Marketing
News covering the marketing of residential property, lead generation, buying and selling and business development.
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Huge difference in traffic to three main property portals revealed by latest ZPG results
ZPG has revealed how much traffic it drives to its various property portals and, the latest figures show, they were visited 68 million times during January, trailing Rightmove by 52 million visits on average but well ahead of OnTheMarket’s 14 million. ZPG’s figures includes 58 million visits to its three property portals; Zoopla, PrimeLocation and SmartNewHomes, while the remaining ten million visits were to its other websites such as uSwitch and the recently-acquired Money. ZPG also says its property websites enjoyed a 10% year-on-year uplift in traffic and, as evidenced by the sea of faces staring at smartphones in Britain’s streets and train carriages, that 60% of its portal traffic now comes via mobile devices. Property portals Visits to its comparison website uSwtich increased by 7% year-on-year, the company says. “We’ve had a great start to the year with a record of over two million visits per day to our websites in January,” says ZPG CEO Alex Chesterman (pictured, left). “These figures demonstrate that consumers are highly engaged with the services we provide and that we continue to deliver incredible exposure, value and results for our partners.” These latest ZPG figures would suggest that Rightmove’s average monthly visitor figure of…
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OnTheMarket shares drop by 14% following last week’s AIM launch
Shares in the property industry’s newest public limited company OnTheMarket have dropped by nearly 15% since it floated on the Alternative Investment Market (AIM) on Friday morning, including an almost 6% fall today. The share price for the company, which trades as OTMP on the junior stock market, has tumbled by 24p from its initial offer price of £1.63p a share to £1.39p (at the time of writing) cutting the company’s market capitalisation from an initial £100m to £89.59 million, according to Bloomberg. The Financial Times said the portal’s share launch, which offers investors a minority stake in the company, had ‘failed to shine’. These are nerve-wracking times for many of the portal’s 2,700 agent members, who last year voted overwhelmingly to trade in their membership for shares which they are hoping, once their lock-in period ends, they will be able to sell. This is equally true for the company’s key directors including co-founder and CEO Ian Springett (pictured, left). He now holds approximately 90,000 shares in the new PLC allocated to him at entry to AIM, plus nearly three and a half million share options, on top of his £170,000 salary. Several high-profile investors have taken substantial stakes in…
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OnTheMarket shares begin trading at £1.63p, plummets to £1.48p
Shares in OnTheMarket began trading on London’s AIM stock market today kicking off at £1.63p, valuing the company at £100 million, and quickly rising by 2p to £1.65 before dropping to £1.48p by end of trading on Friday. The OnThemarket shares issue, which it says has raised £30m out of a hoped-for £50m to finance its battle for market share with Rightmove and ZPG, is the conclusion of a long and tortuous road for CEO Ian Springett’s ambitious portal project. It launched in January 2015 two years after founding members Knight Frank, Savills, Strutt & Parker and Chestertons first convened to form parent company Agents’ Mutual Ltd. OnTheMarket.com positioned itself as a mutual organisation of agent members, but introduced a controversial ‘one other portal’ rules that made agents choose between either Rightmove or Zoopla as their ‘other portal’. Last year agent Gascoigne Halman took OnTheMarket to court, claiming the ‘one other portal’ rule was anti-competitive, but lost the case. This cleared the way for OnTheMarket to demutualise, which took place following a vote of its 2,700 agent members late last year. Former members of the mutual organisation were allocated share options based on their size of listing and length of…
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Zoopla apologises for ‘me too’ hermit crab advert after it whips up Twitter storm
Zoopla has apologised after the latest version of its hermit crab advert campaign whipped up a Twitter storm and prompted one member of the public to complain to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). The ad (pictured, right), which is currently running on the London underground and features a line of hermit crabs each answering “Me too” to the statement “I’m selling my house on Zoopla”, upset many people on social media because of its unintended link to the global #metoo movement triggered by the revelations of sexual harassment within the Hollywood film industry. Hundreds of people took to Twitter to vent their anger, calling out the portal for “for misrepresenting the hastag #metoo” as one post put it, and that it was in “poor taste” and “repulsive hijacking”. But following the complaint to the ASA, a spokesperson for the advertising watchdog disagreed, saying that “while the ad does use the phrase ‘me too’ we consider that viewers of the ad are likely to interpret its use as the crabs all agreeing to sell their houses on Zoopla, rather than a reference to recent sexual harassment claims and the resulting #metoo campaign”. Several Twitter accounts also rose to the defence of the…
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OnTheMarket flotation to go ahead, raising £30m
OnTheMarket has finally revealed its flotation which will raise £30 million of the £50 million it has hoped to receive from the City, three years after it first launched. The 18.2 million shares it is to issue via its public offering are priced at £1.65p each and will start trading on AIM stock market on February 9th, valuing the newly-created OnTheMarket plc at £100 million. Up to £25 million of the cash raised from the share issue will finance a marketing battle with ZPG and Rightmove, while the rest will be spent on an enlarged agent sales team and improvement to its IT systems. The share issue reveals that although the “quality investors” it refers to in his comments about the public offering have been willing to invest in the portal, its initial hopes of raising more money have not been possible. Agents who list on OnTheMarket, based on their branch size and how long they have listed with the portal, were given equity in the company in return for giving up their membership in the original mutual organisation. CEO Ian Springett says: We believe that the new capital, together with our ongoing revenues, will support our strategy to build…
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ZPG signs up four more big agency brands to multi-year deals, including YOPA
Zoopla parent company ZPG has revealed its latest set of multi-year tie-in agreements with agents including its first with a hybrid operator. ZPG says it has signed ‘long term’ agreements with the agents, which are likely to be similar to ZPG’s recent deals with the larger agency networks and last up to five years. The named companies involved are all South of England and London agents; Foxtons, Dexters and Andrews plus online agency YOPA. The agreements usually offer agents more stable pricing structures in return for committing to advertise all their properties on ZPG’s two main portals, Zoopla and PrimeLocation. Although ZPG won’t reveal the nature of each agreement, they are either simple no-frills listing deals or include elements of services provided by ZPG’s business-to-business brands such as the Property Software Group and Hometrack. 200 branches The latest deals will keep 200 branches within ZPG including the 70 apiece that Foxtons and Dexters each operate, and Andrews’ 60 offices. Yopa doesn’t have any branches but like Purplebricks has local agents who work from home. These number 102 currently, spread across nine regional teams. “We’re delighted to extend our relationships with each of these firms for the long term,” says Mark…
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Purplebricks vs allAgents – who is the real ‘rogue one’ in this one-star war?
