the above. It's happening. It's ongoing. So it's going to be a continuous stream of both testing, again, what makes sense and then rolling it out just like we've done with the first parts of Ask Rightmove here. Sorry, what was the second one again?

When you will start charging for it.

We no -- our intention overall is to offer search experiences for free to consumers, right? That's part of the very strong proposition that we have. Now I think as you get into more, call it, again, agentic or advanced kind of workflow or services underneath and potentially with other types of business partners that we have today, of course, looking at commercial opportunities across that, that's a given that we will do that. So again, that's part of the planning going forward. There's going to be a willingness to pay for really good services as usual.

Sean, I think we've got time for one more.

I just wanted to follow up on Giles's question actually. Consumer monetization is one thing for consumers in residential. But on the Commercial side, I imagine there might be a bit more scope. I'm just interested in your thoughts specifically on that part of it.

Yes. Look, I agree in the sense that the -- let's say, the levels of complexity and processes and documentation, et cetera, et cetera, perhaps exist to a larger extent on the Commercial side. But it also means that you need to build something around that. And again, so I think that's absolutely possible over time.

And what is true already now across residential and commercial, we often and always try to leverage as much as possible from one stack from one build that can have 2 different outcomes. So let's say, back to both of those questions, obviously. But it's also true that on the Commercial side, we still think there's a long runway in building what we're doing right now, which is an even deeper and richer property marketplace, right, which we're executing on. And you will have different types of, again, situations and players in the Commercial market.

Great. Well, with that, I think we'll call it a close. So thank you very much all for your time.

Thank you.

All right. Now we officially start. So good morning, and welcome to the presentation of Rightmove's Results for 2025. I'm joined today by Rory Hook, our CFO, sitting here, who'll be here in a second.

First, a couple of takeaways. Our 2025 performance showed strong continued delivery in a competitive market, and we will step up the pace further in '26. We continue to deliver compelling value from and across our platform to both core and other partners. We have a very strong position with consumers, partners and our data. And with our AI capability, we're enhancing all of that even further. We continue to deliver our proposition. We're executing our strategy. We're excited about all future opportunities to further digitize the U.K. property sector.

Now we delivered some really strong KPIs for last year. Revenue growth of 9% was supported by ARPA and membership increases in the core business as well as contribution from growth in our strategic growth areas. Underlying operating profit growth of 9% reflects our revenue growth and ongoing investments in people, technology and product delivery. Underlying EPS grew by 11%, and we increased capital returned by 21%. And finally, time on site at 16.8 billion minutes was the second highest on record, only beaten by the COVID exceptional burst in '21. Said differently, the equivalent of 32,000 years of time was spent on Rightmove platform last year.

We made some strong operational progress as well right across the platform last year. So from the left, over 85% of that large audience came through direct and organic traffic and we grew our app users by strong 11%. We continue to evolve to meet consumers wherever they are and we doubled their engagement numbers in social media channels. We saw a strong penetration of our top packages in Estate Agency and New Homes as well as a very fast start for our latest and market unique Estate Agency own product, Online Agent Valuation.

Our Agency retention was the second highest in over 10 years, and third-party surveys showed record positive sentiment scores for Rightmove. We continued our strategic and operational progress and growth in the strategic growth areas. And all of this was delivered through Rightmove's platform and leading data. We did over 6,000 tech releases. And after a multiyear build, we now have 31 live strategic AI projects at year-end. It's an increase of 4 on our November update, and we tripled the number of data models used to process our proprietary data in the platform. This strong stance is down to purposeful work and investments over the most recent years and has a strong trajectory for future product delivery.

And finally, on people, we have a world-class, engaged and energized team. 89% of our team described Rightmove as a great place to work. So my sincere thanks to all hard and smart working Rightmovers for delivering our results of last year.

It is a competitive market out there, but our position is stable and it's strong. And that's because we keep delivering great value for both consumers and partners. We remain the leading place for consumers looking to make a move in U.K. property. And while facing various competitive dynamics, over time, we have, for years, averaged over 70% share of portal time on similar web and over 80% on Comscore. In December '25, we were at 75% and 89%, respectively. And that love and trust from consumers drives frequency, leads and, of course, a lot of data signals. And those enable us to drive strong outcomes and value for our over 19,000 U.K. estate agents and New Homes partners.

Now I want to touch on that value point a bit. We operate in a competitive market, and we always gauge how we can do even better. So we commissioned third-party surveys quarterly with over 1,600 independent agents contributing responses. The top left chart here shows that the total positive sentiment scores from those surveys. These are -- there are 2 big takeaways. One, just in absolute terms, we've seen a positive trend and a new record high actually by the end of last year. Market conditions and general sentiment out there often impact survey responses. So in the context of the weaker Q4 in the property market through the U.K. budget hesitance, that's actually an excellent result.

And two, in relative terms, you can see a 1.7x differential between Rightmove and the main portal competitors. Now we ask for feedback at branch frontline, branch management level and company management levels, and we also go deep on several subcategories. You can see that we lead across subcategories across business results, value and inclusive services at the bottom of this chart. So we rate really well in what's a competitive market, yet we, of course, always look for opportunities to improve and for all partners. Part of the value and those strong scores come from our Building Success Together program, which we launched in early 2024. We invest resource in supporting our partners' business objectives.

We also help them to understand what happens in the market and where Rightmove can bring. And as noted top right, this comes in many forms and at true scale. Dedicated account management in the field, our Rightmove Plus and Rightmove Hub tools, which are both available to all partners regardless of package levels. We're sponsoring and collaborating with several leading industry organizations across the Estate Agency, New Homes and Rental operators. We continue to invest in and progress these 2. Rightmove Plus, as an example, is the business management tool for partners. Last year alone, had new features and enhancements introduced over 25x. And our partners' engagement value from Rightmove Plus is clear, 28 million sessions recorded in the year.

So in summary, we deliver Rightmove outcomes and value from a broad range of solutions, packages, products, data, insight, training, dedicated servicing through our account management and support teams and we measure these results.

Now let's move to the property end markets for a bit. Within sales, top left here, it was really a year or 2 halves. H1 was strong, building on 2024 and with successive Bank of England rate cuts. H2 was weaker year-on-year due to the fears around the late autumn budget. If you take them together, 2025 as a whole, so 10% more completions versus '24, and that was in line with long-term averages.

Looking at the year ahead, top right, there's been a clear post-budget bounce back in available stock, which is now at a 10-year high. This has caused slower price growth, which is, of course, supportive for buyers in the market. Now these elevated levels of resale stock is less helpful for New Homes developers. So on the bottom right here shows New Homes as a proportion of total for sale stock on our site. And with approved planning applications at an all-time low, we don't expect a material recovery of the development numbers in the market in H1 this year.

With the rentals, bottom left, increased supply and reduced demand continues to improve the more extreme imbalance seen in previous years and which we have talked about. So the 2025 average of 10 inquires per available property is still above the pre-COVID average of 6 to 7 though. And of course, all these segments, of course, mortgage rates is a key driver, and it continues on a steady downward trajectory. At the 31st of January, the average 5-year fixed rate was 4.35%, that's 55 bps lower than a year earlier, and that's per Rightmove's daily mortgage tracker.

So with that, let me pass over to Rory for more detail on our financials.

Thank you, Johan. Good morning, everyone. I'm delighted to present our financial results for 2025. Overall revenue grew 9% compared to 2024 with strong growth across the business. Starting with Agency, Row 1 in the table, revenues increased by 9% to GBP 305 million. If you look at the chart on the right, the light blue bars showed that this growth was driven primarily by ARPA-led games, which continue to be mainly discretionary. An additional contribution of GBP 6 million came from increased Agency membership numbers.

And moving down the table to New Homes, revenues here also rose 9% to GBP 75 million. This was in spite of continued headwinds in the New Homes end market with new builds coming to the market remaining subdued. You can see the impact of this in the chart with the dark green showing revenue growth contribution of less than GBP 1 million from higher average membership increasing by 1%. The ARPA growth contribution remained strong, contributing GBP 5 million. At the bottom of the table, our strategic growth areas delivered another strong performance. Revenue increased by GBP 5.7 million, up 25% to GBP 29.1 million.

Commercial revenues grew 13% to GBP 15.3 million as we continue to focus on customer acquisition with membership increasing 29% year-on-year. Mortgages revenue was up almost 50% to GBP 6.8 million. This was weighted towards the first half of the year, mainly reflecting the timing of interest rate changes and hesitancy in the property market around the budget, impacting activity in H2. Rental Services made up of our Lead to Keys product, referencing ancillary services, saw revenues up 35%, driven by strong growth across the Lead to Keys product.

For completeness, the non-SG&A parts of other revenues being data services, overseas and third-party advertising grew 2% year-on-year. Revenues outside the core represented 11% of group revenue, up from 10% last year. Compared to December 2024 across Agency and New Homes, membership increased by 225, up 1% to 19,272. This increase was due to growth in Agency membership, which increased by 261, up 2% on December 2024. This was due to high Agency retention of 90%, continued growth in Agent formation as well as current partners opening new branches.

Within New Homes, we saw a year-on-year decline of 36 developments, down 1% at year-end. You can see in the bottom right chart, a decrease of traditional developments in orange of 113, offset by an increase in housing associations in teal of 77. New developments coming on site remain low. We are not seeing a pickup in build rates and have seen traditional developments fall to their lowest level since January 2018. We do not see this changing in H1, but continue to be optimistic that developers will be encouraged to build more by H2 and in future years.

Overall ARPA increased by GBP 97 to GBP 1,621. 60% of ARPA growth was product-led with similar percentage in both Agency and New Homes as our partners chose to upgrade or purchase incremental product. The remaining 40% of ARPA growth came from contract renewals, which all proceeded as expected. Given partner engagement with our strong suite of value-adding products, we expect a similar split this year.

In terms of product ARPA growth, we saw upgrades in Agency come from multiple sources, ranging from upgrades through the package ladder from lower threshold packages to new joiners joining straight into the top package. You can see this in the pie chart for Optimiser Edge joiners in the middle of this slide. The migration of the old top package, Optimiser 2020, has gone well and will be fully retired by H1. Joiners in New Homes to the advanced package, shown top right, similarly came from upgrades and new joiners. We had a new top package, Ascend, launched in May with 818, 28% of developments live at the end of the year.

We expect a similar split of upgrades going straight into this top package, but flagged that the advanced package remains highly attractive, especially for smaller developers. So expect to still see good inbound into advance next year. Taking these 2 pie charts together, you can see that key for both New Homes and Agency is that we do not rely on a single source of joiners to the top package and expect penetration to continue to increase in both.

The other driver of ARPA growth comes from incremental product purchase. You can see from the charts at the bottom for both Estate Agency and New Homes. ARPA increases at the initial upgrade in month 1. This is the column marked upgrade. Then we see ARPA increase across the first year and the second year. In both Estate Agency and New Homes, you can see that ARPA keeps growing far past the initial upgrade. This happens as partners choose to purchase more of the same products or add additional products to their package mix. We have shown the previous top package in Agency Optimiser 2020 and in New Homes Advance to illustrate how we have seen this before. And that the initial months of the new top packages in both Agency and New Homes are performing as we expect and have seen previously. We know that continuing to provide great value and superior outcomes to our partners through continually evolving and new products sees them choose to engage further.

Also, at the end of last year, we added online agent valuation exclusive to optimize our Edge partners and with an average price of GBP 170, providing both another reason to upgrade to the top package and also encouraging existing partners to increase their current product spend.

Moving on to costs. Underlying operating costs increased by GBP 11 million year-on-year, resulting in a 70% underlying margin as we invested with discipline and within our cost framework. The main driver of costs remains our investment in people, up GBP 4.6 million or 7%. The other main cost component was our continued investment across technology with an increase of GBP 4 million. In the year, there was GBP 9 million of internal labor capitalization with total CapEx at GBP 10 million. As guided in November, we expect to see an increase in labor capitalization in 2026 with total CapEx to be around GBP 16 million, less than 4% of revenue.

In 2026, we will see investment as outlined last November, which will mainly be in people. We anticipate over 100 joining before the end of the year in roles across data, product and engineering. A few of these roles will be through our new flexible resource provider, which will provide us with the flexibility of headcount over the investment phase. Other material increase in cost will be the AI-powered operations area with work on the back office initial phase already commencing. All in, post capitalization, this incremental investment is expected to total around GBP 12 million in 2026 as guided in November.

We remain highly cash generative with a cash conversion ratio of 107% of operating profit. As we continue to grow the strong cash generation of our business, this leaves us well placed to return surplus cash to shareholders. This year, a total of GBP 220 million was returned to shareholders, GBP 141 million via share buybacks and GBP 79 million via dividends, an increase of 21% year-on-year. We reduced our share count by 2%, meaning over 40% of issued shares have now been repurchased and returned 6% of our year-end market capitalization in the year.

This morning, we announced a final dividend of 6.59p, bringing the total dividend to 10.64p. There will also be a share buyback program of GBP 90 million until the 31st of July. This will be funded by the growth in earnings, but also reducing cash reserves from December's GBP 43 million to around GBP 20 million by half year, which we see as sufficient to manage the working capital of the business going forward. Our capital allocation policy remains prioritize investment in the business, evaluate value-accretive M&A and return all surplus cash to shareholders via a progressive dividend linked to earnings and buyback thereafter.

Turning to financial guidance. This remains the same as set out in November. Looking at the right hand of this slide, revenue growth in 2026 will be between 8% and 10%. We expect H1 growth to be lower than the full year 2026 growth with a higher growth percentage in H2. This is due to the high comparator in H1 last year, particularly in Mortgages, which saw significant activity in H1 2025 due to the stamp duty changes and falling interest rates. And in New Homes due to the full year impact of 36 developments, fewer developments, contributing a negative revenue comparator of around GBP 1.5 million.

