OTM claims that it's anticipating interference from rivals when it comes to agent payments

British property giant OnTheMarket CEO Ian Springett is anticipating rival portals may try to "interfere" with the company's goal to convert agency members from free to discounted deals to market-rate contracts.

OTM’s latest report to shareholders and the City said that around 1,000 of its existing members on free deals had converted to paying contracts an average revenue per agency of £337 per month. 

Now, in an interview with the Directors Talk financial website, Springett says a key target for the portal over the rest of this year is to get more existing member agents to convert - and it is at this point that he makes an allegation about rival portals.

He says: “Clearly we need to continue the process of moving to paying contracts for the agents who are on the portal. We won’t be announcing that on a frequent or regular basis because we can’t conduct that activity in public.

“It’s a negotiation within the industry with individual agent firms, and obviously competitors have a vested interest in trying to interfere with the process as well. So we probably won’t be making particularly big announcements about it [converting agents] until we get to our interim report in October.”

He says that instead investors should look out for more information on the traffic to OTM and the value it delivered to agents.

Elsewhere in the interview Springett spoke of the year to the end of January 2019 - the first year of OnTheMarket being listed on the London Stock Exchange - as being “great”.

He also claimed that by May this year OnTheMarket was delivering 33 percent of the leads sent to agents by what he called “the big portals.”

Meanwhile a report by broker Edison - commissioned by and funded by OnTheMarket - forecasts that the portal will be in profit around 2021.

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