Everything About AI
NextFin News - Europe and Australia's leading classifieds platforms are betting that artificial intelligence can uncouple their growth from the property and recruitment cycles. Rightmove Plc raised its 2026 earnings-per-share guidance to at least 7% growth from 5% on Friday, while Scout24 SE specified full-year revenue growth of about 18% after third-quarter sales jumped 19.7% to €198.2 million. Both companies say AI-powered tools are opening revenue streams that do not depend on more houses changing hands or more jobs being posted - a shift that matters because the underlying markets they sit on top of remain subdued.
The question for investors is whether these platforms are engineering a structural re-rating or simply spending their way through a cyclical trough. The answer lies in the uptake data, and the first signals are arriving.
Layer 1: The Situation - Growth Without a Recovery
The three platforms - Rightmove in the UK, Scout24 in Germany and Spain, and Seek Ltd across Australia and Asia - share a common problem and a common answer. The problem is that their core markets are flat or cooling. The answer, increasingly, is to sell intelligence rather than just listings.
Rightmove's upgrade came against a UK housing market that is barely moving. The average asking price of newly listed homes was £371,015 in October 2026, up 1.0% from September but down 0.1% from a year earlier - effectively flat. The Bank of England lifted its benchmark rate to 4% in November, the first increase in more than three years, keeping mortgage costs high for the buyers that Rightmove's estate-agent customers depend on. Yet the company told investors that AI-powered operations helped it raise its 2027 productivity target. It now expects 2026 revenue growth of 8% to 10%, underlying operating profit growth of 3% to 5%, and an underlying operating margin no lower than 67%.
Scout24's numbers tell a similar story with more momentum. Third-quarter revenue rose 19.7% year over year, though only 10.1% of that was organic growth excluding Spain; the rest came from its acquisition of the Spanish portals Fotocasa and Habitaclia. German subscription revenue grew 11.5%, supported by 3.9% customer growth and 7.4% growth in average revenue per user. Ordinary operating EBITDA rose 15.9% to €120.8 million, a 60.9% margin, and the organic margin edged up 0.4 percentage points to 63.3%. Management specified full-year revenue growth of about 18%, narrowing its previous 16% to 18% range, and kept its ordinary operating EBITDA margin target at up to 61%, or up to 64% on an organic basis.
Seek, the Asia-Pacific employment marketplace, is navigating a cooling labour market. The company reported full-year net revenue growth of 10% in a softer macro environment, with paid-advertising yield across Asia-Pacific up 18% more than offsetting a 6% decline in paid-ad volumes - ANZ volumes fell 1% and Asia volumes fell 12%. EBITDA grew 15% and adjusted profit and earnings per share rose 28%. But the reported bottom line showed a loss of AUD 307 million, driven by a A$201 million net loss from its Growth Fund investments and a Japan impairment. Free cash flow rose 21% to AUD 246 million, the highest since FY2022.
The common thread is not that transaction volumes are booming. They are not. It is that each platform is using AI to extract more money from each existing customer and each existing listing.
Layer 2: The Analysis
AI as a second revenue engine, not just a cost cutter
The first-order reading of these AI programmes is that they reduce costs. That is part of the story, but it is the smaller part. The more important shift is that AI is becoming a billable product - and that changes the shape of the revenue.
A listing fee is tied to whether an agent has something to sell or an employer has a vacancy to fill. An AI tool fee is tied to how much the customer uses the software. If usage grows while listings stay flat, revenue can still rise. This is the mechanism behind what Seek's head of commercial, Peter Bithos, described on the company's FY26 results call:
"Increasingly our job ad is not an ad per se, rather a set of AI services that help deliver a placement."
The uptake numbers are the clearest evidence that this is already happening. Scout24's ImmoPoints - a digital currency that professionals spend on AI-enabled services - had more than 10,000 professional customers using it in September 2026, up more than 40% from a year earlier, with transaction volume up more than 30%. At its Capital Markets Day in May, the company said roughly 60% of B2B members were taking up the scheme. Rightmove has 43 live AI initiatives, including conversational search built with Google Cloud, virtual staging and call transcription for estate agents. Seek's Jobstreet unit has rolled out seekAi, including an agentic assistant that handles pre-screening voice interviews, applicant ranking and automated reference checks.
The transmission channel is straightforward: more users generate more behavioural data, which improves the AI, which attracts more users and justifies higher prices. That loop is expensive to replicate and gets harder to attack with each quarter. It is also why the companies are willing to accept near-term margin pressure. Rightmove is spending roughly £18 million on AI in 2026, including £12 million through the profit-and-loss account and £6 million capitalized, and has added more than 100 hires across data, product and engineering.
The moat is data, not the model
The second question is whether these features are defensible. Any platform can licence a large language model. What is harder to copy is the proprietary data the model runs on.
Rightmove says 90% of the four petabytes underpinning its AI tools is proprietary - search behaviour, listing performance, agent call recordings. Scout24 has spent about €400 million on data assets, including the acquisitions of valuation firms Sprengetter and Bulwiengesa, to feed its immo.ai intelligence layer. Seek's advantage is its history of placements and applications across Australia and Asia, which lets it rank candidates against actual hiring outcomes rather than keyword matches.
This is why the market is willing to look through the margin pressure. Rightmove's shares rose more than 4% on the guidance upgrade, trading around 562 pence. Scout24's shares gained 4.54% after its third-quarter update, reaching €89.43 on 4 November, and were changing hands near €92.80 the following day. Investors are paying for the option on recurring, usage-based revenue inside businesses that have historically been pure transaction tollbooths.