For Core, we anticipate that membership will grow around 1% and we lifted ARPA growth to between GBP 110 to GBP 120. At an overall level, for the SGAs, we anticipate growth to be around 20% to 30% range. Underlying operating profit will grow by 3% to 5%, resulting in an underlying operating margin no lower than 67%. With no change to our longer-term target set out in November, we anticipate underlying operating profit growth in later years to be at similar levels to revenue growth as we still see no reason for a margin lower than 67%.

That concludes the financials. I'll now hand you back to Johan.

All right. Thank you, Rory. So our investment case outlined here will be familiar to most and this summarizes our approach to value creation at Rightmove. On the left, Rightmove has exceptionally strong foundations. We have established a differentiated leading platform at the heart of the U.K.'s large and structurally growing property market. The platform is digital, low-cost, capital-light, driving higher returns on capital. The subscription-based B2B model has a proven ability to deliver and generate value in all market conditions.

Moving to the middle of the diagram. We're using powerful data and profound network effects to deliver that value to all stakeholders. And with it, we're executing an expanded growth strategy with targeted investment and delivering data and AI-backed product innovation and that is done through a high-caliber and very energized team. We're entering now our 27th year with confidence to deliver a larger, diversified, yet very connected Rightmove platform. All said, this will continue to deliver compelling financial outcomes.

Now our strategy is to develop the leading digital ecosystem for the whole moving experience, powered by exceptional data and network effects. And our people, data and platform really are the foundations and strong differentiators for the 3 business pillars of Core Partner, Consumer and New Growth.

The property market is a huge economic activity, and we think there's a long runway to deliver more digital value and grow our business. And that, of course, includes the use of AI. Now there's been a lot of debate who the winners and losers might be, both for classifieds and more recently across a range of industries, really. So I want to talk to property classified specifically. In my view, there are really 4 components you need to win to compete effectively also in an AI world, consumers, partners, data and AI capability. We're really well positioned across all of these. We were well positioned before gen AI, and we will be with the next generations of AI as well.

And here's why. We're a technology company. We built up market leadership through deep knowledge, digital leadership and deep layers of servicing our industry in the first 3 of these 4 components and that's been done over 25 years and at an increasing pace. We keep doing that day in, day out, improving all the time. The numbers are leading and they're deep. Now the most recent components of these 4 is, of course, AI capability. AI models and tools, they're fast developing, it's dynamic and they're not fully defined yet. Here's the thing, though. Anybody can get a hold of AI capability. It's an enabling technology that you can buy, skills you can hire and that you can learn to operate. We've done exactly that and for several years already.

So what Rightmove has? It's a very, very solid performance and performance platform and business model. It's creating the fundamental attributes that are mentioned here, important to any business success. And in turn, they all boil down to 2 things, which, again, deliver true business results and sustained leadership, trust and vertical innovation.

Now we obviously thought a lot about this. In our view, in the case of property classifieds is that LLMs or start-ups running on LLMs are missing or are quite far away on 3 of these 4 components that matters so much in this particular vertical. ChatGPT has been around now for 3 years, yet referral traffic to us is still under 0.5%. And actually, their U.K. app downloads and traffic has leveled off in the last 5 or so months. But more so, I don't think they or other horizontal LLMs can or want to service our vertical as deeply and focused as we and others do, nor to innovate as relentlessly and deep in the specialty of it. Now I'll be very open-eyed and give the large LLMs the upper hand of AI capability and AI innovation overall. But remember, again, they actually enable and sell that capability to buyers like ourselves.

So as we add this AI capability to Rightmove, we combine it with the first 3 components that we already have and that are so strong. We're in the best place of anybody to innovate and service this vertical in new and even better ways. I'm actually going to go and cover these 4 components in a bit more detail because it's so important and so topical.

Let's start with consumer and partner. You're familiar with network effects and how they're part of a great business like Rightmove and how we invest in them. But I think it's very important to understand that in case of home exchanges, there are 3 special aspects of these network effects, which make them even stronger for property classifieds and certainly in the U.K.

So first, in the middle, property transactions, they're high value, highly personal, take a particularly long time in this country and they're very often done in joint deliberation with another person. There's also an incredible amount of browsing done on properties because of 2 things: homes, they're fun to dream of or to be inspired by; and also becomes -- because finding the right one and really deciding when it's time to move is such a serious and important life decision that comes at a high price. So the habit loops are therefore massive. This is very different from a number of B2C categories like e-commerce or research of different kinds, where AI or agents can provide an alternative and shortcut path.

And secondly, to the left here, the same consumer actually plays multiple roles, to consider the 4 key roles who use Rightmove and their multiple use. Very often, a buyer is also a seller, and the seller is also a buyer. In the same chain of events or at different points in life. There are 2.5 million private landlords in the U.K. renting to tenants. And those landlords, of course, themselves live and move.

There are parents who help their kids with a rental or a first-time purchase, while they themselves might be downsizing or buying a second home. So here's the point. The individual gets value from the same property platform for many different needs. They've seen it in the past. They know what the quality is and they are being in different roles. So the platform is trusted. It's specialized. It has all these different audience roles. So in a way, this forms like a consumer side, individualized network effect in itself, not just across to the other side of the platform. And again, that's very different to, for example, e-commerce and other verticals where the consumer might only be a buyer.

And thirdly, of course, in the U.K. property vertical, there's a diverse nature of our partner base, the Estate Agents, New Homes developments, developers, rental operators, commercial and smaller niches. And even in a single branch, an Estate Agency, you can have sales, lettings, commercial, potential financial services, a business owner and branch staff. The U.K. partner is very fragmented and with low barriers to entry. There are many, many different roles that benefit from being on the platform. Agents are local property experts and they can access a highly effective audience platform and with a lot of services included to power their business goals. So in our view, when you combine these 3 points, property complexity, consumer multiuse and agent diversity, you realize that the trusted and vertically specialized UX of the portal will not be replaced by generic or horizontal AI interfaces.

Now let's talk about the fourth component, AI capability. We've been building a great tech and data AI capability for a few years now as we reported on several times since 2023. And the simplified, and I know it's simplified tech stack view on the left here, outlines how our Core platform is built on Google Cloud with logically connected enterprise tools like Big Query, Looker, Model Armor, Vertex AI and so forth and is running AI models from Google, like Gemini, Nano Banana and so forth. Now we have a close strategic and product team collaboration also with Google. And we are actually working together, and we have a good view on what's coming in the future.

Now we have orchestrated the platform, the stack, the pipelines to nevertheless be flexible, performant and trustworthy. So we have relationships with and we also use Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic and a host of smaller solutions. Some of those smaller ones are pure-play AI, some of the more AI-enabled existing software. Our data science team, they can build and connect proprietary Rightmove data models or external models or a combination of them. In November, we showed you one example of the proprietary model and how it uplifts the results, something that is only possible for us because we're in the stack.

At the end, the stack enables us to deliver more value and differentiated outcomes for partners and consumers and, of course, gain operational leverage and productivity for ourselves. The 31 strategic initiatives plus a whole host of many more AI tests across the business today will soon be less of a number counting exercise and rather it's going to be completely infused in an organic way of operating. We're perfectly set up to leverage AI capabilities.

Now I'll come back to very crucial component, data. We estimate that over 90% of our data is proprietary. It's also interconnected and we leverage it with human expertise and usage in mind. This data is not available anywhere else and it keeps compounding inside our ecosystem. We've shown you many examples of large data sets in the past. Here, just outlining a few examples, but to illustrate how unique and valuable this data is. For property, as an example, we have over 28 million unique properties on our Rightmove optimized UPRN address framework. And someone might say, "Well, that's all scrabble, isn't it?" Fact is that over 50% of the metadata underpinning a Rightmove listing is not scrapable from the face of our site.

And for partners, we have, for example, built 57,000 defined geographic agent patches. We dynamically optimize them with our data and also with input and tailoring from our partner agents. That drive unique insights, products and great outcomes. For consumers, for example, again, the 69 billion first-party signals, they don't only provide that strong habit loop that I mentioned before, but they, of course, convert to outcomes through moving auction strength of buyers and sellers. Again, they also drive unique products, insights and recommendations and provide fodder for what we develop next. And the real magic and protection is how those and many more data points are interconnected in the platform. There are a few more examples in the middle, the data compounds and the fortifies.

And finally, in the third column, but not to be forgotten, we overlay our human expertise to enrich this data being completely vertically focused. We also make sure it delivers real outcomes and value for humans that is using the data. All said, we hold the living map of U.K. property moving. The value is not in AI itself. It's what AI can deliver when it sits on the best property data in the U.K.

So to sum it all up, we combine these 4 components. What we have is one connected ecosystem already powered by data and it's enhanced by AI. All right. So over to some of the concrete product delivery that drove the 2025 results and a bit of a glimpse towards '26 and onwards as well.

We increased the pace of delivery in '25 with only a few of the features illustrated here. And I'm going to talk to the renters checklist on the left. It's an important example because it's part of our rental market solutions to digitally enable more of the moving journey. We've seen some strong growth metrics in 2025. A few of them are noted here. And with this renters checklist for consumers, we put all the tenancy admin in one place on My Rightmove, seamlessly integrating it with things like open banking and verifications and what to do next.

The average user revisited their checklist 8 times. The information is stored in their Rightmove account, so it can be reused. That, of course, builds a lifetime value opportunity for us. And like many other products, this product also helps the other side of the platform, in this case, lettings agencies. They benefit from operational efficiency through the enhanced leads and seamlessly have those in their CRM. Now they can also operate the entire flow digitally in the Rightmove Plus environment from referencing deposits and many more things, all the way to contracts.

A quick step back to the outline from November of how we're accelerating the consumer demand going forward. Number one is that we are adding and enhancing ways of searching. Number two is that we're accelerating our services in a consumer home-moving journey, what we call Beyond Find (sic) [ Go beyond Find ]. And here, I've got 2 examples of what we're working on. The Move Journey Assistant set up for sales and the expansion of My Rightmove into My Home, a full-service hub for homeowners. Now across the consumer domain, we have around 25 key releases or so planned for 2026. And for context, that's more than the entire platform consumer and partner sites together delivered in 2023.

Now I want to expand a bit on conversational search, no surprise, which we launched only a few weeks ago to a limited amount of traffic. So here's just a demo of what it looks like. I'm going to talk over while you follow this. So this experience and features built through our partnership with Google Cloud it's using Gemini models. It's trained on and interrogates our listings, text and images and we use over 1 billion proprietary image database and many attributes that goes into the listings.

As of today, it links straight into listings on the main site. And we'll evolve this tool led by the data that we see and our design expertise and we're going to make sure that we deliver a high-quality experience. Data so far from thousands of conversations tells us that users seem to have a pretty good idea of what they're looking for. They continue to explore and engage with tools in the main flow of listings and on the site. And so far, those who engage with conversational search are almost 3x more likely to send a lead versus the control group. Overall, feedback has been very positive.

Now I want to consider a little bit the conversational assistance in searching a bit more strategically. Now first, on the left here, this is really, in many ways, it's just a continuum of changes. However, you discover, we have you covered, right? So we're entering another search modality or paradigm for consumers, and our position is the same as it has been with previous changes. Discovery is key, right? The classic behavior of visual scrolling and comparing properties, I believe, will always be there. But longer term, I also think this holds a real amplification opportunity for Rightmove. Conversational search will enable hyper-personalization and new utility for consumers on our platform that I couldn't get before.

So AI assistance will be useful up and down the funnel and seamlessly provide complementary information along a complex moving journey on the platform. This will drive 2 things: higher platform engagement; and substantially more intent and behavioral data signals. And we can convert that data signal to increased value and targeting for Core partners and for diversified revenue opportunities, just like we have done in the past.

Now we have already started a few years back to build many more of these consumer features with exactly that in mind. And you can see some of this in the graph and in the table metrics here. Impressive growth, and a lot of that comes from well-defined features and, of course, the scale of the audience and traffic that we can apply them to. Every feature we built is research and data-backed. It brings utility, frequency and data to us on an ongoing basis. And with it, as noted right here, we create enhanced partner value and, of course, revenue opportunity for Rightmove. Some of these improve or enable new products for Core partners. For example, the enhanced lease to lettings agents with the appointment bookings with the New Homes Ascend package. Others are monetized separate through commercial relationships that we have, like, for example, mortgages or ancillary lettings products. And here's the thing, as we scale and compound this data, we just increased the revenue and profit opportunities.

Now over to the partner side. We released significantly more product and optimization source of partners in '25. A few key ones are set out in this slide. And I want to highlight online agent valuation on the left, as Rory mentioned before. It's soft launched in the fall and it's off to a great start. This tool works on both sides of the platform. It enables consumers to receive a digital valuation estimate from an Estate Agency with a quick turnaround and it's an opportunity for agents to start a new online relationship with a potential vendor through our platform.

It leverages and reinforces our existing valuation domain on various tools, slotting in very logically with instant valuation, local valuation alerts, best price and premium price guides and so forth. And agents, in this case, can also choose to use an AI tool to support the responses in OAV. And for those that do, we have seen so far in the data that the response times are 16% faster on average, and the cohort actually books 20% more visits. So OAV, I think, is a good example of where AI is an enhancer of an already great digital product with real value. But AI is not the entire product itself.

Finally, with OAV, Rightmove's platform also gets more data signals through up-to-date photos and property attributes supplied by the consumer. And this is before the property becomes a listing gets put on the market. That, of course, can feed into our AVM, which is a business line on its own and also powers many other things internally that we can build on for the future. Both '25 and '26 show how we are developing across several product lines and segments much more in parallel than in the past. And with AI bringing more efficiency and marketing opportunity to partners.

Moving on from Core to the strategic growth areas. These grew, as you heard from Rory, by 25% as a group and that's close to 3x the Core growth rate. Operationally, we've taken some great strides forward in the year. For commercial, we added 275 new members to the platform. This year, we will launch our new search pages. And at that point, every aspect of the user web journey will have been completely overhauled to commercial-first experience. We'll also be launching our first chargeable product in the segment during the year.

