Rightmove’s Revenue Diversification Challenge
Like Sweden's Hemnet, Rightmove is almost entirely reliant on a single growth lever: pricing power.
Why it matters: Growing new revenue streams is hard, and after four years of investment, Rightmove's strategic growth areas still represent only seven percent of total revenue.
With complete market saturation, Rightmove's primary growth engine, ARPA (average revenue per advertiser), has been slowing for years.
Cost growth has outpaced revenue growth since 2022 as Rightmove invests in three strategic growth areas (SGAs): mortgages, commercial, and rental services.
The result has been a gradual erosion of its industry-leading profit margins, from 76 percent in FY22 to 70 percent in FY25.
Investment in new revenue streams doesn’t come cheap; Rightmove’s tech headcount has more than doubled since 2020.
About ninety percent of Rightmove’s revenue comes from what it considers its core business: agency and new homes.
And that core has been the primary growth driver, accounting for 87 percent of total revenue growth since 2016.
Revenue concentration in the core business has dropped from 92 to 89 percent in the same period, and in FY25, 7 percent of revenue came from Rightmove’s strategic growth areas (up from 4.4 percent in FY22) – a slow increase.
Reducing reliance on the core by diversifying revenue streams has been a top priority for management.
In 2023, a plan was outlined to go from 90 to 75 percent revenue concentration in core, with strategic growth areas accounting for 20 percent of total revenue by 2028.
With core revenues sitting at 89 percent and the strategic growth areas at 7 percent, it appears unlikely this goal will be met.
Rightmove’s strategic growth areas are growing at a healthy rate; they’re just small.
The growth rates are consistent with other portal adjacencies, Zillow Rentals and Scout24’s consumer subscription business.
The issue is numerical: revenue in Rightmove’s three strategic growth areas is £29M, compared to €107M in Scout24’s consumer subscriptions and $630M in Zillow Rentals.
Part of Rightmove’s challenge is that it won’t hit its 2028 goal.
While its 2023 investor presentation was filled with specific revenue targets, the 2025 update included no specific revenue targets.
In fact, the only reference to revenue targets is buried in a dense slide with classic British understatement: “2028 revenue targets will take longer.”
Run Rightmove’s 2023 and 2025 investor day presentations through the Loughran-McDonald Financial Sentiment Dictionary — the academic standard for analysing corporate disclosure language — and a pattern emerges that goes well beyond tone.
Conviction language — words like “will,” “deliver,” “launch,” and “drive” — dropped 76 percent per 1,000 words between the 2023 and 2025 investor presentations.
And on a normalized basis, there are significantly fewer financial words like revenue, ARPA, and CAGR – while “accelerate,” a verb that describes speed without specifying a destination, is up over 300 percent.
The bottom line: Rightmove has invested in growth beyond its core, but after four years, its strategic growth areas are just seven percent of revenue and the 2028 targets have been quietly pushed out.
Rightmove is almost exactly as reliant on its core today (89 percent) as it was a decade ago (92 percent) — the diversification story remains aspirational and uncertain.
Both Rightmove and Hemnet are starting to see the upper limits of pricing as a growth lever, but finding profitable alternatives are costly, take time, and are much easier said than done.