# Rightmove revenue up £27.7m on 2021 to £332.6m

- Link: https://www.directorstalkinterviews.com/rightmove-revenue-up-27.7m-on-2021-to-332.6m/4121108523
- Published: 2023-03-03T07:39:31+00:00
- Author: Amilia Stone

**[Rightmove plc](https://www.directorstalkinterviews.com/ftse-company/rightmove-plc/rmv.l)**(
LON:RMV), the UK’s largest property portal, has announced its audited results for
the year ended 31 December 2022.

| **Financial Highlights | 2022 | 2021 | Change vs 2021 | % Change vs 2021 | 
| Revenue | £332.6m | £304.9m | £27.7m | +9% | 
| Operating profit | £241.3m | £226.1m | £15.2m | +7% | 
| Underlying operating profit^((1)) | £245.4m | £231.0m | £14.4m | +6% | 
| Underlying operating profit excluding prior year ‘other income’^((2))   | £245.4m | £228.6m | £16.8m | +7% | 
| Final dividend | 5.2p | 4.8p | 0.4p | +8% | 
| Total dividend for the year | 8.5p | 7.8p | 0.7p | +9% | 
| Basic earnings per share | 23.4p | 21.3p | 2.1p | +10% | 
| Underlying earnings per share^((3)) | 23.8p | 21.8p | 2.0p | +9% |

·    Revenue up £27.7m/9% on 2021 to £332.6m, as customers continued to upgrade 
their packages and to increase their use of digital products

·      Operating profit of £241.3m; up 7% on 2021 (2021: £226.1m)

·      Excluding the one-off impact of ‘other income’ of £2.4m in the prior year(
in relation to the release in 2021 of the contingent consideration for the acquisition
of Van Mildert), underlying operating profit^((2))  is up 7% compared to 2021.

·      Final dividend for 2022 up 8% to 5.2p (2021: 4.8p) per ordinary share. Total
dividend for 2022 up 9% to 8.5p (2021: 7.8p)

·      £197.7m of cash returned to shareholders through share buybacks and dividends
during 2022 (2021: £238.8m)

·      Cash and cash equivalents, including money market deposits, at the end of
the period of £40.1m (31 December 2021: £48.0m).

**Operational highlights**

·      Average revenue per advertiser (ARPA) ^((4)) up 11% to £1,314 per month (
2021: £1,189); second-highest year ever for absolute ARPA growth

·    Total membership flat at 19,014 (2021: 18,969), with Agency branches down 178
and New Homes Developments up 223 since the start of the year

·      Resilient traffic despite a significantly less frenetic property market than
2021, with a total of 16.3 billion^((5)) minutes spent on the platform in the year(
2021: 18.3 billion). Time on platform 34% higher than the pre-pandemic record of
2019

·      Continued uptake of our premium Optimiser 2020 package, with 34% of independent
agents now subscribing, up from 21% in December 2021

·      Ongoing strategic innovation, with the launch of the Rental Lead-to-Keys 
flow and increased consumer usage of the integrated Mortgage in Principle capability
both digitising more of the home-moving transaction.

·      Approval of our medium term emissions reduction targets by the Science-Based
Targets initiative (SBTi).

_(1)      Underlying operating profit is operating profit before the share-based
payments including the related National Insurance charge_

_(2)      Underlying operating profit excluding prior year ‘other income’ removes
the impact of £2.4m ‘other income’ in 2021, which represented the release of a one-
off contingent consideration provision_

_(3)      Underlying EPS is profit for the year before share-based payments charges(
including the related National Insurance and appropriate tax adjustments), divided
by the weighted average number of ordinary shares outstanding in the period_

_(4)      Average Revenue per Advertiser (ARPA) is calculated as revenue from Agency
and New Homes advertisers in a given month divided by the total number of advertisers
during the month, measured as a monthly average over year_

_(5)      Source: Google analytics_

**O****utlook**

Rightmove’s network effects continue to position us at the heart of the UK property
market and our visibility of property market data remains unrivalled. Our financial
performance in 2022 reflects the trust that our customers continue to place in our
digital products to help drive their businesses in both faster and slower markets.