In Rental Services, revenues grew by 35%. And as we set out in November, we started to roll out the upfront modules of inquiry manager and enhanced leads to dual agents within their Core subscription. It's a process that is ongoing over '26. This is an exciting market penetration step-up. It brings efficiency to agents, to landlords and to tenant applicants and it's a true market scale.

And in Mortgages, we saw strong growth overall. You will have seen that we announced a new exciting partnership with NatWest, the U.K.'s leading digital mortgage lender, which will be introduced in April across both sites and our apps, and we'll also continue to build out the broker opportunities over the course of this year. And finally, again, and importantly, a reminder, the SGAs all strategically reinforced the Core platform, drives user utility and frequency, and again, thus the great data sets that we have.

Now this slide is a reminder of the 3 focus areas that we described in November. We are positively stepping up the pace with an eye to the medium-term opportunity of a more diversified and technically advanced platform. We're driving towards that larger digital opportunity in the U.K. property ecosystem. Now also as a reminder, we set some really ambitious midterm target KPIs for these initiatives. And I'm glad to report that all of this is mobilized in one way or another and the capabilities will be built and realized throughout 2026.

We're going to see results along the way. One example, of course, being the successful launch of conversational search already in the very beginning of the year. So we'll come back to these areas and the KPIs over time. And I hope you can see that we drive this business with discipline, high quality and our goal is to deliver strong value and returns.

So in conclusion, here are the key takeaways I showed you at the start of the presentation, and I want to repeat them. We're happy with the strong results in '25. It was a record year for innovation for Rightmove. We look forward to an exciting 2026. And as you can see in the graph, we're stepping up our innovation and delivery considerably yet again. We will grow revenue and profit in line with guidance, adding to strong financial returns in both the short and medium term.

And with that, we're going to go to Q&A.

So Rory is going to join me up here. Please raise your hands. Yes, some already did. Say your name when you're passed a microphone and let's aim for 2 questions in the first instance. We can double back if it's fine.

Jessica Pok from Peel Hunt. I've 2 questions, please. The first one, just on the ARPA guide, Rory, GBP 110 to GBP 120. Can you give us an idea of how we should think about that Agent versus New Homes given the trends that we've seen last year?

And then the second one, maybe on Mortgages. The new relationship with NatWest, any color on what triggered the change and what we can expect from that relationship in the near term?

So on ARPA guidance, GBP 110 to GBP 120 is the blended ARPA guidance. Expect Estate Agency to be towards the bottom end of that and New Homes well above the blended rate. I would flag that in both EA and New Homes, we expect their ARPA growth to be higher than they saw in 2025.

All right. And on NatWest, yes, we're very excited about entering a new partnership here. We've had a great partnership with our other partner for the last couple of years. NatWest is really the #1 mortgage lender in digital channels. So that tells you, I think, something about the vision alignment that we have. We continue to work deeply with one partner because we're quite keen to both build the business, of course, give more -- consumers more utility on the platform, but really also try to innovate along the way in this industry, which is still very fragmented and analogous and off-line and so forth. So those are really the few simple reasons behind it.

It's Will Packer from BNP Paribas. A couple of questions. Firstly, could we talk a little bit about agent relations? So from today's update, the survey data looks very encouraging, although I know we didn't see the absolute numbers, but that would be interesting. Retention is at record levels. You've got new agent additions. But then in contrast, if you read the trade press, it all sounds a bit grim. You've got the court case coming. And I think there's a perception that your relations with your customers are more adversarial versus some of your peers globally. How do we square that circle? Is it -- there's a few loud adversarial agents, but the median agent is getting happier. Can you just give us a bit of color there?

And then secondly, your framing around the labor intensity of Rightmove is a little bit different to some of your peers within classifieds and other platform businesses. You're growing headcount aggressively. It sounds like that's going to continue for a little while. Could you frame that for us? Is that catch-up investment because the previous management team didn't hire enough people? When can we see the labor force to stabilize? Any color there would be useful.

I'll take. You can jump in. Look, the first one, you mentioned some of those KPIs, which I think stand out, right? High -- second highest retention in a decade, highest take-up of our new product, OAV. We had record uptake of Optimiser Edge. That shows customers are engaging with our products and really happy with the outcomes. That, for us, is a real sign of strength in terms of relationship we have with customers, of which over 80% are now with us for 5 years. They know us well. They know our products well and we work with them to grow their businesses. You're always going to have a small minority, might be louder than the majority, but I would say that those KPIs, what we look at to show the strength of our products and the value that we provide our customers. We also, as we showed today, do monitor sentiment and we're delighted to see that sentiment not only much higher than competitors, but growing.

So we don't rest on our laurels. We take it very seriously, and we keep our finger to the pulse in terms of how agents are feeling. And we support them as the property market ebbs and flows. And ultimately, for us, key coming back to providing those great products, and I think that take-up really shows it.

In terms of the labor intensity, yes, we're adding over 100 and those 100 people are going to be building some fantastic products and fantastic assets. They're going to make Rightmove stronger and on our path to higher growth. That, for us, is a short-term investment. It's going to allow us to build many of the things that will enable us across the domains that Johan talked about. And we've provided a flexible resourcing partner as well to help us accelerate or pull back in that recruitment as we see fit. For us, this is about driving higher profit growth. And this is about us building things that we're really excited about that we see great ROIs from and that requires some head count in the short term. But what you will see and what we look forward to bringing to you on a regular cadence is some of the really exciting products that they're going to build.

Will Larwood from Berenberg. Firstly, just obviously integrating a lot more AI functionality going forward, consumer with like conversational search, et cetera. How can we expect sort of the cost profile of the business to shift particularly thinking about sort of using more compute going forward?

And then secondly, you mentioned it very briefly in terms of the mortgage broker side of things, but if you could provide an update on that, that would be great.

Yes. Yes, I'll start with AI. So look, we obviously anticipate and budget for compute cost that didn't exist in the past because of this. But I think there are a couple of important things to remember, a, again, back to that slide of how we set things up. We set it up in a very organized, very orchestrated away, and we have fantastic control over this just like we have on other costs. Here's the thing. It's a cost to deliver opportunity, right? And if you look at token cost overall, I mean, they keep coming down by 80%, 90% on an annual basis across the world, right, both because models become more efficient themselves and because there's a lot of competition out there. So it's an item to keep track of, but it's not something that concerns us particularly, right?

Yes. So Mortgages, I'll go to that one as well. So we are -- I think we talked a little bit about this before. So we have brokers on the platform, but it's a small part of what we do today. A lot of attention has been on the MIP product, building awareness with consumers seeing what that does and obviously deliver great results. What we did last year was prepared a little bit more to be able to scale the broker side of the business as opposed to one-to-one relationships with brokers because there's literally 5,000 of them in the U.K. And it's also really about looking at this as -- I think of this as an inevitable trajectory kind of thing. Because of who we are, the interest in properties, the fact that 2/3 of properties needs to be financed, us having some kind of service in this space makes sense and that's evidenced already.

But it's a long-term thing to build. There's still awareness. They're still optimizing it. There's still -- we're still, but what we're trying to do again is build a better experience and an experience that doesn't exist anywhere else. That takes some optimization. It's 2% of our revenue today. We're happy with the growth, but there's going to be a test and learning as we go along with it and we're executing on it really well. So over time, there will be broker options as well. And it's about understanding the consumer. And again, because of all the consumers that we have, what's their mindset, right? Are they close to transaction or they're really out shopping and still want to get an affordability check.

So segmenting that and dissecting and making very logical for them and, therefore, funnel them to different opportunities for financing is important. And that doesn't come just from saying we do one thing on the website, right? But again, fantastic opportunity going forward and lots of money in this space, and I think we have a real right to play.

Andrew Ross from Barclays. I've got 2 on AI. First one is about the conversational search you've rolled out on platform. What are you observing in terms of the conversion rate from search into leads or any kind of outcome-based metric that you track from and kind of what impact is it having on clicks on to featured and promoted listings as part of it? That's the first question.

And then the second one is you guys have obviously applied to put an app into ChatGPT. Can you just give us some context as to what the thought process was as to why do that? On the one hand, you're kind of feeding the beast. On the other hand, first-mover advantage is where the users are. What were the kind of puts and takes? How are you thinking about it?

Yes. And so when it comes to conversational, again, I outlined a few stats, right? We -- because of our traffic and in spite of having it on a minority of that traffic already, we've seen thousands of conversations, lots of messages, very good flow-through in terms of people getting the results that they wanted and also, as expected, coming back over to the main site and digging around and using different tools and so forth. We have seen that uptick of about 3x the sort of lead sending propensity. But to be honest, is that cause a correlation?

It could be the most qualified users that have been on Rightmove before and so forth. Or is it a novel way and, therefore, they become interested? I think it's too early to say. And anyone who talks about these data points, I think it's important to give that kind of context. Now again, I point back to this as an opportunity, right? The fact that how consumers experience the site and the listings and what they do with it? First of all, this is a first version of integration. And how partners show up in that? That will, of course, evolve over time, right? It depends on how much of a traction this will see from consumers, small minority or complement to -- for a lot of people to what they do, it's just simply too early to tell.

But again, the opportunity, if you think about it, it's a much more personalized and engaged consumer in different ways doing this. And that further qualification of someone's behavior has value. So the fact that there's potentially new or, for sure, different commercial opportunity around this is also there and that goes through our heads, right? But it's early days.

And the second one on ChatGPT, yes, I think you maybe outlined it well, puts and takes, consideration. Look, today, they're just -- they're meaningless in terms of a feed or a platform for people actually looking for and going after homes. So as we said, with those stats, right? And I think most of the peers report the same numbers, very, very small. But look, it is a tool that lots of people use for different things. So for us, this is a test-and-learn, right? We want to be where some consumers are and see what we can learn from that.

And very importantly, of course, it's an app that we created. It basically displays listings and consumers then go back and do much more of the experience where they have all that experience and again, all the data and tools in their own history and so forth on Rightmove and that's what we expect going forward as well.

And you keep all the data, right?

Yes.

Joe Barnet-Lamb from UBS. Two for me. First one, a technical modeling one, but I think it's important for the interpretation of ARPA guidance. So historically, forecasting agency was simple as ARPA times by the average membership. But we now have a growing proportion of non-ARPA revenue within Agency. So can you just clarify which revenue streams within Agency are non-ARPA? How big they were in '25 and how you expect that to change into '26?

Then the second question is just on buybacks. We see you're effectively restarting and spending excess capital generation beyond dividends and spending half of the GBP 40 million that you've accrued, whilst you weren't buying back. Can you just give a bit of color on why you aren't spending all of the excess cash to get you back down to 0? And a sort of general commentary on sort of the merits of running a net cash balance sheet given where your share price is?

Sure. Two for me. Yes, you're right. ARPA used to be much easier. You took kind of customer numbers, multiplied by ARPA and you got roughly our revenue number. There is a non-ARPA element, which is because we don't count agent accelerator in our ARPA calculation because it's a program rather than a package and also insurance revenue in the rental services part of the business because that's insurance to consumers and landlords. So therefore, it's not counted under the average ARPA. Those 2 together, used to be almost 0 a few years ago. Great to see them grow, and they're around about GBP 3 million. So that's what you should add on once you take your average ARPA times by your customer numbers.

In terms of the share buybacks, great, we -- first thing to flag, we return all of our surplus cash to shareholders, and we don't see that changing. We've reduced our cash reserves from GBP 40 million to GBP 20 million, which we think is sufficient to run the business from a working capital perspective going forward. For those that have been with Rightmove for a long time, GBP 20 million was always the number that we used to have and feel very comfortable that, that's a manageable cash reserves for our working cap. So flag that.

In terms of looking at debt for share buybacks, I think is what you're asking, we're not philosophical about no debt on the balance sheet. At the same time, we see there's many pros and cons of having no debt on the balance sheet. It's something that we continually evaluate and discuss with our advisers and with the Board. At the moment, we don't have plans to leverage up. But I would say, as always, nothing is off the table, and we'll continue to evaluate all of our options.

Just one follow-up maybe on Agent Accelerator -- on Agent Accelerator, obviously, with what we're seeing with new agent formation, is it fair to assume that the Agent Accelerator will grow faster in '26 than the average of Agency?

It's Agent Accelerator, low ARPA. So don't get too carried away. Great to see the agent formation come back. I wouldn't expect to see that continually rising given its record levels. So I'd just be cautious about that, but great to see that market open up.

Marcus Diebel with JPMorgan. Johan, just one question again on investments. And clearly, we've seen '26 is going to be a peak year. Again, we're going to guide for like 3% to 5% operating profit growth. Given where the shares are and you're prioritizing, obviously, buybacks and those things, I mean, how critical is it really for you that '26 is really sort of a one-off in terms of operating profit growth and things bounce back relatively quickly, i.e., do you feel that some investments that you clearly had in mind are now a bit more put on hold longer term? Is that the case? Just a question for what is the mood? How critical is to see a meaningful margin bounce already in '27?

And then the second question, just in general, because you touched on this value-accretive M&A. Are we then talking about sort of like investments in tech? Do you feel there are some tech assets out there that you should get to? Any comments would be interesting because it feels there won't be much. I just want to be really clear on this.

Yes, I'll have a go. Maybe, Rory, you can fill in. But look, we -- when it comes to the investments, right, as we outlined, and I say it again, we have a great foundation, a great tech platform. We're doing this because we think there's more opportunity in this market. We look at the U.K. property market, our position and what we can do together with others over the medium term. we want to step up that pace. That's what we're doing.

And in terms of how that's shaped, we've guided to '26 and what that means on both revenue growth and operating profit growth. And we're not going down, as we said before, to be specific year-by-year. But of course, you can assume that the profit growth will start aligning more to the revenue top line in the years following, right? So that's kind of all we can say. And as usual, you look at the business and you look at the opportunities or sometimes challenges ahead and you adjust after that. But we're very happy with what we're doing right now and off to a great start with it.

