Rightmove plc (RMV) Earnings Call Transcript

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 state 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 Q 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 completed 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 state 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 the state 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 data sets 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 agents and new home partners. Now moving on to some review of their 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, 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 state 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 a rows. And you can see that through most of these time periods, there's been some green tailwinds on either supply or demand side. But at the moment in 2026, there was 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 face 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, weaken consumer confidence, more political uncertainty and 2 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've 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 serving, marketing and lobbying engagement activities. So in conclusion on this piece, while it's a tough volume spell in the market, we've 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 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, the 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 inquiry manager to customers across the start of the year. Around 7,000 partners now have inquiry manager with 1.7 million of the inquiries coming from this higher lettings product revenue. This activity is largely compete -- complete. So our focus going forward will mainly be on driving referencing and ancillary revenues. Overall, we continue to expect SG&A 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 85,000 to 90,357. 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 level 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 Optimizer Edge had almost more than double the incremental ARPA growth in their second year of membership compared to what we saw with Optimizer 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 a 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 product 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 results 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 is 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 drawn down, 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 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 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've 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 to 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 SG&As in this half. And you heard some from Rory. Commercial, launched a 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 inquiry 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 played slide format now. So first, we have a fully AI-capable and leading tech 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 said 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 principled 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, number two 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 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 future. In late 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 write new data together. And local pricing and market dynamics, leveraging Rightmove's proprietary data set 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 and even for end 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 through 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. They're 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, in very early stage products that are more fully based on AI, the Rightmove Plus Property Performance Assistance and Voice Intelligence. I'll talk you through all 3 very briefly as they show very well we now can create value, AI built in. So we mentioned online agent valuation, or 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 of 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 valuations 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 Optimizer Edge branches, and that shows both 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 power 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 are impossible to match for -- by, for example, an LLM or a startup. 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 RightmovePlus AI system 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 state 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 data set. 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 recording for training, lead qualification, staff performance monitoring. Their biggest issue, well, is 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 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, a 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 2 questions in the first instance, and we can come back if there is more time. Jes, do you want to go?

It's Jessica Pok from Peel Hunt. Two questions. The first is on new homes. Clearly, a 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? And the second one is on SG&A. And 14% in 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. So yes, 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 sell 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 of 15%. ARPA has been deflated because of the mix. but we've now got our first chargeable product 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 SG&A growth up to the 20% to 30%. Will?

It's Will Packer from BNP Paribas. A couple for 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 of other media Internet businesses because of the smaller data set, 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 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 AI ops and also financial ops perspective. So we're controlling our rollout and continuously, of course, optimize the setup itself, right? There's a lot you can do with cashing. There's a lot that we can do, thanks to the flexible architecture in terms of using different models, right, several different models levels in terms of performance cost and quality from each LLM and of course, across the different MLMs. On an ongoing kind of macro perspective, there continues to be as we 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. We've probably seen just recently AI, K3 model, I think, 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 in the future, and we have fantastic team that manages to keep track and experiment with that as well. Jo?

It's Joe from UBS. A couple from me. Other non-SG&A. 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'll take the first a second. So yes, the other business lines. So again, we call the mother 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 bits 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 more rich data and qualifications that will give us that, that will probably provide opportunities to target them with advertising in a better way in the future. But we're not putting 2 big sort of financial expectations on that, just worth mentioning, I think.

In terms of the exceptional, 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 to pass 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 Maas 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 startups 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 the 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 1 part of the pieces of our capital allocation.

Great. Yes. And on competition, I think the headline 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 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 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, it's 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 see 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?