While we remain alert to the ongoing economic uncertainty, Rightmove is not materially
impacted by the property market cycle, other than in the most extreme circumstances.

The strong ARPA growth in H2 2022, and the momentum it provides for 2023, gives 
us increased confidence in ARPA growth in 2023. 

We expect customer numbers to follow a similar pattern to that of the second half
of 2022.

In 2023, we will maintain our disciplined cost management and focus on profitable
revenue growth, as we continue to invest in innovation.  The increased inflationary
backdrop is not expected to materially impact costs, and we expect an Underlying
Operating Margin for 2023 of c73%.

Our capital returns policy, whereby substantially all cash generated in the year
is returned to shareholders, remains unchanged.

The strength of our proposition, coupled with our on-going innovation, underpins
the Board’s confidence in Rightmove’s outlook for 2023 and beyond.

> **Peter Brooks-Johnson, Chief Executive Officer, said:**
> _“The year’s changing housing market conditions demonstrated our customers’ resilience
> and ability to adapt and to continue to succeed. The softening from the covid-
> induced frenetic market towards a more normal market earlier in the year was disrupted
> in the final few months by the unexpected rapid mortgage rate increases. The strength
> of our results is a reminder of how effective and integral our new and existing
> products and services are in helping our customers in both faster and slower markets._
> _“Rightmove continues to be the place that people turn to and return to first,
> with an average of over 1.35bn minutes spent on our platform every month in 2022.
> The continuing love home movers have for Rightmove is testament to the team’s 
> focus on providing an easy to use leading edge platform, enhanced with innovation
> which home movers want. This is exemplified by the ability to create Property 
> Lists which we launched in 2022. Over one million lists, and counting, have been
> created since launch._
> _“There’s much more to come and exciting plans ahead for Rightmove. As a company
> that will always be close to my heart, and as a shareholder, I look forward to
> watching Rightmove’s ongoing progress as it continues to make home moving easier.”_

**The Company will publish a pre-recorded audio results presentation at 7.00am today,
followed by an audio Q&A session for analysts and investors at 9.30am with Peter
Brooks-Johnson, CEO, and Alison Dolan, CFO.**

**Chair’s review**

It is my pleasure to present Rightmove’s results for the year ended 31 December 
2022. In a year  of continued economic challenge and global change, our results 
demonstrate the resilience of Rightmove’s business model and the clear value we 
provide to our customers and to the UK’s home hunters. Rightmove remains the first
place that consumers turn to time after time as they look for their next home.

In spite of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, increased inflation and the challenges
in world markets, UK housing transaction numbers remained resilient in 2022, particularly
in the first half of the year, with c1.2m transactions. Traffic to the Rightmove
site remained considerably higher than pre-pandemic levels as consumers showed how
they continue to trust and rely on us to find a property, even in less certain times.
I am proud that our teams continued to deliver such a high quality of service to
our customers and to home hunters throughout the year.

2023 will see a transition in leadership for Rightmove as Peter Brooks-Johnson steps
down after more than 17 years in the business and as our CEO for the last six years.
I would like to thank Peter for his dedication and service. He has been fundamental
in helping Rightmove become the successful business it is today and the UK’s largest
property portal. Under his leadership, the Company has increased the value it provides
to customers and to home hunters, with time spent on the portal increasing from 
11.7bn minutes in 2016 to over 16bn minutes in 2022. This has delivered sustained
growth for our shareholders, increasing annual revenues from £220m to £333m in the
same period and returning more than £1 billion through dividends and share buybacks
over that time.

During 2022, the Board focused on supporting the management team with the ongoing
delivery of Rightmove’s strategic plan. In addition to the growth in the core business,
we continued to make progress with other strategic initiatives, including increasing
the digitisation of tenants’ rental journeys, simplifying the process for them; 
growing the value of the Commercial real estate business; and providing an enhanced
experience for consumers seeking a mortgage. Our ambition remains for Rightmove 
to be an innovative and sustainable growth business for the benefit of all stakeholders
as we continue to evolve our product offering and value proposition for the benefit
of our customers, consumers and shareholders.