Secondly, on M&A and maybe value -- well, value creation and what kind of companies. Yes, I mean, look, there's always been a plethora of proptechs in the start-up space. And now many of them come with AI after them. So I can tell you in some conversations we've had with agents directly, some of them, of course, use AI already. It's like, "Hey, here's a quicker way to do admin or whatever it is." They're start seeing some of the AI-enabled products that we actually equipped them with, and they're also inundated, right? They get so many pitches from that dot AI and the other dot AI on an ongoing basis. So it's a little bit confusing.

And as usual, there's a lot of promise. Again, as I said before, I mean, AI is one thing, right? You got to -- you actually got to build it on something. And it's a filter and automation tool, right? But it certainly doesn't provide the whole experience. So that doesn't mean that there aren't interesting companies, and we keep a good eye on them. We have conversations with several of them. But for now, our organic growth path and with the capability we have is clearly how we operate mainly.

Maybe in this context, it's actually quite interesting. I mean, yes, we see a lot of start-ups approaching agents, very early, very small niche. But do you feel that the large players, the open AIs of the world also go directly to agents and asking them to upload and work closer together. Is there anything that you see you or hear?

Nothing, I would say, particularly on, let's say, the big LLMs from an enterprise perspective. And first of all, because our 16,000 memberships typically consist of very small, medium-sized businesses. But the fact, again, that many of them are interested in using tools, right, whether that's a free user or paying GBP 20 a month. And some of them are, of course, more advanced in trying to figure out what's happening either on their own or again, sold by someone else. But I don't think that's a particular thing that we see, no.

Annick Mass from Bernstein. The first one is on ChatGPT, again. So can you tell us a bit more about how the user data is shared in between ChatGPT and youself? At what point do you get access to the user and actually can follow them around and actually can collect the data exclusively?

And the second one is on Opti Edge. When agencies don't decide to upgrade, generally, why is that? Do they keep the money and they don't invest? Do they go for something else? Can you just tell us a bit through the challenges that you hear when you're meeting with agencies?

I'll take one. You can take two. Yes, so on ChatGPT, again, what we built is an app and it has an end point and it sits within -- or will sit within the ChatGPT environment, right? And what the consumer will experience is to be able to do conversations that -- and answers will come partly from ChatGPT. And in the case of serving up property listings that are relevant, that will come from us. And what I think others have reported and what you can expect, it's a fairly simple outline, right? Yes, it's possible to find our brand there. You can find it today, but now we can find it in a slightly more organized fashion. And consumers will be very encouraged and already know where to go and find the full experience. So that's kind of the outline right now. And that means that the really valuable aspects of data on how people navigate and what they've done before and what they want to do in the future will remain in the Rightmove platform.

And of course, remember, again, we're building a conversational interface on Rightmove, right? People already have that habit loop. It's like, "Hey, I can do all of this conversation, including complementary information on Rightmove." So yet another reason, I think, to not worry too much about some other alternative universe being built out. But again, interesting enough to test it. That's the way we view it.

On Optimiser Edge, we actually don't want all customers on Optimiser Edge. We cater packages for all different types of customers and different types of businesses. And we want them to have choice and Optimiser Edge doesn't see all customers. low stock, low value, depending on where you are in the country, depending on competitiveness, funding, lots of different reasons. The strength of our account management team is knowing what products work for which customers. And the way that they start the conversation isn't about which package to be on, but which packages or which products are going to help you grow the business. And depending on that product mix is what then will generate a recommendation of which package to be on.

And so for some, Essential is absolutely the right package to be on, and we don't expect them to move. Others, we'll see them move from Essential to Enhance to Opti and others will come straight in. And that was a little bit of what I wanted to show earlier was the variance of how we see the inbound into the Optimiser Edge package.

The other stat I would flag is that over 50% of our customers are choosing to purchase products above their committed levels. So again, they can engage and see value in our product without having to move up the package ladder. So for us, it's about coming back to offering a plethora of different products that suit whatever needs a business has, but also fit whatever the property market is doing because the property market, as we all know, in the U.K. can change a lot. So we want products that suit them whatever is happening in the property market.

First question, Johan, I was really pleased to hear you describe ChatGPT is meaningless at the moment, given they're 0.5% of your referral traffic. First question from me, from both a technical and sort of market power point of view, if it came to it, would you have confidence in blocking LLMs, not just from scraping data for training, but also for the grounding process in search? And sort of what would be the puts and takes? And how would you look at that decision?

And then secondly, where you've rolled out market capabilities, for example, in conversational search? Are you finding that the major LLMs are good enough off the shelf? Or are they requiring quite a bit of fine-tuning customization to work with the data that you've got and Rightmove effectively, only Rightmove has?

Got it. Yes. So look, on the first one, technically, you can choose to be in an environment and you can choose not to be in an environment. And so I think that option is already there. Again, it's an interesting environment to test and learning, probably very small meaning at the moment. It might grow, and then it will be relevant to be there. So we'll see how that goes over time, simply. But the optionality is absolutely there.

I think on the conversational side that we've done ourselves. So again, we operated the current version with Gemini models from Google. And again, it has the benefit of -- it's all very tied up through our stack. But we have also built that capability to switch that out for literally any other large LLM. We have those relationships and conversations as well. So it's off the shelf in the sense that the general LLM is there. Now as you know, every week or 2 or whatever, there's another dot-something version coming out. And the 3 things that we optimize for is it's not just cost, right? Again, that's kind of a tailwind over time because it's going to continue to come down.

But it's cost, it's quality and it's performance, right? Quality is very important. And performance as in speed and response rates. And already today and even as a consumer, at least if you pay, right, you can see for yourself how the models act a little bit differently. And of course, we have a fantastic platform and capability in the teams to judge these older things, right? So we built this stack where we can plug and play on the side and then we decide what we take live. And we run concurrent what's called evaluation models. So models that evaluate the models on an ongoing basis. So it will continue to go along that way simply.

Then maybe the last point. Yes, of course, the generic LLM capability is one thing. The really interesting thing to create a fantastic experience and relevant experience for the consumers to combine it with the data that we have. And again, the more people actually use this and/or any other personalization features on our sites, the more tailor that experience can be. And a lot of that comes -- or the vast majority of that really comes from our own platform.

Giles Thorne from Jefferies. Back on Mortgages, please. The attributes, Johan, you used earlier to describe what pulled you towards NatWest, I'm pretty sure the things that were used to describe nationwide when the MIP product was first developed. So I'm still a little bit none-wiser as to what went wrong with the nationwide partnership and what NatWest now solves. So I wanted to push you on that a bit harder.

And then the second thing still on Mortgages is just to hear your latest thinking on how you solve for the problem of the broker product only appearing after a failed MIP, if that's even still the case? So an update there.

Okay. Thank you. So I'll leave you to judge your own wiseness, Giles. But we've -- as I said before, we've had a great relationship with Nationwide and what we are looking at now, where are we now, what are our own plans, what have we learned from all the data. And we have selected NatWest as our partner going forward for what we think are really good reasons.

And on the second question, yes, the broker path to a large extent has been -- because we have been focused so much on understanding the MIP path has been focused on, okay, who doesn't get a MIP for what reasons? And over time, of course, as I said before, we want to expand those choices for consumers through our segmentation, seeing what they do on the site and potentially what they are outright requesting. Some of that experimentation has been going on already, and that's going to continue in the future.

And just a follow-up. Where is the remortgaging product? I think that was due to be second half of '25 -- I forget the exact date, but I'm pretty sure we passed the original signal around when you're going to launch that.

No, it's launched. It's on the site. Again, it's not the main focus. Remember that we had a lot of first-time buyers, of course, on the site. And for lender partners, often, they want to try to get a hold of new customers. Now the remortgage product is absolutely there, has been there for a while. But it's sitting as we have said before, logically connected, so closer to the home valuation tools, for example, where people might be in that mode of, "Hey, I'm tracking the value of my property. That might be because I'm thinking about selling or I'm thinking about refinancing because I'm staying." So that's where that is. And again, over time, that's an opportunity to obviously build that out further, but it's going to come with -- in the right placements and as we see fit.

Great. Well, I think that's -- well, I'll squeeze you in, Andrew, last one.

So another on one AI and about kind of Agentic. And I appreciate there's a whole separate conversation about whether you'd actually want your personal agent to be searching for a house. But in a future world where that could be possible from a technology perspective, what's your view about whether you'd let agents be searching on your site, how you kind of set up the technology to do it? Do you let them call and do whatever they want on any sites? Do you make sure you have a commercial relationship where it has to be free your flow? Like how are you thinking about the Agentic journey?

Yes, a little bit, let's say, early, but clearly, the Agentic opportunity keeps growing. But again, I just -- what you said yourself, remember property, particularly. AI is a filter, an advanced form of a filter, humans make decisions, right? It goes for a lot of processes. So the level of filtering assistant, obviously taking out admin tasks and so forth, big opportunity in AI, but humans need to be in the loop still for a lot of things and even more so for other things, including this one.

So we'll see how that evolves over time. I really can't talk to the technology of it or who we might have a relationship with. There are interesting precedents on Amazon shutting down. I think it was Perplexity's Agentic rolling around. I don't know where that sits, right? But it's something that we'll deal with over time, just like we deal with other opportunities.

I would say thank you all for your good questions today, and I wish you the best of the day.

Thanks, everyone.

So good morning, and welcome to this investor update. I'm joined by Rory Hook, our CFO; and Tarah Lourens, COO. We look forward to taking you through this update on our business today.

First -- if the clicker is with me. Apologies for that. I'll try the other one. Can we get some help up there? All right. Became another 1.5 minutes before we get going. Presentation mode. It's important. We're good? Thank you.

All right. So let's start with this high-level view of our journey to date and where we're heading. For over 25 years now, Rightmove has been a leader in our core domain of Estate Agency and New Homes, combined with an exceptional reach and connection with the U.K. consumer. We're powered by exceptional network effects, delivering great value to both partners and consumers, and we have a compounding revenue line for Rightmove over time.

We do have and are generating still vast amounts of data, close to 3 petabytes to date, and that keeps growing. There have, of course, been some big technological shifts and enablers through this period, all of them adopted by Rightmove at some stage and turn into value, both externally and internally. In 2023, we outlined the opportunity to start expanding our role in the property ecosystem through the logically connected strategic growth areas. And at the same time, we accelerated our next-gen platform work to make it fully modern, faster and AI ready.

As of today, it's clear to us that both our platform and the fast-changing AI landscape in general are at a place where it makes sense to invest and accelerate. We want to proactively cater to the opportunities and the technological changes ongoing and coming. It's not with an eye to the next quarter. It's a train sight on the developments over the next 5 years. So from today, we will lean in and accelerate further, progressing strongly in our core engine and new growth areas, including the SGAs, and we will infuse AI into all we do. We continue to execute with discipline, high-quality approach and indeed, strong shareholder returns.

So with that lead in, just a quick orientation to the 5 sections to go through today: first, a recap and scoring of the business since 2023, what's changed and how we now look upon the future opportunity, the areas of focus and execution going into that future more specifically, the financial strong outcome and long-term benefits that we generate, and finally is going to be conclusion. And of course, we'll get to Q&A.

So let's start with a quick reminder. Our strategy is to develop the leading digital ecosystem for the whole moving experience, powered by exceptional data and network effects. So this strategic framework for growth and diversification that we set out before and you all know, we continue to follow this framework, including the highlighted focus areas.

A couple of things to note. Residential find, top left, is still very much at the heart of what we do, and that's 90% of our total revenue. For the other areas that we expand in, we have 2 principles. One is that they constitute attractive revenue and profit opportunities; and two, that we build even further network effects back across the core business and platform as we execute them.

Now we presented -- sorry, there we go. We presented these 5 Rightmove business pillars back -- to you back in 2023, and we have executed strongly across this period, both operationally and financially. We're definitely more modern, more product-led and more future-ready organization compared to the past.

In the far right column here, you can see our self-scorecard summary marks for each pillar. We have done well on all of these and in some, really, really well. Calling out only a few of the highlights in each of the pillars. For consumers, we have maintained a strong leadership position in traffic engagement metrics in a competitively quite dynamic landscape. We led with product and experience innovation, and we have had an upgrade of our brand and marketing approach. We've also added meaningful amounts of users more directly connected and relating to Rightmove, all in, deepening our relationships and again, ramping our data sets.

For partners in our core engine, we have delivered strongly across packages and products. We've also taken many of our partner interfaces and tools to the next level, and we are equipped with the best account management team in the U.K. with great confidence in the long-term runway of our core business.

The strategic growth areas, which were around 7% of revenue at the half year, as you remember, have hit the operational marks that we set alongside very good revenue pace. Results and learnings have confirmed the large market opportunities we identified, and we remain excited about the segments. Now we did set out very ambitious and quite precise 2028 targets back in '23. We're continuously looking at the best long-term way to play in them. So whilst we see strong growth rates of around 20% to 30% as sustainable, our initial absolute targets for these will take a little bit longer to realize.

Now within platform, transitioning to the cloud of our production and data platform is a methodical, multiyear and complex effort and in which we have made really great progress. Importantly, along the way of this effort, we've delivered high-quality service, platform performance and innovation. We're squarely becoming faster, more resilient and more efficient business, one we'll be able to innovate even more from.

And lastly and importantly, our people. The team has grown with many new excellent colleagues and capabilities, combining with a long and deep experience bench we have in place. We're better and truly technology-oriented team and our culture and performance approach have strengthened. So my thanks to the team at Rightmove for what I think is fantastic delivery in an ambitious, competitive and dynamic environment.

Now I know there's a lot of interest in the 7% of our business that is strategic growth areas or the SGAs, so let's just take a further look at those with a short video recap.

