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Despite a fall in Australian housing volumes, realestate.com.au’s parent company has announced revenue and profits are up.
REA Group held its annual general meeting in Melbourne yesterday, with chairman Hamish McLennan flagging the company’s strong results in the face of flattening market conditions.
According to notes from the meeting, revenue from the group’s core operations grew by 20 per cent to $629.8 million in the 2016 financial year. Group earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) rose by 22 per cent to $347.3 million and net profit increased by 16 per cent to $214.5 million.
“This is a particularly strong result given that property listings volumes were relatively flat in Australia during the same period,” Mr McLennan said, citing CoreLogic data comparing Australian residential market “new buy” listings for the year ended 30 June 2016 to 30 June, 2015.
Mr McLennan said the results provided good news for investors in the group.
“Pleasingly for our shareholders, earnings per share increased by 16 per cent to 163 cents and our total dividend for the year increased 16 per cent to 81.5 cents per share fully franked,” he said.
Meanwhile, CEO Tracey Fellows said REA Group’s impressive results had continued beyond the 2016 financial year.
“Our revenue from core operations for the quarter ending 30 September 2016 delivered revenue growth of 16 per cent to $170 million and EBITDA growth of 9 per cent to $90 million,” she told the AGM.
“This is a strong result and I want to put that in context. Housing volumes in Australia, our largest market, fell by 8 per cent over the quarter. So to deliver the revenue growth that we saw in spite of the listings fall is a really strong performance.”
Mr McLennan said the group’s “flagship site” realestate.com.au has “attracted 2.1 times the number of visits while the average monthly time spent on the site was 6.1 times longer” than its nearest competitor.
“For our agent customers, we are continuing to focus on delivering more value through premium listing products which are providing an increased return on investment to both agents and vendors,” he said.
Ms Fellows weighed in, saying agents remained key to realestate.com.au’s strategy and ongoing success.
“The three pillars of our strategy remain the same,” she said.
“The first is property advertising, the foundation of our business, which is online property listings and supported by great data. We really believe that agents are going to continue to play an important role in the property transaction, an important part of our ecosystem, and an important part of the value that we want to add to them every day.”
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