_Financial Results_

The Group’s results reflect the strength of our business model and core value proposition,
delivering underlying operating profit^((1)) of £245.4m (2021: £231.0m) and operating
profit of £241.3m (2021: £226.1m) from revenue of £332.6m (2021: £304.9m). Underlying
earnings per share^((2)) were 23.8p (2021: 21.8p) and basic earnings per share 23.4p(
2021: 21.3p). Our cash^((3)) position at the year-end was £40.1m (2021: £48.0m),
having returned all surplus cash to shareholders.

_Returns to shareholders and dividend_

In keeping with our policy of returning free cash to our shareholders, £197.7m (
2021: £238.8m) was returned through the share buyback programme and dividend payments.

The Board remains confident in our ability to deliver sustainable returns to shareholders
and is recommending a final dividend of 5.2p per share for 2022 (2021: 4.8p). The
final dividend will be paid, subject to shareholder approval, on 26 May 2023, taking
the total dividend for the year to 8.5p, an increase of 9% on 2021 (2021: 7.8p).

_Board changes_

Johan Svanstrom was appointed to the Board on 20 February 2023 and will become CEO
in March 2023.  He will bring significant experience of growing established business
to business to consumer online marketplace businesses. Following his appointment
as Global President of Hotels.com and Expedia Affiliate Network brands in 2013, 
he served on the Expedia Group global leadership team for over five years – growing
revenues to over $3 billion and leading direct teams of 1,500 people across four
continents. A Swedish national based in the UK, Johan most recently served as a 
Partner, EQT Growth Advisory Team, which is part of EQT, the global investment organisation.

_Other Board changes_

Rakhi Goss-Custard leaves the Board in May 2023, having served her maximum term 
of nine years as a Non-Executive Director. Rakhi has made a significant contribution
to the Board, bringing extensive knowledge of the customer and consumer experiences
from a range of other digital product and mobile platforms. We have commenced a 
search for her successor and will keep the market appraised of our progress. I would
like to thank Rakhi for her contribution to the Board and to the business throughout
her tenure.

_Board governance_

The recently established Board sub-committee, the Corporate Responsibility Committee,
has continued to guide and oversee progress in the execution of our Environmental,
Social and Governance (ESG) strategy, and I am delighted with the approval of our
Net-Zero target by the Science-Based Targets initiative (SBTi).

This is our second year of reporting under the framework of the Taskforce for Climate-
Related Financial Disclosures and we have updated our climate-related risk assessments.
Further detail can be found in the [Sustainability](https://www.directorstalkinterviews.com/sustainability-green-stocks-news)
Report.

The Audit Committee has overseen the implementation of the new Enterprise Resource
Planning (ERP) finance system, as well as a revised Risk Management Framework.

The Remuneration Committee has reviewed and revised the Company’s Remuneration Policy
during the year. Consultation with Rightmove’s largest shareholders has been broadly
positive and the Policy will be put to shareholders at our Annual General Meeting
in May 2023.

_Looking ahead_

Our ambition to innovate continually to make home moving easier in the UK and to
create long-term sustainable growth for the benefit of all stakeholders is undeterred
as we move into 2023 and continue to execute on our long-held strategy for the benefit
of our customers, consumers and shareholders.

On behalf of the Board, I would like to thank all our customers for their confidence
and support and our employees, who continue to serve our customers and consumers
so well through their dedication and hard work.

I am looking forward to welcoming Johan into the business and to working with the
Board and the Rightmove team in 2023.

**Andrew Fisher**

**Chair**

_(1) Underlying Operating Profit is defined as operating profit before share-based
payments charges (including the related National Insurance)_

_(2) Underlying EPS is defined as profit for the year before share-based payments
charges (including the related National Insurance and appropriate tax adjustments),
divided by the weighted average number of ordinary shares in issue for the period_

_(3) Cash including money market deposits_

**Chief Executive’s review**

Rightmove’s purpose is to make home moving easier in the UK, and the trusted place
that we hold at the heart of Britain’s home moving journeys was evident during 2022.
Against a backdrop of macro-economic uncertainty, particularly in the second half
of the year, home movers continued to turn to Rightmove not only as the place to
find their next home, but as the most reliable source of information about the housing
market.   For the twelfth consecutive year, Google report that more people start
their home search with ‘Rightmove’ rather than ‘Property’; this popularity led to
home-movers spending over 16 billion minutes on our platform searching for their
next property.