[Presentation]

All right. So as you can see, we're leading with product and differentiation, and we're growing our position in these markets, and we're definitely driving revenue growth along with it. Let's look at some of the very notable strong operational outcomes during this period.

In commercial first, you can see the great progress we made across several key metrics compared to where we were just a few years back. We've also done a lot of foundational platform and data work in the background fit for commercial real estate purpose into the future. In addition, it's worth mentioning that our share of time on site per similar web is now nearing our share in residential, and it is high quality. Over 70% of it is unique to Rightmove. Our share of FTSE 100 company real estate functions using Rightmove rose to 84% in the period. So our revenue growth is on a good compounding trajectory. We're now entering more of the product and package evolution part over 2026 and beyond.

In mortgages, the metrics here similarly show the clear consumer interest and uptake of the MIP product. Affordability is very relevant for the 67% or so of all homebuyers who need financing, and it's very obvious that they like Rightmove providing these digital, intuitive and novel ways to help them.

The 2x effect on overall site engagement by users of the MIP feature and the mortgage tools is very meaningful. It's a good example of a new consumer feature adding to the network effect for Rightmove. Meanwhile, of course, MIP users become better and contextually informed in their home hunting journey, and thus, they also become more qualified in their subsequent agent conversations. We'll continue product development and increasing our ability to segment the huge user base for the right mortgage process and products with nurturing paths and data loops with lender and broker partnerships.

And lastly, for rental services, same thing here, very strong metrics, great progress in penetrating this opportunity. We double our volumes of enhanced leads, tenant leads and within a full digital product suite behind them to handle it, we're making life clearly more effective for agents.

In late summer, we started to embed the 2 upfront part of Lead to Keys, which are the Enquiry Manager and the enhanced lead modules into many of the market CRMs used by agents, making workflows more effective yet again. And lastly, during this fall, we are trialing and enabling of those 2 upfront modules to more dual agents within the core subscription, something that will continue over the next year. It's an exciting penetration step-up opportunity, bringing efficiency to agents, landlords and tenant applicants at true market scale. And for clarity, the other Lead to Keys modules will be sold separately as they are and over time, of course, to that enlarged base.

So let's turn now to the core Estate Agency, New Homes, again, 90% of our revenue with a bit more detail. We delivered a lot here in the past 2 years. On the left, you can see our ramping product innovation pace for both consumers and partners. Often, we actually build to both sites directly, like we did with the Ascend package for New Homes. And many of our consumer-only features, which drive utility, frequency and engagement with the site, also building up data signals that we use in future product builds either for core partners or that can provide other monetization opportunities for us.

We have delivered a number of packages and products to our core partners. We built market product segments like Agent Accelerator for brand-new agents or Access for housing associations, and we now develop more tailored solutions to partner cohorts like multi-branch or corporates.

On the right, with the Building Success Together program, we have continuously and meaningfully upgraded our business partnering toolbox and training support to the industry. The key outcome here is strong retention and sentiment scores. We're excited about the data-driven value creation and again, long runway of our core business opportunity.

So now I'll show you another video. This is going to be of the OAV product, Online Agent Valuation. It's the latest and quite recently launched product for estate agents, which is going into rollout mode. It's a unique digital product. It helps both consumers and agents in one go to save time and build a relationship. Plus it's adding information about the most recent features and state of our property onto our platform. Tellingly of our times, it comes with an AI component built in from the start. OAV complements our existing suite of valuation products for both consumer and partners. And that's, of course, 1 that we built out quite meaningfully just in the last 2 years as well.

[Presentation]

So to summarize the business progress and what we've been up to, Rightmove's consumer driven network effects are strong and our powerful engine for growth going also into the future. The strategic growth areas have delivered against operational milestones with good financial performance. Execution and product development plans continue towards what we believe are meaningful revenue opportunities. And engagement with core partners has strengthened. We've upped the game on product and relationships and see a long runway for growth.

Now let's look forward. You also recognize this picture. It's important. We remain excited about the large and growing GBP 10 billion total revenue pool in U.K. property and home moving services. It can undeniably be much better digitized, more connected, more efficient, and we do have a role to play in that. And as you might know, Rightmove just turned 25 years, so happy birthday, of course. But mostly, we're excited about what we can do over the next 25 years.

Now what brought us here won't take us there. We want to accelerate into this. So again, our strategy is to develop the leading digital ecosystem for the whole moving experience powered by exceptional data and network effects. We're guided by the vision at the top of our house, our 3 business pillars underneath, leverage and build the network effects that create value for consumers and partners and definitely generating a lot of value for Rightmove.

Note that -- what we call new growth here includes the SGAs but the name also signifies that we have several ideas and opportunities in the hopper for the future. As you can see from the symbols across the house, AI has already taken a place in our home, has increasingly gone into how we think, plan and execute the entire business.

So let's do a very quick backdrop on AI. The truly big change in strategic context since we set out our plan in 2023 is the pace of AI developments. Massive amounts of money is invested across infrastructure for compute and in applications. Now these numbers are large, yet all in are actually forecasted to grow into trillions over the next 5 years. Consumer usage from being served shorter answers and conversational interfaces in both existing and new platforms has grown to very large volumes already. And there, of course, there are predictions of agents replacing or maybe complementing humans in any facet of browsing or buying.

So what's the upshot of this? Well, for sure, is that the innovation cycle is on hyper speed. There is creation, adoption and growth at scale. Far from everything, though, is ready, mature or high quality, as pointed out in many reports and of course, discussions. Nobody can quite tell what the true adoption curve will be and for what exactly, but there's undoubtedly a real paradigm shift and the curve going on. So again, that is what we believe that -- being the fundamental context change for us since we set out our 2023 strategy.

And we're taking a balanced yet decidedly forward-leaning approach to this. We want to future proof and we want to accelerate our business with AI in mind and in doing. The point is this is not about today or even next year. This is about potential implications for consumer behavior, software and property services on a 3-, 5-, 10-year strategic horizon. I would say probably the only constant over that time is that we all still will need physical homes to live in.

But let's, though, consider the starting point for property, our sector and for us. First of all, Rightmove has a phenomenally strong over 90% brand awareness, 85% direct and organic traffic. Our experience is tailored, fit for purpose. There's a lot of contextual relevancy and built up credibility. That deep specialty and aggregation is also what we deliver to partners. There are no signs of consumer disruption in any real sense of the world -- word.

Second, keep in mind the consumer process of making it into a new home. First of all, it's a long and very comparison-oriented process. Comparing is actually not a necessary level. It's something consumers want to do. Two, a home is a very heterogeneous product, and nearly 10,000 new homes to discover goes up on our site every day. They're comparable, sortable, discoverable on many parameters. That's also where these strong habit loops come into place.

Three, the location of a home isn't something people just try to easily decide for with an online answer. They know quite a lot about where they look, and often, they do it in real life. In the U.K., the average moving distance is 5.5 miles.

Four, a home is a big ticket item, whether you're buying or renting, and getting to one ultimately is quite complex. Since you're going to spend 2/3 of your time there for years, finding the one is important. And therefore, the process is long. It's discovery and definitely also opportunity-driven.

And finally, a home is a decision where emotion and truly personal preferences play a big role. With over 60% of households having more than 1 person, it's actually a double up of those preference considerations and the nurture process. So personal choice and comparison making is how people eventually get there.

Powering up all that choice comparisons, deliberations, home opportunities in the right place at the right time with the right tools, that is what our specialty is. And ultimately, it's done really well and mainly through data.

So I think I've said this before, but I really do think of us as a data company. Data is scaled. It's connected and to a very large extent, proprietary. If you look across all the data points here, you realize the power of having all of it with memory and learning patterns in one platform. Of course, LLMs have both started to democratize product development, and they really started to give really condensed and precise answers to queries for consumers. We have the advantage to also use the power of LLMs or AI applications, but we can derive reinforcement learning and sector-specific value with our live and whole market data set. We do not just hold static property data. We hold the U.K.'s living map, property intent and behavior, signals for pricing, supply and demand dynamics and geographies in our platform.

Now let me just give one example of how we leverage this with AI already now. We start with all that scaled proprietary and connected data. At the data modeling stage, we use off-the-shelf ML or LLM models in our data hive. And now we augment them with proprietary Rightmove AI models that are based on our much more contextual data.

So for example, for our vendor prediction model, which feeds a few of our existing products to partners, we've seen over 50% higher accuracy doing this by applying our data models, and that is, of course, a very substantial lift. Over time, the model will build up into scoring engines for different entity sets, and we can use both models and engines for products. In this case, the AI-powered prediction model gets orchestrated and piped into existing product, Opportunity Manager and Discover, improving its performance for partners. This went live only 6 weeks ago, and over time, it's going to drive usage uptake, package migration or spend-ups as part of our subscription model.

Finally, and importantly, these improved products will generate even more and new signals from both partners and users and in a closed loop, that we'll be further adding to the data sets. That's going to drive new ideas about innovation down the road. It's a virtuous cycle and indeed a compounding effect.

So investing more in these AI power ups of what we have drives reinforcement learning and value that simply otherwise wouldn't have happened. This is but one example of why we think now is the right time to go after this and doing it meaningfully.

So a little bit more broadly than that half technical slide. AI is now becoming central to all we do. Internally, we will create, complement and enhance all our existing capabilities and the workforce. Externally, from consumers and partners on our platform, we will connect, predict and personalize to much greater levels than today. In short, we plan to be an AI winner.

Now we're building on an existing base of activity, and we have reported continuously on some of these. We now have 27 top-down prioritized AI projects and many more smaller individually built applications. And as you can see, they are right across the entire estate of the company. Four external-facing ones went live just recently. Yet what we see here is absolutely early stage. There's a lot of ongoing exploration that needs to happen, keeping track of that very fast-changing tool landscape, productionizing pipelines, data and architecture, deciding what to buy versus build, figuring out how an opportunity that we have in the market or have identified might actually change with AI in mind and when and so forth.

So with the fast pace of technology itself and also how search might evolve, we are convinced now is the right time to invest a bit of our very strong cash flow into this over the next few years. We leverage the position we have. We do it for future proofing and for value generation. The value will manifest itself both on revenue opportunities as well as cost or productivity.

I'll add very clearly, Rightmove is out for quality, usefulness, production grade, security grade. Those attributes have made us a market leader. There will be things that we discard, but we'll learn faster. We wrap ourselves as usual in diligent assessments. We have financial discipline, and we have an always-on requirement to prove value in what we do. We're excited, but we're certainly not in the era of AI for fast PR drops.

Concretely, our investment plans target 3 main areas: First, consumer innovation, in particular, the app and AI-powered search as well as progressing faster in the beyond find space. We'll create more utility, data loops and monetary opportunity. Second, AI-powered operations, bringing seamless experience and productivity benefits internally as well as externally from our back office; and third, strategic R&D capability for new growth areas.

With it, again, we'll deepen Rightmove's ecosystem role and value creation. It's going to be through revenue growth. It's going to be through operational leverage, and we aim to hit double-digit profit growth on a sustainable and true long-term basis. We'll become increasingly fitter and opportunity-ready organization along the way.

So with that, I'll pass over to Tarah, who will explain these 3 focus areas in a little bit more detail.

Thank you, Johan, and good morning, everyone. I'm Tarah Lourens, COO. Today, I'm going to walk you through our plans across our 3 investment areas and how they'll benefit Rightmove, our partners and consumers.

I'm sure many of you here currently live in homes that you found on Rightmove. Our mission is to make the home moving journey easier and simpler for everyone, and that is something we do exceptionally well. Rightmove is already synonymous with finding a property, and we're extending our brand down the life cycle so that we become even more indispensable to consumers. This will unlock significant new revenue opportunities, which we are very well placed to capitalize on.

We've made good progress over the last few years, releasing several new tools that support our users across the home moving journey and many key improvements to the core search experience. But as Johan has just mentioned, the landscape is evolving rapidly. AI is raising the bar for what consumers expect, and we want to go faster. We're going to accelerate our progress, in total, nearly doubling the product capacity that we have focused on consumer development. This significantly scales our efforts, allowing us to stay ahead of evolving needs, deepen our relationship with users and accelerate the building blocks that will deliver new revenue. Everything we do to engage our consumer base provides value to our core partners, whether directly by driving more leads or indirectly through enhancing the data signals that power our products or creating new ways for our partners to showcase their brands.

We know that consumer behavior is changing quicker than ever before, and we will be at the forefront of that change. We're going to fundamentally transform how users engage with our platform. First, we'll reshape our search, delivering a hyper-personalized experience that leverages AI and helps users find the right property faster and with greater confidence. This will include conversational search that, among other benefits, will create new ways for our partners to engage with our audience. We'll also deepen the connection with our users through property inspiration and insights, keeping our casual browsers who are future buyers and sellers on our platform.

Next, we'll lean further into the home moving process, creating an assisted experience to support both buyers and sellers as they navigate the complex and lengthy journey. We'll continue to develop our suite of integrated mortgage features to help users better understand their affordability and financing options.

And finally, we'll complete the life cycle with a curated homeowner experience. We've already built a market-leading instant valuation tool informed by first-party data that no one else has at our scale. The recent launch of online agent valuations, which Johan just showcased, provides homeowners further insights and confidence to take the next step through a fully digital and Rightmove delivered experience. We'll continue to build out this space, creating a dedicated my home area on the platform, positioning Rightmove to be top of mind when homeowners are ready to sell and delivering more leads for our partners.

Our ultimate goal is to provide a world-leading AI-assisted experience going above and beyond when it comes to property search and the rest of the home moving journey. To bring all of this to life, I've included an example of one of our new AI-powered features. Through Style with AI, users can transform any listing on Rightmove. It's part of a broader suite of tools that we've launched this year, all designed to help users understand the potential for home improvement, whether you're a homeowner or a home hunter. We want to be the place that consumers come to for all property-related decisions to increase platform stickiness, give us even more data signals and create those revenue opportunities that I mentioned earlier.

