REA Group has achieved a 37.8% jump in first half year profits – its best result ever.
REA which operates online property portals realestate.com.au and realcommercial.com.au – a news partner of Australian Property Journal, yesterday delivered revenue of $91.28 million – an increase of 27.9% over the prior period.
CEO Greg Ellis while in the past growth was based on a combination of organic and acquisition, the first half-year of FY09 was almost purely based on organic growth except for one small strategic acquisition in the UK.
During the last six months REA Group has reviewed its portfolio of businesses which resulted in the closure of the New Zealand office, the sale of the Clarke business (trust accounting software) in Australia, a refocused agent solutions business in Australia, and a write-off of the intangibles and goodwill of the Belgium agent solutions business (Altowin).
Overall, during the period the REA Group core business of online advertising has shown strong resilience during the last half-year to the current global economic crisis. The relative robustness of the online business is a result of the product structure (subscriptions with additional upgrade products) and the price and convenience of online advertising over traditional advertising.
In Australia, the REA Group’s largest market, the company continues to operate the most popular residential and commercial real estate sites:
ï‚· Australian revenues were up 33% to $73.3 million
ï‚· Subscribing Australian agents increased to 9,284 as at 31 December 2008, representing about 95% of the estimated Australian agent base
ï‚· Average revenue per agent increased to $926 per month for Australian agents
ï‚· Traffic (Unique Browsers) to Australian websites increased from 3.7m to 4.8m (Nielsen) – the gap between realestate.com.au and domain (#2 residential site in Australia) reached 2.1m which has realestate.com.au at more than 2 times the traffic of domain.com.au
Australian Property Journal