Our customers continued to invest in our digital products, to showcase their expertise
and to build their businesses, in what was a year of contrast for our customers,
with the underlying post-pandemic robust market of the first quarter returning to
a more normal market over the course of the year. This theme was punctuated by the
rapid rise in mortgage rates following the mini budget.  The robustness of our business
model and the return of investment on our products for agents and developers are
evidenced by the high ARPA growth of £125 – our second-highest year ever for absolute
ARPA growth after the 2021 Covid-recovery year.

I am proud that we have emerged from the pandemic disruption with deeper relationships
than ever with our customers, who have seen our products deliver such strong returns
for them, not just through the buoyant market conditions of Q1 2022, but in the 
more normal conditions over the remainder of the year.

2022 has very much demonstrated the semi-countercyclical nature of the Rightmove
Agency and New Homes businesses.  Estate Agents started the year with a seller-led,
stock-constrained market that then evolved to one in which realistic pricing was
key to concluding sales. Throughout the year, agents continued to purchase additional
Rightmove Products to drive their businesses forward, by winning the right instructions,
and the average revenue per advertiser (ARPA) for Agency grew 11% to £1,278.

New Homes developers began the year with many developments fully sold off-plan and
therefore not advertised. The fall in demand in the fourth quarter saw Developers
turn to Rightmove’s digital products to help to boost sales, which resulted in a
8% increase in the number of developments listed on Rightmove at the end of 2022
and increased take-up by developers of our products, particularly Native Search 
Adverts and Digital Marketing.  ARPA for New Homes grew by 11% to £1,513 in the 
year.

Rightmove’s key smaller businesses – Commercial Property, Data Services, Overseas
Listings and Third-Party Advertising – which leverage the strength of our property
advertising business – also continued their impressive growth rates throughout 2022.
These business units all maintained double-digit growth in 2022 and contributed 
£31.5m to revenue (2021: £26.8m).  Our more nascent businesses, Tenant Services 
and Mortgages, continue to evolve their proposition for consumers as well as for
agents and landlords, and we have learnt an enormous amount during 2022 about the
right next steps as we build these businesses.  

Rightmove’s commitment to innovation remains undimmed.  One of many examples of 
our innovation to help our customers be more efficient is the launch of our Certification
for Estates and Lettings Agents – a series of online training courses with a bespoke
learning management system that enables agents to receive an Ofqual-regulated Level
3 certificate. We help our customers to reach the UK’s largest audience of home 
hunters more effectively through continuous improvements to our market-leading products,
such as Local Valuation Alert and Native Search Adverts, and we are playing a leading
role in digitising the processes of buying and renting a home through our Lead-to-
Keys and Mortgage in Principle flows.

I am delighted that our products and our teams have delivered such strong value 
for our customers and our consumers throughout the entirety of what has been a turbulent
year for the country and the economy. Our progress is testament to our disciplined
focus and the huge efforts that ‘Rightmovers’ have put into building this business
together with our industry customers. We look forward to delivering further growth
as we continue to shape the UK property market and support our customers in 2023.

**Our Strategy – making home moving easier**

**The place consumers turn to and return to first **

Rightmove is synonymous with home-moving, remaining the place home hunters and sellers
turn and return to first when looking for a property or to research the market. 
Over 80% of all time spent on property portals in the UK continues to be spent on
Rightmove^((1)); a reflection of the quality and innovation in our technology and
platforms, delivering the most effective search and research tools and up-to-date
property content.

During 2022, the level of consumer engagement on the Rightmove platforms remained
exceptionally high: consumers paid over 2.3 billion^((2)) visits to our platforms(
2021: 2.5 billion visits) and spent over 16.3 billion^((2)) minutes searching for
properties on Rightmove (2021: 18.3 billion minutes).  Over 70% of all time spent
on Rightmove’s platforms in 2022 was to our mobile-optimised site and apps. 