Yes, it's a fun tool to play with, but through our early research, we found that over half of users who would use this tool are high intent, either visualizing if they could live in a space before progressing to a viewing or assessing the property for renovation potential. As with everything we do, we've taken a truly -- we've taken time to truly understand user needs, which has led to unique features like being able to remove furniture or adjust the lighting. And in the background, we've been trialing various models so that we deliver the best quality renders and reduce hallucinations. We want this to be a genuinely useful feature, so we've also included a real-time feedback loop, allowing us to monitor how the model performs at scale. And this, again, is a unique aspect of our tool.

As I'm sure you all know, apps are incredibly powerful when it comes to platform stickiness. Once users download and start using the app, they are far more likely to return, stay engaged and make Rightmove their go-to platform. What's really interesting is that users who use both app and web are our most engaged, driving twice as many sessions and generating 3x as many leads.

When searching for property, larger format screens play a crucial role. Users want to compare properties side by side, view detailed floor plans and carry out in-depth research, all of which is often best supported on desktop. So going app only is not the answer. Our goal is instead to elevate the app experience we provide so that whichever platform the user chooses, they have a consistently great experience.

Our first step will be to align the core search features across all platforms. Then we'll lean into device-specific features like offline mode and biometrics. And finally, we'll introduce app-only features. We know that our app plays an important role for our highest intent users, so we'll play into that as an example, with new features that support the property viewing stage of the journey. Investing in our app now will strengthen our long-term position by increasing user engagement and enabling our strategy to move further down the home moving journey with our most serious users.

Now on to the second investment area, our platform and operations. For simplicity, I've broken up our platform into 4 layers: first, the proprietary technology that we've built to deliver our consumer and partner-facing experiences; then the underlying data platform that powers our entire business; next, the back-office systems we use to deliver day-to-day operations, for example, for onboarding new partners or actioning product purchases and package upgrades; and finally, the technology infrastructure on which we deliver our entire platform in a secure and scalable way. We've been upgrading the platform over the last several years and are now well progressed in migrating to the cloud. We've built over 100 micro services within the experience layer, and this has led to a four-fold increase in code deployments in recent years. We now also have a unified data platform, bringing together ever-growing volumes of data that we're generating every day.

Going forward, we'll continue to invest in all these layers but with 2 distinct focus areas. First, we'll invest in the operational layer of the platform, which has been a lesser focus until now. Here, we see significant potential, and I'll cover this one in a bit more detail on the next slide. Secondly, we'll build on our early learnings and create an AI-powered developer experience. The goal here is to reduce cycle times, eliminate repetitive tasks and enable our teams to deliver faster and with greater quality and consistency.

The plan is to rebuild our operational layer from the ground up. For our partners, we'll provide faster and more digital service. AI will play a key role, delivering an intelligent and responsive experience powering all partner touch points, whether human or digital. Internally, we'll work more efficiently with streamlined processes and reduced manual workload.

These new AI-enabled interconnected systems will also give everyone at Rightmove access to more data and create new ways to improve the partner experience. But the work to modernize our operational layer is substantial. And again, we want to go faster. We're at the very early stages of planning and design, but I wanted to demonstrate just how transformative this investment will be for our partner experience, so the team have prepared a brief concept video that brings the thinking to life.

[Presentation]

This is an exciting step for us that would transform our partner experience and allow us to quickly innovate going forward.

Our final area of investment will be to increase the capacity we have in our strategic R&D function. Until now, we've had a small internal team tasked with exploring new ideas. They have a keen eye on ROI, whether that be in terms of revenue, strategic benefit or enhancing the network effects. And the bar for consideration is high. Some ideas are never taken beyond analysis. Others are stopped after initial pathfinding when learnings suggest that the opportunity is just not significant enough, like we did in auctions a few years ago. Others have shown significant potential, and that's when we lean in. A good example is Rental Operators, which has scaled to generate around GBP 10 million annually.

We're in a fortunate position. We have so many opportunities we could invest in if we choose to, and so we're adding more capacity to explore ideas faster and create a larger pipeline of future growth areas. Many of these ideas are at very early stage and have competitive sensitivities, so we won't be covering the specifics today. But what I will say is that a key theme going forward will be exploring new wallet areas across the home moving journey. We see the eventual opportunity here, both sizable and additive to the network effect. We will, of course, provide more details when an opportunity comes out of incubation and start scaling, which we're committing to do by 2027.

So to summarize, investing in these 3 areas will deliver significant benefits. For consumer innovation, we're aiming to double our pace. We'll significantly grow our app user base, strengthening our long-term position and delivering a great experience wherever user chooses to engage. We plan to triple usage of our home mover and homeowner features, extending our relevance across the life cycle. And all of this creates new opportunities for our partners to engage with the largest home moving audience in the U.K.

For our internal operations, replatforming our operational systems will transform the partner experience and deliver substantial internal efficiency. AI will allow our technology teams to work smarter and faster, unlocking even more capacity to innovate.

And for strategic R&D, as we extend across the life cycle, we unlock new opportunities. We'll double our capacity to research and test more of these in parallel, generating a strong pipeline of future growth areas. Ultimately, this is about speed, scale and shaping the future, bringing forward initiatives that strengthen our position and make us even more valuable to partners and consumers.

Now over to Rory, who will be covering the financials.

Thank you, Tarah. Good morning, everyone. Now turning to the financial considerations. To deliver the opportunity, which Johan and Tarah have just outlined, we plan to accelerate investment by approximately GBP 12 million in 2026 and a total of circa GBP 40 million over a 3-year period. Looking at the chart, this provides a split of the GBP 12 million P&L investment: GBP 3.5 million in consumer, supporting initiatives across the consumer domain as outlined by Tarah; GBP 2.1 million in apps with a proportion allocated to short-term burst to bring app functionality to parity with the web; GBP 3.1 million in operations, which includes a new back-office system; and an additional GBP 2 million will be invested into new growth to expand ideation capacity and delivery with the assumption that 1 or more initiatives will be backed with product and operational support, which we will provide details on going forward.

Finally, we've included anticipated scaling support costs of GBP 1.3 million across the business. The majority of this investment will be driven by headcount growth in technology roles and AI-related costs. The roles will mainly be in product, engineering and AI. These figures are the P&L impact of the investment after capitalization. Total incremental investment will be around GBP 18 million in 2026 as we estimate around GBP 6 million will be capitalized. This capitalization will be in addition to our existing GBP 8 million of internal labor capitalization from BAU activity and will rise in line with salary inflation and applicable initiatives.

There is significant rigor and discipline around our approach to investment. There has always been and will continue to be a healthy internal competition for capital. Every pound invested in our platform must deliver tangible business impact. We have embedded committees across Rightmove, covering AI, product development, revenue planning and people.

These groups are there to drive prioritization, identify risks and opportunities and ensure accountability to budgets and targets. Both Johan and I sit on these committees, which use tailored frameworks to measure success and guide decisions. For example, new initiatives are supported by ROI business cases developed by the requesting teams, tested by the program and analysis team and scored using a blend of commercial, financial and strategic metrics to determine investment priority. Some indicative examples of the level of internal scrutiny are set out on the slide.

The committee frameworks feed into group planning through leadership meetings, quarterly reviews and ultimately, Board approval. Importantly, we operate these structures in a streamlined, high-frequency way, allowing us to remain agile and responsive. The investment set out feeds into our main financial performance metrics, growth in revenues, underlying operating profit and earnings per share.

Starting at the revenue level, our execution has been demonstrated regardless of the macro or property market. At a group level, we aim to maintain our current level of 8% to 10% revenue growth through the investment stage to 2028, aiming to increase sustained double-digit growth by 2030. As today, that will be driven by growth in the core business of 7% to 8% through the investment stage and beyond. This will be underpinned by an exciting array of products, continually enhanced and extended by our experienced product development team, leveraging our world-class data and AI capabilities.

On top of core, the investments made since 2023 in the strategic growth areas will continue to diversify our revenue and support our ambition of double-digit revenue growth. We expect the SGAs to contribute between 1% to 2% of incremental growth to total group revenue. Together, we see a robust growth rate of between 20% and 30% as an achievable run rate going forward and into the long term. They're still on early journeys, and unlike core, they are unlikely to see a linear line of growth. But as Johan discussed, we are very excited about what these businesses could become, and we will not make short-term decisions that impact their long-term prospects. So in aggregate, core plus the SGAs should deliver robust 8% to 10% growth through the investment stage, but we want to be firmly in sustainable double-digit growth territory, which is why some of the investment outlined aims to contribute further revenue growth from new wallets or from existing areas.

Moving to underlying operating profit. As I've explained, we anticipate a focused investment with operating profit growth lower in the early part of the period as we invest, then increasing as that investment begins to deliver returns, meaning we'll be nearer the higher end of the range towards the end of the investment period. As we look at our plans today, we see a floor margin of 67%. This is before any impact of the U.K.'s digital service tax, which we would expect to apply once eligible revenue passes GBP 500 million.

We expect to see profit growth ahead of revenue growth again after year 3 as operating leverage kicks in for the initiatives outlined today. But our clear priority is sustainable underlying operating profit growth, moving from high single-digit to sustainable long-term digit growth. That's why we haven't provided long-term margin guidance. Our focus is on profit, and we'll have options to deliver that growth through either cost efficiencies or using the operating leverage to grow revenue faster.

Throughout this period, we will remain highly cash generative and continue to deliver substantial returns to shareholders. The share buyback program will be EPS accretive, adding 2 to 3 percentage points to underlying profit growth. Together with a progressive dividend, the business should be capable of delivering mid-teen returns annually through the cycle.

Before we move on, a few words on nearer-term guidance. We've introduced 2026 guidance today of 8% to 10% revenue growth and underlying operating profit growth of 3% to 5%, which reflects the investment outlined earlier. These are both within the ranges shown in the middle of this slide and assume a stable macro environment and no inorganic activity.

So turning to our capital allocation policy. This will remain consistent. Our first priority is investment in the business against the framework set out earlier. Secondly, we will continue to evaluate value-accretive inorganic opportunities. We would look at opportunities that accelerate us towards our strategic ambitions quicker or provide us with products or services that we couldn't build better ourselves. As with our organic growth, we have a disciplined and high threshold. Any M&A would be expected to drive incremental growth to that outlined earlier. With remaining excess cash, we will return this to shareholders via a progressive dividend, which will grow aligned to earnings growth and share buybacks thereafter.

I'll now pass you back to Johan to wrap up.

Thank you, Rory. All right. So next 5 years then in headlines, what's changing and why? Well, with an eye towards the world playing out with a whole bunch of different changes, and we talk through them, we see things on the left here being very stable, right? We'll continue to drive progress on the back of our strong position in the market. We have opportunities and foundations in the context that we operate. We run a very strong and compounding business model.

The themes of change and the opportunity are set out on the right. First, LLMs, applications, usage of AI are unfolding at pace. Someone said that AI today might be at the equivalent stage of dial-up of Internet itself. Imagine what happened in the ensuing years. Nobody actually knows, again, what that curve of technology will evolve to, but we assume it will be rapid, and we want to be in a strong spot on it. Second, for Rightmove, AI does become central and foundational for all what we do. And third, we are specifically investing near term in consumer innovation, AI-powered operations and R&D for new growth. We'll become an even stronger platform than we're today. We're going to drive strong total shareholder returns for the near, medium and long term.

And with that, let's turn to Q&A. If you could please use the microphones in front of you if you have them or we can get them, and press and hold the button to speak. And Rory will help to direct questions.

Jessica Pok from Peel Hunt. I've got 3, please. The 8% to 10% growth you're guiding towards the next couple of years, just to be crystal clear, you're suggesting the core is -- it's not a case that you're suggesting 8% to begin with kind of rising to the 10% over the next 3 years. Is that a matter of actually it can be choppy next 3 years depending on how quickly the SGA is in a given year?

The second thing I just want to ask in terms of the top line is the 3 growth areas, I guess, the less predictable 1 is the new R&D spend. So within that top line guidance, can we assume that you're probably not assuming anything that comes out of those new growth areas in what you suggested?

The second one is just on the peers. What are you seeing that they're doing on the AI front? Any color around that would be good.

And then the final one is you pushed the SG&A kind of targets out further. Can you just remind us what are the pain points that you've seen so far?

Do you want to take the first 2?

Yes. So look, the 8% to 10% absolutely is a range. We've delivered 10% in the first half. We've guided 9% at the full year, so we absolutely see opportunities to get towards the top end of that range. And we so may do in the investment period. We're giving you a range like we have done for next year because there might be some things that influence it, for instance, just the pace of what we want to do in terms of the SGAs, in terms of tailwinds or headwinds. Look, if we get a push in new home developments, which we haven't had for the next last couple of years, absolutely, we'll be towards the higher end of that guidance.

So it's absolutely a range. We think there's opportunities to get towards that within the investment period, but we're giving you what we think is a really robust reasonable range for that period.

In terms of the new growth, look, it has to be quite material to make a percentage impact on our revenue growth given revenues are coming up to GBP 0.5 billion, and that's going to take a bit of time with these new areas. What we're talking here is not a product that will flywheel off core like the OAV or Optimiser Edge. And therefore, it will take a bit of time for it to come through. And that's why effectively, that new growth will be incremental to effectively the current growth that we're seeing past the investment stage. And we will do everything to accelerate that and to push it forward, but we think that's a reasonable time frame from what we're seeing.

And sorry, the third question, if we get to that, I think, AI and peers. So yes.

U.K. peers.

U.K. peers, yes. Look, I think I can comment quickly on the overall peers piece as well. I think you actually have a bit of grouping of active players, and you have some that seem much less active amongst the many actives. And I know that you all track them. It's definitely a healthy ongoing activation, definitely classified still as, I would say, experimentation stage, right, some great interesting pieces out there. I don't think there's anything that sticks out necessarily at the moment at least.

