Marketing
News covering the marketing of residential property, lead generation, buying and selling and business development.
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Google gathers senior estate agency for invite-only digital seminar
After a nearly ten-year hiatus tech giant Google appears to have begun re-engaging face-to-face with the property industry. During the late noughties there was an outcry when it appeared that Google might begin targeting consumers directly and cut out agents from the property selling and renting process, although this was denied by the tech giant at the time. Nevertheless, the Californian-based online search firm subsequently scaled down its attempts to court the ‘for sale by owner’ sector and concentrated instead on other markets, much to the relief of agents. But now it’s back. The tech giant this week opened the doors of its UK head office to host a meeting of estate agents to mull over how to get instructions online. One of Google’s more senior UK executives, Harvard-educated Roxanne Brownlee (pictured), who works with larger, high-growth clients, did the presenting. Google, along with digital agency Fountain and 24/7 live managed live chat firm Yomdel, also offered up online strategies to help combat the challenges of competition from online hybrid agents, the privacy issues created by GDPR and Brexit. And Fountain should know – it helped hybrid agency Ewemove achieve rapid growth during its start-up phase. “Yomdel and Fountain began…
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OnTheMarket to catch up Zoopla by early 2019, figures suggest
Property portal OnTheMarket is recruiting 28 agents every day to its service and is on track to catch up Zoopla's current tally in February next year.
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ZPG to be sold for £2.2 billion to international private equity firm
Zoopla's parent company ZPG is to be sold lock-stock to a huge but relatively obscure global private equity firm for £2.2 billion.
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What’s behind the 15% jump in value of ZPG shares?
ZPG shares have been rising dramatically recently but then suddenly dropped off despite the portal group announcing increased number of returning agents.
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allAgents bans Purplebricks and all other agents with fewer than three-star reviews
Reviews website allAgents is to ban all agents with less than two-star reviews average to become the third largest provider of sales and lettings leads after Rightmove and Zoopla.
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Startup win-a-house website offers developers ‘third way’ to sell newbuilds
Former property professionals launch business that they say will succeed where other "sob story" prize competitions have failed.
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OnTheMarket has now signed just under 40% of all estate agent branches
property portal onthemarket has signed up 7,500 branches or nearly 40% of all estate agents in the UK to its service.
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OnTheMarket signs up 1,000+ new branches via equity participation and free listings
OnTheMarket Plc says over 1,000 additional agent branches have been signed up to its recently AIM-floated portal just five weeks after its shares first began trading, taking its branch total to over 6,500. The portal’s salesforce have a new offering to tempt agents to list with them – Agent Recruitment Shares – which “selected” sales and lettings agents are being offered, in effect locking them in to OnTheMarket for an undisclosed period or, as the portal puts it to “align their interests as shareholders with the success of the company”. “We believe that as we expand our sales team, we shall continue to sign up more and more new estate and lettings businesses up and down the country,” says OnTheMarket CEO Ian Springett. This new form of equity participation in OnTheMarket is running alongside the longer-term deals earlier listers on its portal were offered. Those not being offered the equity scheme, or who don’t want to get involved, are being given free or discounted listings deals for an introductory period and who, OnTheMarket hopes, can be converted at a later date. This latter model is the one its competitor Zoopla employed when it launched to persuade agents to list on…
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uSwitch to become ITV’s Britain’s Got Talent show main sponsor
ZPG has signed a deal with Simon Cowell to make its household bills comparison site uSwitch the headline sponsor of his ITV prime-time perennial Britain’s Got Talent (BGT). The deal, which was signed with both ITV, Syco Entertainment and FreemantleMedia, will see uSwitch’s creative run before and after all the ad breaks during the 12th series of the show, which kicks off on Saturday, April 14th. ZPG says this will be aimed at inspiring and motivating consumers to switch and save money off their household bills. Presented by Ant & Dec and featuring David Walliams, Simon Cowell, Amanda Holden and Alesha Dixon, the BGT weekly shows are expected to pull in between 9.5 million and 13 million viewers. ZPG says the sponsorship deal, which is for an undisclosed sum, is the most expensive promotional agreement uSwitch has struck so far since it was founded in 2000 by Lord Milford Haven. BGT sponsors rarely reveal how much they pay to get into bed with Cowell’s TV juggernaut, but Dominos Pizza is reported to have spent £1 million in 2011 sponsoring another Cowell prime-time show, a short-lived roulette-based competition format called Red or Black? uSwitch advertises heavily on TV and other media…
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ZPG fires latest salvo in its ‘signings’ battle with OnTheMarket
The battle between ZPG and OnTheMarket to poach agents off each other kicked off again yesterday when the Zoopla parent company said it had lured 100 new agents back to its purple portal, and signed existing client Chancellors to a new five-year deal. Competition between the two is now fiercer than ever after OnTheMarket (OTM) dropped its ‘one other portal’ rule following its recent AIM flotation, while ZPG is keen to counter OTM’s recent push to sign up small and medium-size agents, which so far has seen several hundred new agents sign up. The larger of the 100 agents on ZPG’s list includes some recent, as well as less recent, returnees including Curchods, Douglas & Gordon and Jones Lang LaSalle in London, Henry Adams in Surrey and Sussex, Morris Marshall & Poole in Wales and Whitakers in Hull. These companies between them have nearly 80 branches plus ZPG says the rest of the returnees are one, two and three branch agents, taking the total number of additional branches now listing with ZPG to 200 or more. ZPG also says the Chancellors Group, which as well as its own branches in London and the Home Counties plus Anscombe & Ringland in…
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