This level of consumer engagement is underpinned by our culture of continuous improvement.
One focus during 2022 was to encourage home hunters to engage more deeply with Rightmove
by logging in while searching.  We released features such as a customisable ‘Property
List’, to help home hunters to organise their search journey in categories that 
make sense to them. Since release, over a million unique lists have been created,
by over 600,000 people, not only making the search process more effective for home
hunters but generating useful data for future product development.  My Enquires,
another feature available to logged-in users, allows home hunters to track properties
they have enquired on and record their thoughts, making Rightmove even more integral
in the path to a new home.  Over 9% of people sending leads have used the feature
since it launched in November 2022.

In addition to searching for properties, consumers use Rightmove data to research
the property market.  Rightmove’s unique demand data, analytical capabilities and
access to real-time search and sales patterns provide valuable insights and commentary
on property and home-moving trends. Property research tools, such as sold prices
data and the “Where Can I Live?” tool, were widely used by landlords, homeowners,
buyers and sellers during 2022.  Following a ground-up refresh, consumers spent 
18% longer browsing our sold prices data, which integrates our proprietary archive
of over 16.4m unique properties. We sent an average of 3.3 million consumer emails
every week to keep both consumers and professionals up to date with the property
market, and our House Price Index remains the most accurate leading indicator of
house prices in the UK, based on 95% of newly advertised properties in the UK.

Consumers expect the platform they rely on to be available all the time. Testament
to the engineering prowess and dedication of the team, Rightmove maintained its 
industry leading level of uptime of 99.9% meaning the platform was unavailable for
less than 43 minutes for the entirety of 2022.

**Unrivalled returns for our customers through digital marketing solutions and insight**

Rightmove provides its customers with exposure of their brands and properties to
the largest possible home-moving audience, as well as a range of digital services
and information. This helps them to market more effectively; win more business; 
grow their market share; save time; and create new revenue streams.

The high traffic to Rightmove, coupled with the strong rentals market, meant a continued
rise in the number of property-specific leads delivered to our customers, with over
67m leads sent in 2022, an increase of 8% on 2021. At over 2 leads every second,
this is a new record for the number of leads sent from Rightmove in a year. 

The extensive digital product suite we offer to customers has been carefully designed
to be effective in both faster and slower markets. As the market changed during 
2022, and stock levels increased, our customers turned more than ever to our products
to help them to win property sales instructions efficiently. 

Our premium packages, Enhanced and Optimiser, help our agency customers to generate
more opportunities to win instructions cost-effectively. These packages include 
branding solutions to boost agents’ performance in the awareness stage of the marketing
funnel. The branding suite was enhanced in 2022 with the introduction of the Native
Search Advert product, exclusively for our Optimiser customers. Reflecting the evolving
nature of online advertising, Native Search Adverts provide our customers for the
first time with a medium by which to market themselves via video on the Rightmove
platform.  The product is particularly strong on mobile and uses smart targeting
to help to ensure the best return for agents. To help agents to deliver engaging
video content, we automatically created innovative, data-driven videos for each 
agent, drawing on over 182,000 data points.

Our popular Local Valuation Alert and Rightmove Discover products fast-track agents
to the consideration stage of a home seller’s process for choosing an agent. During
2022, we continued to enhance the performance of these products to keep them at 
the forefront of digital marketing for our customers.   Local Valuation Alert was
optimised on our mobile platform, which helped to deliver over 22% more leads from
people asking for a valuation on their home in 2022 compared to 2021.  Rightmove
Discover was upgraded to encompass an on-demand version, allowing customers to self-
serve their membership and access products immediately.

The usefulness of our additional products to customers is demonstrated by over 1,300
agents electing to upgrade to our top Optimiser package during 2022. These package
upgrades, along with customers choosing to buy more products and our pricing actions,
contributed to the strong agency ARPA growth between January and December 2022.