And it's -- in the U.K., I would say it's the same thing, Zoopla probably a little bit more active than the other competitor on this stage. But no doubt, everyone is looking into this, and also OTM and CoStar, obviously, they've just announced a bunch of things around this, at least in the U.S.

The SGA targets, so you had a question on the SGA targets. Do you want to repeat that, Jessica?

Just to remind us on the pain points of SGA so far. You've reached a lot of milestones for that, but the target has been pushed out to the right slightly. So what have you seen, which has challenged?

Yes. Maybe I'll start and you chip in. I mean I think there's a couple of things with the SGA to flag. If we take commercial as a good example, we've had some headwinds in that sector. It's been impacted more so than residential. But also we've made decisions for the long-term value on which we haven't want to sacrifice for short-term wins.

And the example of that is that as we grew customer numbers, you saw the fantastic growth we've seen since 2023 in that. Going forward with a price increase or a product now for us wasn't the right move. We want to continue to build that network effect, knowing better than anybody what a powerful network effect can lead to. We've seen that in residential. And therefore, rather than pushing on price and product now, continuing on that customer acquisition, growing consumers and growing customer side gives us a much better platform for the future. And so therefore, we were prepared to take that growth in commercial down a few percentage points.

And I think that's an example within the SGAs that we are seeing all of these areas as real opportunities with large TAMs, where we absolutely see our sales being able to play a big part of that. That hasn't changed. But what we aren't prepared to do is take kind of short-term wins to sacrifice that long-term value. And so I think there's a little bit of that in terms of us providing that range of 20% to 30%, which, to be completely frank, we will be aiming for higher. Of course, we will do. And I would like to say it's towards the higher end of that range, but that is what we see, is a really robust sustainable growth rate in those SGAs for the long term.

And look, I would just add to that, the 20% to 30%, of course, that's not the inflection point that was needed for the previous 28 numbers. The 20% to 30% is a very meaningful 3 to 4x the core business. And as long as we feel comfortable with -- of course, we're trying to push them very meaningfully forward also commercially, but truly, we are looking at the long term.

We talked about it, I think, on an ongoing basis, of course. And in some places, it's like we're doing this, great execution, but look, the opportunity might be even bigger if you think about it like this. And in some cases, you come up against some stuff that takes time that you -- we simply couldn't have forecasted by that time, PEPs and sanctions regulations that needs to go into all the machinery, Lead to Keys as an example, right? But look, that's part, of course, in doing business. And I'm really happy about those growth rates and what they will lead to over time.

Will?

It's Will Packer from BNP Paribas Exane. Three for me, please, as well. So firstly, to sort of frame the margin investment, we've obviously had a significant margin dilution in recent years already. We've had a 50% increase in staff. Should we think of it the backward-looking margin dilution was catching up where you needed to be and investing in strategic growth areas and now this is you proactively trying to get ahead of the curve? Or should we think of it still sort of as catch-up versus peers? We had the last couple of weeks a busy results season hearing about products like [ Hey! MO ], et cetera. Do you need to catch up to that?

Second question, playing devil's advocate, why not have a much more aggressive investment in 2026 if the -- we have such a fast-moving market backdrop? Just understanding a bit why the investment is gradual over the next 3 years would be helpful.

And then finally, I don't think we mentioned ChatGPT in today's presentation. They're very important strategic decisions forthcoming. How much do you integrate when they launch their integration -- app integration in Europe? Are you planning on being a part of that? Do you have to be because Zoopla will if you don't? How do you see that kind of risk/reward and decision-making?

Do you want to take the first and the [ third ]?

Yes, take the first. Yes. I'll start with the investment gradual. Look, it's -- where we envisage it is the investment is pretty quick in the first year and then it kind of stays pretty similar, growing very slightly over the 3 years. So it's not that we're investing and then continuing to increase that investment materially over the 3-year period, which is effectively why we expect to see underlying operating profit growth at the lower end of the range to start with. And then it starts rising, and so as we exit the investment stage, we're towards that double-digit operating profit growth.

So we are accelerating and going fast with that investment from 2026. And what Tarah has outlined as well is that investment is on top of, a, the current investment that we're really happy with the ROI that we're getting across core SGAs and consumer at the moment and that we are very targeted and disciplined in what that investment gives us. You heard me talk about the kind of frameworks and governance that we've gone through, and that will add us a lot of firepower in order to see what we want to do.

There are some things that we'll get quicker wins with because that's the nature of that investment versus, say, a back office, which is going to be a multiyear time frame. And that's going to take time to implement, and then it's going to take time to see some of the efficiencies come through that. But we feel absolutely that the GBP 12 million P&L investment is the commensurate value with what we want to deliver with this.

In terms of the first question in terms of is it a catch-up, no, I mean, look, I think like all businesses, we're continually wanting to invest, refresh and evolve our business. And so of course, I'm sure Johan would have wished that some of that was a bit more upgraded when he came -- started, but I think that's the same for every incoming CEO.

I think the investment that we outlined at the Capital Markets Day was specifically accelerating the strategic growth areas. We're not cutting back on them. We're really happy with what that investment will deliver. This is investment that we absolutely could have absorbed within our current margin profile, and we have that discussion. For us, that wasn't the right way of going this because we want to do all of this quicker. We see that if we waited like that, then the opportunities wouldn't be brought forward and we would miss out. And us as the market leader wouldn't find that acceptable.

And so for us, lowering the margin in a short period of time to be at the front of the pace for what's happening and being able to take the advantage of the opportunities, of which, as Tarah gave some detail and flavor of them, we think are really exciting and varied, for us was the right decision. And we'll constantly look at margin as an output, as we've always discussed about what is the right level of investment. But as I say, very happy with that floor of 67% for the investment period.

Yes. And on ChatGPT, so look, there's an overall premise here in that wherever consumers are, we're interested in getting hold of them, right? But also very importantly, over 90% of them know about our brand, and we have 70% to 80%, obviously, of consumer time spent on portal.

So there's an existing search engine, which is the biggest in the world, actually keeps growing, by the way, and it's not being replaced. And people have used that to some extent, that they actually go and look for our brand, and 85% or 85-plus percent of everyone actually comes to us directly or organically, right? So we have a direct relationship with them already. I think a lot of that is very transferable to another medium, where people might conduct some of their online activities, whether it's social media, which has turned into search in some instances or obviously ChatGPT.

Now again, ChatGPT is powerful, right? It's very intriguing, of course, to see what they're doing backed by billions and consumer adoption, right? That goes for everybody. So if that makes sense for us to play in, we're absolutely open to that, right?

Now when we talk to them regularly, they're obviously not ready with their European sort of setup and SDK. But we expect that to come, and we will entertain that idea for sure. There are still things to figure out in terms of what the setup is and where we'll go over time and so forth, right? We also have very good direct relationships with several of the U.S. companies who went on the apps in GPT already on.

Marcus?

Sorry, it's muted. Sorry about this. Clumsy, sorry about this. Can we continue on the AI? I'm sure you get this -- in every single meeting as well, we get this as well. I mean the concern seems to be that, going forward, as you said, a large part of traffic might have a different starting point. You mentioned Google, and obviously, that's obviously a day-to-day business today. But in the future, the risk is, as far as I understand, that any LLM might not prioritize. And the inventory leadership that Rightmove has is not that large. It's massive traffic leadership but not necessarily inventory leadership.

So the question is if the starting point is different and it's not prioritized necessarily, isn't there a risk if the properties can be also found elsewhere that LLMs find it. So the question is do you think about potentially limitations to what level of data you will give to the LLMs because at least the argument would be that if the search criteria or the search would be better experience in, let's call it, ChatGPT, it might be hard to -- harder to compete. So is it really that you just say, okay, it's -- let's wait, but we are open to give our inventory to those sites, whatever they will look like? If you could give us just a bit more broader answer on this than what we just heard.

And maybe 2 more questions. One is on the growth initiatives. I mean, obviously, you highlighted that the proceeds will just come later. I haven't really fully understood why that is. Is it just that you feel, with better tech, it will work better? Is that sort of like the bottom line, why we should still expect the same outcome, just a bit delayed?

And then thirdly, on the cost base. I mean, clearly, Rightmove is a U.K.-based cost base company. A lot of other peers talk about outsourcing, not only software engineers but also other areas. Is that something that is starting to get discussed internally? Where are we in this context when it comes to Rightmove?

Okay. Great. I'll start with the first one and also let Tarah chime in being close to this. I think what you mentioned, Marcus, is actually interesting. If I got you right, the fact that we don't have a huge supply advantage, we do have a supply advantage, but it's not huge. And if that is exposed elsewhere, why wouldn't people go there? I would flip it and say precisely because there's not a massive difference in supply and consumers go to us and keep coming to us, it's because we deliver what we deliver for them. And then we built that repeat behavior.

So I think that has real longevity. But again, in a new way of searching or finding information, it might be complementary type of information. Then you have to assess how you interact with that environment or, again, if it's actually a little bit like you see on search overall, right, it's not -- again, it's not that the 850 million weekly users on ChatGPT has just sucked that equivalent out of Google. Google reported 100 billion. A lot of it was cloud, right? But actually, they see search growing. But they're also obviously rapidly sort of redeploying how they serve answers.

Right now, it seems to be all boats are lifting a little bit because this is interesting. It's novel. It's another way of finding information. And I think that's a parallel to what we do as well. First of all, having all of that content and as I said before, I think comparison and actual visualization is extremely important. But then you combine that with all the very contextual, specific linked in or logged on, et cetera, features. Very, very few, Google included, Facebook included, who try to go into different verticals actually get to that level of sophistication, right, because they try to rule the world up here as the answering engines.

And obviously, that's, for sure, I think what ChatGPT is absolutely about doing right now. I think they're extremely focused on growing revenue as well, but it seems to be very B2B oriented and driving user and consumer, right? We'll see how it shakes out over time.

I'm just going to add. I guess 2 advantages for us that really stand out to me: one, the 25 years of data that we have that is just so much more than stock; and secondly, how deeply we understand what users want when it comes to property. We do thousands of hours of research with both consumers and partners every year. And as Johan said, we're doing so much more than search, what I showed you. Every part of the home moving journey, we're starting to provide value and tools that help you. We're going to be the one-stop shop for all of that.

So Marcus, on your cost one, and I'll come back to -- you might need to clarify the growth one. But on the cost, we continually evaluate our resourcing model. We have used contractors in the past where we want to accelerate and go faster. Those have always been kind of U.K. domiciled. Pre-COVID, we have used contractors outside of the U.K. We'll always look at our resourcing model in terms of what's best in terms of a measure of cost but also efficiency and also culture. So we'll always evaluate that.

I think your question was just why is the new growth taking a little bit of time to come through. Was that the...

Yes.

That's the question. So the reason for us I mentioned is, look, to make an impact on revenues of up to -- coming up to GBP 0.5 billion, it's got to be anywhere between GBP 5 million and GBP 10 million, and that's just going to take time. Of course, we have products within core that can do that pretty quickly, but these new growth areas, and we're not counting a product like OAV or Optimiser Edge within that, right? So that's just going to take a little bit of time to mature and get off the ground, which is effectively why we're saying that's past the investment period. Of course, we'll try and make it quicker, and we'll bring more details when we have.

Giles?

Yes, sound check. First question is for Johan. We sat here in -- well, not this office, obviously, your prior broker a couple of years ago, and I asked you, incoming, did you get everything you wanted from the Board around investment. And you said, well, you come from a pro-investment cycle, a very pro-growth environment, but you respected to the Board's needs to balance profitability and growth. And yet we are 2 years later and certainly suggested from Rory's earlier answer that there's a bit of catch-up here. So the question is do you finally have everything you want to be investing in.

Second question is on the Rightmove Resistance Tour. So many leading questions I could ask there, but I'll leave it over to you to comment on how you see fit. But the one element coming out of that tour is that you're currently blocking ChatGPT. So a specific comment on that would be useful.

And then finally, on the strategic growth areas, a very, very specific question about the mortgage and principal product. Is the launch of eligibility checker a tacet admission that there was a flaw in the original design of the MIP product?

Okay. I'll start with the first one obviously. Thank you, Giles. Look, it's pretty simple answer. I've always been and felt very supported by the Board. So we're going to go into some of the specifics, but that was true then. That is true now. And of course, the Board is -- it's a really great Board. They are challenging in our strategic thinking. That's where they had a lot of that piece. But at the same time, they're supportive of what we're doing then, a year ago. Same thing now.

Blocking ChatGPT?

Blocking ChatGPT, yes. You want to take it?

Yes. I mean, I guess, yes. I think, for us, it's very much -- and I think we've covered it already. I think we're open to conversations around integration, but we're also very focused on what we're doing. And we see huge advantages, and we're very confident that we'll continue to be the place that people come to search for property.

MIP product. The MIP product, do you want me...

You go.

So I think the MIP product, I think, is one of just evolution. As we look at that mortgage business, it's still really nascent, early business, and we continually to look at how we improve that value for our lender partner as well as our brokers and for consumers. And for us, that just looked like a good way of increasing the value, and that's what effectively was born from it.

We've been really, really happy with the performance of the MIP. It continues to perform really, really well. I mean we could have had a better market in the second half, but -- and I think we'll continue to see that as we look to evolve that because, ultimately, mortgages is only a business that's kind of 3 years old and so other things that will come from it as we learn that we want to adapt and change.

So there's nothing to read into the changes of leadership in the financial services.

No, not at all. David had been with us for a long time, and Lydia has been with us for just as long really. And so it was a nice change for her to come in and look after that.

Jo?

Jo from UBS. Three from me, please. So firstly, it feels like you're effectively not forecasting revenue from the AI investments in your guidance, and that's due to sort of conservatism, forecast uncertainty and the time it takes for them to build. But when will monetization start even if early? And which product should we be keeping an eye on from that perspective?