Agent reviews website allAgents has come out fighting after Purplebricks yesterday said its experience of the site had “been very poor”. The hybrid agency went on to say that “we have never sought or had any commercial agreement with allAgents and we have no desire to work with them in the future”. But the reviews website, which has been in dispute with Purplebricks since at least September after the agency challenged whether negative reviews on its website were true or not, is not taking the criticism lying down. allAgents says it welcomes Purplebricks statement that “they don’t want to work with the UK’s largest independent review website for the property industry” because the only people allAgents wants to work with “are consumers”. “When it comes to the 300,000 reviews on our site, we don’t want to work with Purplebricks, or any agent for that matter,” says allAgents director Martin McKenzie (pictured, left). “We work for the consumer. Unlike other sites, we have no commercial agreements with agents, which is why they are a fair reflection of consumers’ experiences – good and bad. “We’ re a business of course, and agents pay us for such services as branding and property listing…
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allAgents reinstates ‘majority’ of negative Purplebricks reviews after negotiations break down
Reviews website allAgents has reinstated Purplebricks’ reviews on its site including “the majority” of the negative ones and half of the questionable ‘five-star’ postings that sparked a two-month spat between the two organisations. allAgents says it has not reposted half of the ‘five star’ reviews after the people who originally wrote them failed to respond to checks by the reviews website’s team, and that it will in future only be accepting reviews from vendors who have sold their homes via Purplebricks or “withdrawn from the agreement with Purplebricks”. “We will continue not to allow duplicate postings by the same client for the same transaction. This will give a more complete picture of Purplebricks’ service, as customers may feel very different at the end of the process, than they do at the pre-sales stage,” says allAgents’ Martin McKenzie. This would appear to end the three-month long dispute between Purplebricks and allAgents, which saw the hybrid agent threaten legal action over 26 negative reviews posted on the agent reviews site. Negative reviews Purplebricks claimed the negative reviews were fake and, after allAgents investigated each one, only three could not be verified as real. A further five were also taken down by allAgents…
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OnTheMarket flotation confirmed alongside sweeteners for agents to sign long-term deals
The long-awaited OnTheMarket flotation on the Alternative Investment Market (AIM) is to proceed, it has been confirmed by parent organisation Agents’ Mutual. It is now four months since the vote to demutualise Agents Mutual which was to be followed by the creation of a new company OnTheMarket plc prior to an Initial Public Offering (IPO) on AIM. Agents Mutual has yet to announce the new company or IPO, but has revealed that it will introduce “appropriate incentives” to persuade new members to commit to five-year deals with OTM. This will include giving share options to “selected” agents joining the portal if they commit to long-term listings agreement. OnTheMarket flotation But agents who receive equity in OTM following the flotation are to be prevented from cashing in their shares too soon to “align their interests as shareholders with the success of the Group”. OTM has already begun the process of securing five-year deals in return for promises of shares in the company including, most recently, deals announced with Arun Estates, Chancellors and Hunters. But, as previously announced, the £50m it hopes to raise from the City will be spent on marketing and PR to drive traffic to the site and to…
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allAgents to make ‘significant’ announcement about Purplebricks next week
Estate agent reviews website allAgents.com has said it is to make a ‘major announcement’ next week about its battle with Purplebricks and has confirmed that talks with the online agent have broken down. Martin McKenzie (pictured, below), Director of Business Development at Glasgow-based allAgents.co.uk, says the talks fell apart because “our negotiations with Purplebricks broke down as we feel their business ethics are not in line with our own”. “However, there’s been a lot going on behind the scenes and we plan to make a major announcement early next week. We will not be bullied into submission by them, or anyone else.” The row between the two sides kicked off in September when allAgents.co.uk refused to take down reviews that Purplebricks considered to be ‘fake’ or ‘could not be justified’, according to Purplebricks founder Michael Bruce (pictured, right). But allAgents.com refused to back down despite repeated threats from the online agent if the reviews were not removed and, after replacing the Purplebricks account page on its site with a message decrying the company’s actions, began a crowdfunding campaign to raise £50,000 legal fighting fund. It reached £45,380 before its closing date. Peace talks allAgents said at the time that it would…
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