New Homes developers also continued to invest in our top subscription packages specifically
designed for them – despite facing a stock-constrained market for much of the year,
when developments were fully sold out, reducing developers’ needs to advertise. 
Advanced Development Listings creates an opportunity to cross-sell and up-sell plots
on a development, providing better engagement and lead-generation, and subscription
to this package increased by 37% on last year.   In the fourth quarter, as the property
market cooled, sales of the two products introduced in 2021 – the Property and Developer
Carousels – increased. Both products were designed to operate most effectively in
a demand-constrained environment. The growth, along with the resurgence of the Digital
Marketing Campaign product has generated significant momentum for New Homes ARPA
as we head into 2023.

Rightmove’s value to our customers goes beyond digital advertising solutions; we
also offer tools and training to our customers to support them in running their 
businesses more efficiently. Rightmove Plus – included free of charge as part of
all Rightmove membership packages – helps customers throughout the property marketing
lifecycle and was used by over 90% of independent estate agents during 2022. The
Best Price Guide, for example, a reporting tool within Rightmove Plus which helps
agents to gather comparable properties to support their suggested property price,
saves them up to an hour per market appraisal. The Best Price Guide alone was used
over 17 million times in 2022, a 22% increase on 2021. 

Rightmove’s culture of constant improvement and innovation helps to create more 
opportunities for our customers to identify potential new business. A good example
of this is Opportunity Manager, which is a lead management tool available with our
Optimiser package and is powered by an algorithm that is constantly learning and
improving to intelligently spot the home hunters who are most likely to turn into
potential home sellers in an agent’s area. The opportunity to get a head start on
marketing to these potential vendors led to a third of Optimiser customers using
Opportunity Manager at least once a week.

Our market-leading professional training programme, free to all members, remains
an invaluable tool for our customers. Delivered in webinars, it was viewed by more
than 14,000 property professionals, both live and through our on-demand service,
and the topics covered in 2022 ranged from ‘economy’ and ‘winning more stock’ to‘
legislation across sales and lettings’. Our Rightmove Hub, which hosts all the material,
had more than 1.4 million page views in the year.

In November, we were proud to launch a new Ofqual-regulated Level 3 certificate 
to estate and lettings agents – the Certificate for Estate and Lettings Agents (
CELA). The training is free to Rightmove members (who pay only for the final exam)
and is provided online, backed by a bespoke learning management system. It includes
an overview of the industry, from experts, on the moving process, codes of practice,
legislation and customer services, giving them an easy way to demonstrate their 
quality and credibility to sellers and landlords. By the end of the year, within
six weeks of launch, over 1,700 agents had enrolled with momentum growing into 2023.

The Rightmove platform is tailored to ensure it works for our entire range of customers
across the different business units. Rightmove’s Commercial Real Estate (CRE) portal
provides access to the largest audience of agents, surveyors, landlords, owners,
developers and investors in the UK.  The market share of time spent on Rightmove
Commercial increased by 3% to 63% in 2022. This platform increasingly generates 
leads from occupiers with significant scale, allowing CRE agents not only to earn
a fee on the property being advertised but to introduce clients to the other professional
services they offer. Reflecting the increasing size and value of this audience to
our CRE customers, ARPA has increased by 30%.

Rightmove’s Data Services business supports the property industry by delivering 
property valuation tools and insights based on our unparalleled datasets. Surveyors
use our Surveyor Comparable Tool to make property valuations – it was used in over
75% of mortgage transactions in the UK in 2022, with more than 2.3 million reports
run – whilst our Automated Valuation Model is used by lenders and was used to value
more than £4.9 trillion worth of property in 2022.

**Innovating to make the home moving process more efficient by being more digital**

Rightmove has played, and continues to play, a leading role in the ongoing digitisation
of the property search market in the UK. Our goal is to improve all aspects of the
journey – from searching for a home to being ready to transact. We want to make 
the process more transparent, efficient and less stressful for both professionals
and home hunters, while creating opportunities to expand and augment our revenue
beyond classified advertising.

Rightmove is helping to drive an increasingly digital rental journey, making the
process less fragmented and frustrating for agents, landlords and tenants alike.
We launched our ‘Lead-to-Keys’ tenancy digital workflow in June, with virtually 
every element of the tenancy journey – from initial lead, via video viewing, holding
deposit, tenant referencing, security deposit, digitally signed contract to ‘keys’(
and beyond into tenant and landlord insurance and broadband services for tenants)–
now available on the Rightmove platform. The introduction of “enhanced leads” in
the fourth quarter allows tenants to share a little more about themselves when enquiring
about a property, reducing the likelihood of a frustrating reference failure for
them late in the process.