Second question, we can obviously flow through guidance to estimate a net investment level for future years, but what we don't know is how much cost savings fueled by AI you're expecting and are effectively baked into that as well. So can you help us understand what cost savings you're expecting to get from AI and whether they're baked in?

And then finally, on the incremental investment, you've spoken about what you're sort of producing with that investment. But what's the investment actually going into? Is this just people? Or is there anything else that you're putting money into? A little bit of an understanding of that would be helpful.

Okay. I can start with the first one, and then we'll roll on. So I think as we've discussed a little bit, we are trying to look at this from a long-term perspective, right, both on the revenue opportunity side as well as on a productivity perspective. And on the revenue side, there are 2 kind of quite easy ways to think about it, which I think is true.

One, you got to remember, we do have a subscription business model, right, at the core of -- and we like a lot of the compounding aspects of that one. So when we, for example, enhance a product, potentially come up with quite a new version of it, pre-AI and certainly with AI, that gives us opportunity to move that in and commercialize it through package upgrades depending on where we put it, right? Very similar again to the business model that we followed before.

So for us, it's a matter of just like we do with the product road maps, generally speaking, and you know it. We have ideas for many years, which fits within that sort of package structure and product model. So that's a compounder.

Now can there be very interesting, very value accretive aspect because of AI? Potentially. And can that move the needle in a different way than it has before? Potentially. But generally speaking, you're coming back to that compounding subscription-based model.

And then, of course, there is another side of it, which is AI driving product innovation, which is sold or commercialized in a different way. Even the MIP that we're doing, we have already actually infused AI into our own data set's behavior on the site to target consumers that we think would be interested in that tool with some aspect around it. And that's led to some of the conversion gains, right? So good example already. It's an additional piece of revenue, and for sure, there will be -- or we have thoughts about there could be entirely new pieces around it.

So it's a plethora of different things. I'm not going to say here's XYZ, and you should expect that in 6 months or 12 months or 18 months. It will be a rolling cadence. We'll be very excited to talk about it, and we will keep you updated for sure.

On the cost efficiencies, listen, you hopefully got a feeling of how much increased productivity we -- can come from this business in the next few years, and that gives us a huge opportunity. Now yes, it can provide us cost efficiencies, but it also allows us, if we should choose to reallocate them, to drive further top line growth.

We have an option to do either, and our preference absolutely is in the first most to drive higher revenue. Ultimately, though, the game is to drive underlying operating profit growth. And once we have done some of these things, particularly the back office and some of those operations, which is why it will take a little bit of time, we will really have those levers that we can pull.

In terms of what it's going into, I mean, Tarah, do you want to give a flavor of some of the things that we'll be spending?

Yes. So I think Rory already mentioned the bulk of it is on people but also technology costs. Obviously, AI comes at a bit of a premium, so we factored that in. The back office will involve introducing new systems, new capabilities, so there's some cost in there.

Andrew?

It's Andrew from Barclays. I've got 3 as well if that's okay. First one's on your assumptions on marketing costs over the medium term. And I guess I'm interested both in the angle of what kind of take rate you may or may not have to pay to OpenAI, Google, et cetera, in a world of AI acquisition and in the nearer term, whether you need to spend more on kind of geo because it would look to me like your visibility within ChatGPT on search results today is worse than it is on kind of traditional Google search with SEO. So curious on your view on that.

The second question is to ask how much money you guys make out of kind of prominence or premium ads, if that makes sense. And I guess the thinking I'm exploring is if in a world of AI, we're going to find a perfect house more efficiently, whether some of that kind of time spent or premium ad-based monetization is going to change and how you thought about that as part of your mid-term revenue.

And then the third one is there were some good slides there about kind of getting deeper into the workflow of the agent and helping them to do a broader range of efficiency things. But I guess the question is why not go much harder because it feels like there's this huge pot of money of people cost with agents that AI is going to help to automate and you could benefit from that? But it could require much more investment than you've outlined today. And could that be an area of kind of inorganic focus?

Okay. Great. I'll do 1, 2, 3. So I think the question was marketing cost over time and including to ChatGPT and the subbing of this. So I mean, first of all, today, it's a pretty high degree of variability in terms of what results you get back, right? So it's clearly still immature and mind you, way less than 0.5% of traffic. So that's where it is today.

We expect it to evolve. Clearly, they're moving their positions forward as well. If you look at the 7 big U.S. or global brands that they announced, we talked to several of them, as I said. None of them are doing it because they see all the consumers have gone there, right? It's in the interest of experimentation. It's quite a big effort.

And they have taken slightly different tacks in terms of how to integrate, right? More of the full experience over there or an early lead in, et cetera. It's just super early. So the point is to be able to play with this and figure out what the right thing is and at the right time and what your alternatives are.

I think marketing-wise, again, it's like even more uncertain, right? Are they going to be focused on B2B and all of that, build a cloud or what have you? Or are they going to try to monetize the consumer side? You could expect that but -- at some point, perhaps. But I think that's going to show itself.

Same thing there. If you have a very strong brand and affinity and you stay on top of things with the consumer, you don't necessarily have to pay a lot to another platform just because some people are searching there, just like it is for Google today. That's the position we're coming from. That's the position that we're intending to stay in. And that's part of what we're thinking about here over the next 5 years.

On the prominence point, Andrew, our package strategy really protects us from that because, effectively, we have an all-you-can-eat, flexible product suite that customers can pick and choose from. And so what we see in cycles is some upweigh in prominence products like we've seen in the moment where they're trying to fight for buyers. But in other markets, they drop that, and we allow that flexibility.

And so if someone was to drop prominence products that become less valuable, if you believe that, they'll sub them out because they've got a threshold to meet for other products. And there'll be other products that meet their needs, and we have a suite now of 30 odd across all different categories that we've built over our 25 years, knowing all the different types of markets and user behavior. So the way that the package structure is charged and monetized, it very much protects us from that subbing out in that instance.

And then on the last question about why not go harder, I think the first thing is it's worth remembering this investment is on top of what we set out in 2023. We're already delivering more value than we ever have and at a faster pace than ever. I mentioned earlier kind of four-fold code deployments. And through this period, AI is going to allow us to go even faster with the efficiency it brings to us.

The video I shared earlier, the concept around where we'll take Rightmove Plus as a result of the back-office investment plays exactly into helping partners be more efficient. And I think as Johan mentioned, as we internally start to use AI more, there are definitely things that in the past would have been too complex, too cost prohibitive for us to do with partners or consumers. Going forward, we expect that to be easier, and we will be exploring more opportunities there.

Can I just follow up quickly, Rory? Just to confirm, there's no step-up in marketing costs as a percentage of sales baked into any of your guidance?

No. Ciaran?

It's Ciaran Donnelly from Citi. First one, just in terms of the core business, could you provide us update in terms of your thoughts around new packages? You alluded to kind of Optimiser Edge being your fastest-selling product ever or package ever. How should we think about new core products in terms of the medium-term guidance and how it's baked into that?

Secondly, could you just talk on the underlying operating profit guide for '26 to '28? If you look at revenue, obviously, it's 8% to 10%, and then you've given 3% to 10% (sic) [ 5% ] for the operating profit. So if we assume FY '26 is rebased to 67%, are you implying that we could see further degradation of margin in '27, '28? And what scenario might that lead or lead to?

And then just on mortgages, the focus was very much on the MIP product. But could you provide us an update on the broker offering that you guys alluded to in '23?

So look, I'll do 1 and 2, and I'll do quickly because conscious of time. No, the revenue guidance is within the range of the underlying operating profit. We expect, as I mentioned in the script, to move up towards the higher end of that range towards the end of the investment period. That's because we expect to accelerate the investment from year 1, i.e., 2026, and that will be the first step-up in investment. As I gave, about GBP 40 million over the 3 years, you'll see a small addition to that initial GBP 12 million. But as revenue will continue to rise in that 8% to 10%, we expect that underlying operating profit to move from the bottom end of the range towards the top end of the range.

In terms of the core packages, look, really great to see last year, the Ascend package taken up really well from developers and haven't gone into ARPA, but it's been really exciting, the take-up of that. The Online Agent Valuation tool has been just out but really, really positive and had great feedback. Both of those will underpin ARPA going into next year. OAV is going to be sold exclusively to Opti Edge customers, so we'll expect to see more upgrades to that top package as well as those incrementally buying it above their package thresholds.

As you know, we look at the package strategy kind of 3 years out and absolutely with the product guys already, have a really long pipeline of exciting products, of which we will, at the moment, decide whether that underpins a new package or like OAV comes out by itself. And the main thing for you guys is, look, just seeing the strength of those products that have come out in the last couple of years, the fantastic take-up regardless of competition or market and we have real confidence and exciting about what is coming through in that core line in both New Homes and EA in the next year or 2.

Great. And on mortgages, I think the -- a couple of points to this answer. One is that the MIP, as we've shown here, has done really well. And many aspects of that, that we've evolved over time as well, including the property checker are actually complete novelties, right? We're bringing things that clearly a lot of our consumers are very interested in. So part of it has been a focus on that one.

But we have been working with brokers, a handful all along the way. We have quite a few conversations with customers or partners of all different sizes. And as we alluded to before, what we don't want to do and some of the groundwork that we're laying is building the infrastructure to be able to connect to several brokers in parallel with obviously thinking about what is that broker path -- the right broker path for consumers who really want to go to a broker up -- further up in the funnel, right?

But actually building a layer that will make it scalable is something that, again, we've sort of said, wow, clearly, we need to do that, right? We're not here to do one-offs. And we weren't explicit about that necessarily all the way back in the day but not for any other particular reason, right? And again, growing very fast here.

Running out of time. [ If I have ] 2 questions, Annick and Sean, do you want to try and we'll try and be quick? Thank you.

Annick Maas from Bernstein. I'm interested in understanding why you set yourselves on the investment budget that you've announced today. You could easily double it if you hear about all the investments that are happening in AI. So with that in mind, have you modeled what would happen to your revenues and operating profit if you were to double your investment today? And if you had a partner that were coming along today -- would be coming along today and allow you to ramp up your investment even further, would that be something that you would be interested in looking at?

I think we continue to look at the balance of investment and return on investment for that. As I touched upon, the governance we go through is incredibly detailed. And we're really conscious of every pound that we invest, what that does to the business and to our consumers and partners. We're really happy that the investment levels that we've outlined delivers what we think is in the best interest of our shareholders in the medium and long term, and we think it is a very sensible level of investment to deliver the returns that we see.

We will continually evaluate them as we've always done, but we see no reason for that change in the foreseeable future based on what we see ahead of us. And we think that, that investment gives us a lot to do and what that can do to the business after the medium term is really exciting. So the answer to your second question is no. If someone came across and said do you want more, no, because if it was that and we thought that was the best for the business, we would have done that now. We haven't, and we think this margin profile is right.

Sean, last question.

I have about 10. I'm going to restrict myself to 2 just in the interest of time. Firstly, Johan, I wonder if we can take a little bit of a step back and you're the third company in 3 days to set out a bit of a stall on AI, at least in the U.K. market. Can we take a bit of a step back and just ask how do you assess the quality of existing sort of off-the-shelf AI tools versus the need at the moment to build much more bespoke models and agents for hyper-specific applications? And so I wonder if you maybe talk about the sort of the thresholds for deploying AI in that sort of environment, if that is indeed sort of how you see it at the moment. I don't know.

And then second of all, there are a lot of start-ups out there spending a lot of money on AI products. So inevitably, the question comes, in addition to the investment you're making yourselves, do you have a budget in mind for inorganic opportunities? Any color you can share there would be appreciated.

Okay. I'll take a crack at both. On the start-ups, indeed, I mean, look, the proptech scene has always been full with many, many, many players. And of course, same thing holds true with AI in mind. I think one of the challenges for any start-ups, but I would say, particularly in that space, I've actually looked into it from an investment perspective in my previous life, is that it tends -- it looks like it's very hard to scale for quite a few of them, right? And that's just like a general comment.

But there are interesting ones. And of course, you can also, in many ways, get a company going very quickly today with the help of AI tools themselves. I think getting to that distribution, distribution is actually a real product as well, is challenging.

To your question, though, and we've said this before, we keep a close eye on that scene. We talk to a lot of them. And it could be a potential partner, could be an acquisition. But generally speaking, our default road map is we run and develop this organically. So nothing new in that sense.

I think on the first one -- and Tarah, please help me out here. and I know we need to finish up or chime in. But to give a first answer to quality of tools, et cetera, I mean, it's an incredible range. First of all, you have 9,800 of them for any category. Okay. Fine, a couple of big LLMs, right? That might be a handful. But it's a really wide range.

And the other thing is that even the ones that seem to come to the fore, if you take co-development, which they have GitHub, GitLab, Cursor, Windsurf and a couple of others, Claude, the names are starting to sort of stabilize even between them, right? It's like one takes a step forward, and all of a sudden, that looks like the winner takes another month and the other ones come back.

And this goes back to my point before. We want to lean into this and really get the maximum benefit. That actually means being able to try and run on a couple of different tools, whatever aspect it is. But again, the variability in terms of does it really work versus does it look very cool or how much do you need to change or reconfigure an existing process for it to actually work, that is very much still there. That doesn't mean that it doesn't work. There are quite a few absolutely, and we use quite a few of them already. But it's absolutely a dynamic landscape. I don't know if you want to add anything to that.

Just briefly, I guess. I think, in your question was a bit around build versus buy, and as a technology company, before AI, we were always having that debate. And for us, it comes down to kind of cost quality, how quickly we can do something that sort of shapes that question or decision, and that hasn't changed.

I think what I shared with Style with AI, the new feature that we've launched, there is a product out there that others are using to deliver the experience. We find we could do it a lot better doing it ourselves. So in that case, we chose to build a model.

Appreciate everyone's time. Sorry we're a bit over, but thank you very much for today.

Thanks, everyone.