Shares in OnTheMarket began trading on London’s AIM stock market today kicking off at £1.63.5p, valuing the company at £29.3 million, and quickly rising by 2p to £1.65.
The OnThemarket shares issue, which it says has raised £30m out of a hoped-for £50m to finance its battle for market share with Rightmove and ZPG, is the conclusion of a long and tortuous road for CEO Ian Springett’s ambitious portal project.
It launched in January 2015 two years after founding members Knight Frank, Savills, Strutt & Parker and Chestertons first convened to form parent company Agents’ Mutual Ltd.
OnTheMarket.com positioned itself as a mutual organisation of agent members, but introduced a controversial ‘one other portal’ rules that made agents choose between either Rightmove or Zoopla as their ‘other portal’.
Last year agent Gascoigne Halman took OnTheMarket to court, claiming the ‘one other portal’ rule was anti-competitive, but lost the case.
This cleared the way for OnTheMarket to demutualise, which took place following a vote of its 2,700 agent members late last year.
Former members of the mutual organisation were allocated share options based on their size of listing and length of membership. This lead to several agents signing up to long-term deals with OnTheMarket, in return for share options, including Hunters and Arun Estates.
But the portal has often been riled by ZPG’s ability to poach agents off OnTheMarket, which ZPG claims has totalled over 800 agents since OnTheMarket launched.
“The key proposition of the business remains the creation of an agent-backed, full-scale property portal to disrupt what is otherwise a duopoly of Rightmove and Zoopla by offering a premier search experience to consumers whilst charging sustainably fair prices to agents,” says OnTheMarket’s initial public offering (IPO) material.
OnTheMarket says that as of today it has 5,500 branches signed up to its platform, approximately a third of the market.
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