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Purplebricks co-founder Michael Bruce is looking to raise tens of millions of pounds from investors for his new business, Booomin.
Sky News reported over the weekend that the 47-year-old, who is expected to launch the venture next month with brother Kenny and David Shepherd – who is another Purplebricks ‘original’ – has been in talks with potential institutional investors.
It is also claimed that Bruce has received significant investor interest in backing the venture, which is not surprising given the extraordinary wealth that Purplebricks created for its early investors.
Sky News also reports openly for the first time that Boomin is to be a direct rival to Rightmove, Zoopla and OnTheMarket, but offer a wider range of estate agency and consumer tools.
The money will be needed. As well as significant advertising costs, taking on £5.3 billion Rightmove and £2.2 billion Zoopla will not be cheap.
Also, Boomin already has over 100 staff including many senior colleagues from the Bruce’s Purplebricks days, and some 60 engineers and tech specialists.
The most significant industry big-hitter to have joined the firm so far is Gary Barker, former CEO of Reapit, who is to lead the business.
Boomin remains tight-lipped about what the business will really look like, having only revealed that it aims to ‘transform the property market for everyone and promises to be the most agent and customer centric solution ever created, putting agents at the forefront of determining the future rather than needing to react to it’.”
We already have a decent challenger to Rightmove and Zoopla, namely On The Market! It’s working really well for us and we haven’t missed Rightmove in the slightest since we left at the start of the year.
I trust agents have not forgotten that investors pumping in £Millions require extraction of millions in return.
Surely agents are not going to be suckered into supporting yet another limited by shares portal?