Our tenant-referencing product is also increasingly sophisticated, as we introduced
open-banking to our referencing process during the year, reducing both the application
time for tenants and the accuracy for agents and for landlords. These two releases
created a market first, with tenants able to search, secure and contract on a property
entirely from their mobile device.

We also continued to enhance the early stage of the home-buying journey that involves
understanding affordability. Our nascent digital flow for mortgages brings together
the Mortgage in Principle (MiP) and property search tools, with helpful content 
which not only creates more certainty for borrowers but increases the volume and
quality of mortgage leads for our mortgage partner. Consumers are able to apply 
for a MIP directly from our site and can then tailor their search journey to a successful
MiP, confident that they will be able to borrow the amount they need to secure their
next home.  Despite only reaching scale in Q4, the number of MiPs completed was 
nearly double that in 2021. Plans are well advanced to make the journey to achieving
a MiP easier and more efficient for a greater proportion of borrowers in the first
quarter of 2023. This helps both prospective buyers and enhances agent efficiency
through better qualified leads.

**Our environment and society**

‘Doing the right thing’ is central to the way we do things and our response to a
range of issues. As an organisation, we live by our values and our values extend
beyond how we do business. We believe Rightmove can and should be a force for good
within the communities in which we operate.

During 2022, we remained focused on delivering our environmental strategy, and the
Science Based Targets Initiative’s scientists validated our emissions reductions
targets as being consistent with the 1.5 degrees global warming initiative. These
targets will see us reach Net Zero in both our own business and in our supply chain
by 2040. Beyond what we do within our business, we believe we can use the reach 
of our platform to continue to help consumers to understand the available options
to make their homes more energy efficient.

We continued to engage with our local communities with an emphasis on charities 
that matter to our employees, making donations and offering employee-matched funding.
We supported charities close to our offices, where our contributions can make a 
significant impact including Willen Hospice and Harry’s Rainbow who support bereaved
children. 

A diverse Rightmove is important to us. We recognise that a diverse team will provide
a wide range of perspectives that promote innovation and business success. Drawing
on what is unique about individuals adds value to the way we do business and helps
us to anticipate and then provide the features our customers and home hunters expect
from the Rightmove platform. We are committed to reducing the gender pay gap within
Rightmove and are pleased to report that the ethnic diversity of our employees reflects
the UK population, with good representation in each pay quartile. We continue to
work on promoting inclusion and opportunity beyond our workforce. Through our partnership
with Makers’ Academy we hope to encourage people to switch to a career in technology,
particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds.

More information about these initiatives and our environmental policy can be found
in the Environmental, Social and Governance Report.

**The Rightmove team**

Our people define Rightmove: talent and passion to perform is not enough to make
a great Rightmover – the way in which we behave towards each other, our customers
and consumers is vital and creates a culture which is inclusive and supportive, 
where everyone matters and knows that their ideas will be explored, and views respected.
Our employees live by the central behaviours of doing the right thing for our customers
and consumers, driving improvement, and taking responsibility for making things 
that matter happen.

 In 2022 87% (2021: 89%) of employees, responding to the annual Have Your Say Survey,
agreed that ‘Rightmove is a great place to work’. 

I am proud of the vibrant culture and business we have built together, and I would
like to thank everyone for everything they have done to achieve this. I wish Johan
every success and hope he will enjoy his journey at Rightmove as much as I have.
I look forward to watching Rightmove’s continued success in the future.

**Peter Brooks-Johnson**

Chief Executive Officer

2 March 2023

_(1) Source: Comscore MMX® Desktop only + Comscore Mobile Metrix® Mobile Web & App,
Total Audience, Custom-defined list of Rightmove Sites, RIGHTMOVE.CO.UK, ZOOPLA.
CO.UK, PRIMELOCATION.COM, ONTHEMARKET.COM, and BOOMIN.COM January – December 2022,
United Kingdom_

_(2) Source: Google analytics_

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