Cyclical markets, structural shift
This is where the cyclical-versus-structural call comes in, and the two must be separated - because getting it wrong flips the conclusion.
The housing and hiring downturns are cyclical. They are driven by interest rates and confidence, and they revert when rates fall and activity recovers. History is full of these cycles: UK housing transactions collapsed after the 2008 financial crisis and again after the 2022 mini-budget shock, then recovered as mortgage rates stabilized; German housing went through deep corrections in the 1990s after reunification and in 2008, each followed by a rebound; Australian job advertisements have risen and fallen with every mining boom and bust over the past two decades. None of the current weakness is a permanent impairment to the platforms' core markets.
The AI monetization, by contrast, is structural. It is a change in what the business sells and how it charges. Even if UK house prices stay flat for another two years, Rightmove can still raise average revenue per agent through AI tools. Even if Australian hiring stays soft, Seek can still sell automation that reduces recruiters' administrative time. The structural shift is from being a passive tollbooth on transactions to being an active software vendor inside the transaction workflow.
Scout24's chief executive, Ralf Weitz, put it directly after the third-quarter result:
"Q3 shows that we continue to deliver strong results through changing market conditions while building our Agentic OS for real estate. We maintained double-digit organic revenue growth, expanded organic margins, and added customers in both professional and private."
The phrase "Agentic OS" is not accidental - it describes a platform that lives inside the customer's daily work, not one that waits for a listing to be posted.
The risk is blending the two forces. If the cycle turns up first, the platforms get a double lift - volume recovery plus AI monetization - and investors may attribute all of it to AI. If the cycle stays down, only the AI story is left to defend, and the valuation depends entirely on usage growth holding up.
The counter-thesis: AI features are easy to copy, and the rivals are well funded
The strongest case against this view is that AI features are not a moat at all. Zillow, CoStar Group, REA Group and Domain are all rolling out conversational search and agent tools, and several have deeper pockets. CoStar's Homes AI, built on Microsoft Azure, offers speech-to-speech search over neighbourhood intelligence and price history. REA Group partnered with OpenAI to power its realAssist companion. If the underlying models commoditize, the platforms are selling a feature that customers expect to be free.
There is also a pricing-power question. Rightmove's 2026 operating profit growth of 3% to 5% is roughly half its revenue growth of 8% to 10%, precisely because AI investment is eating the margin. If AI tools do not command premium pricing, the platforms absorb the cost forever and simply become less profitable versions of themselves. The market has punished this before: Rightmove's shares fell 28% in November 2025 when it first flagged the step-change in AI spending.
The answer lies in the uptake data, and it favours the platforms - for now. ImmoPoints at 60% of B2B members and growing 40% year over year, Scout24's AI search used by 2.5% of on-site seekers and "growing fast", Rightmove's 43 live initiatives - these suggest the tools are being adopted, not just announced. Adoption is the test. If professionals keep paying for the tools after the novelty fades, the moat is real. If usage plateaus, the counter-thesis wins.
What would prove the thesis wrong
The falsifying signal is specific: if AI-driven average-revenue-per-user growth falls below 5% while AI spending stays above 4% of revenue for two consecutive reporting periods, the monetization story is not working and the margin pressure is permanent, not transitional. For Rightmove that means watching whether underlying operating profit growth stays near the 3% to 5% range as the £18 million AI spend rolls through 2027. For Scout24 it means whether ImmoPoints volume growth stays above 30%. For Seek it means whether APAC yield growth - up 18% in FY26 - holds as the freemium model rolls out and volumes stay under pressure.
Layer 3: Conclusion and Outlook
The beneficiaries of this shift are the platforms with the deepest proprietary data and the largest installed customer base - Rightmove in the UK, Scout24 in German-speaking Europe and Spain, and Seek in Australia and Asia. The exposed are the smaller regional portals that cannot afford the data and engineering spend, and the traditional software vendors selling standalone tools to agents and recruiters, who now face competition from their customers' own platforms.
Short term, the stocks are being re-rated on AI credibility rather than transaction volumes. That is a sentiment move, and it can reverse if the next two quarters show usage growth slowing.
Medium term, the base case is that these platforms grow revenue in the high single digits to low teens even with flat underlying markets, funded by AI tools and higher-value memberships. The upside case is that the cycle turns - mortgage rates fall, housing activity picks up, hiring recovers - and the platforms get both volume and monetization, which is what happened in the strongest historical periods for classifieds. The downside case is that AI features commoditize, pricing power erodes, and the companies are left with higher costs and no premium revenue - a margin compression story rather than a growth story.
Long term, the structural question is whether classifieds platforms become the operating system for their verticals. If agents and recruiters do their daily work inside these platforms' AI tools, switching costs rise and the platforms capture more of the workflow, not just the advertisement.
What to watch over the coming quarters: Rightmove's underlying operating margin against its "no lower than 67%" guide and whether the £18 million AI spend translates into higher average revenue per agent; Scout24's ImmoPoints volume growth, the Spanish contribution to revenue, and whether organic growth holds above 10%; Seek's APAC yield growth and the pace of freemium adoption. And the macro signal that would change everything: a sustained fall in mortgage rates in the UK and Europe, or a recovery in Australian job advertisements, would lift the underlying cycle and make the AI story easier to believe.
These platforms are not waiting for the housing market to recover - they are building a business that can grow without it. That is the difference between a cyclical recovery trade and a structural re-rating, and the next two quarters of AI usage data will decide which one this is.
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