Marketing
News covering the marketing of residential property, lead generation, buying and selling and business development.
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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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OnTheMarket has been signing up 16 new agents a day since flotation
OnThemarket’s strategy to sign up more agents on the back of its recent AIM listing appear to be working. The formerly mutual portal has signed up 243 additional sales and letting agents to its service, up from the 81 revealed just after its shares were listed on AIM ten days ago. The portal also says independent agency group Chancellors has begun listing its properties on the portal. In November Chancellors agreed to sign a five-year listing deal, but only if OnTheMarket successfully achieved an AIM flotation. This means Chancellors’ 53 sales and lettings branches, which range across Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Herefordshire London, Oxfordshire, Powys and Surrey are now listing their properties on both OnTheMarket, Zoopla and Rightmove. The portal says Chancellors’ listing is evidence that agent support for the portal, which is now valued at £101.4 million following the AIM launch, is growing. Chancellors has agreed to more than just a listing with OnTheMarket, though. The company has agreed to actively promote the OnTheMarket.com portal brand with digital and branch-based marketing activity. Chancellors Group Chancellors, which used to be known as Hogg Robinson Property Services, in 2016 generated profits of £2.5 million on a turnover of £26.6 million, its latest accounts…
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Agent spend on Rightmove rises by 10% last year to £922 a month
Agents spent 10% more listing their properties on Rightmove during 2017 than the year before, pushing their average monthly spend on the portal to £922 a month, its latest results show. This helped increase its revenue by 11% to £243.3m and operating profit by 10% to £178.3m. This means, its results show, that it has an extraordinary profit margin of 75.8%. The company says the increase in revenue is largely down to agents buying more of its products, data and services. “As the industry becomes more digital our software has become even more valuable to our customers with 90% of our Agency members making use of it each month,” says Rightmove’s CEO Peter Brooks-Johnson (pictured). Peter also reveals in the results that the company has been concentrating on renters over the past year, which is not surprising given the sluggish sales market and the decrease in ownership in recent years. Rightmove’s shareholders will also be happy – the cash rich company, which has also been buying back its share regularly throughout 2017, paid dividends totalling £140.4m last year, up from £131.3m in 2016. Rightmove’s site traffic also continues to run at full tilt – its site was visited 1.5 billion…
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OnTheMarket shares finally exceed original AIM launch share price
If you’re an agent who holds OnTheMarket shares then it may be time to celebrate. The company’s share price has finally recovered and today exceeded its original offer price of £1.63p from ten days ago. Trading in OnTheMarket shares peaked at £1.70p late this afternoon, the highest the share price has reached to date. At launch the share price dropped to a low of £1.40p but has since been climbing slowly to today’s high, helped by an upbeat announcement on Friday that included details of its strategy to both target smaller agents and tie-in larger agent groups to long-term deals. “The more agents who join now, the more we believe all agents and property-seekers will benefit in terms of the increased property stock at OnTheMarket.com,” CEO Ian Springett said in Friday’s statement. “We are focused on reaching out to agent firms across the country which can see the disruptive appeal of our proposition of sustainable fair pricing from an agent-backed portal.” Excited Springett is currently refusing all interview requests, but has been busy doing the rounds at agent gatherings, including at agent Jackson-Stops’ annual conference, at which he said he was “excited by progress”. During today’s session on AIM nearly…
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OnTheMarket targets independent agents as it launches war with ZPG
OnTheMarket has come out fighting five days after its stock market flotation, telling its new City backers that the company is to target independent agents and has already signed up 81, with more in the pipeline. “The estate agent sector is highly local in character and early indications are that we are on track in terms of creating local momentum in the marketplace up and down the UK,” says Ian Springett, CEO of OTM. “The core proposition of the business remains the creation of an agent-backed, full-scale property portal to disrupt what is otherwise a duopoly of Rightmove and Zoopla by offering a premier search experience to consumers whilst charging sustainably fair prices to agents.” But the portal also says it is targeting larger estate agency groups and has already to signed up its first a to five-year deal since launching on the AIM stock market. This is the 18-branch agency Butters John Bee which, as well as signing up to OTM, has withdrawn its listings from ZPG’s portals. The agency, which has branches across Shropshire, Cheshire, Staffordshire and the West Midlands, was bought by the SpicerHaart group in September last year. Butters John Bee is essentially now aligning itself…
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OnTheMarket founding agency Douglas & Gordon signs up with ZPG
Douglas & Gordon, one of the most vocal founding members of OnTheMarket.com, has returned to ZPG on an unspecified but likely five-year deal. The 18-branch agency, which is one of London’s better-known agency brands, has signed up with ZPG after OnTheMarket dropped its one other portal rule ahead of the portal’s recent stock market flotation although it “remains a strong supporter and investor in OnTheMarket and has recently signed a new five-year listing agreement with us,” an OTM spokesperson told The Negotiatotor. Douglas & Gordon continues to list its properties on Rightmove as well, suggesting a new trend in the industry following the OTM share launch; that agents with generous marketing budgets will now choose to list with all three portals. Douglas & Gordon was one of several high profile agents who founded OnTheMarket in 2015 including Savills, Strutt & Parker, Knight Frank, Chestertons and Glentree Estates following two years of behind-the-scenes discussions. James Evans (pictured, left), Douglas & Gordon’s current CEO, says, “We are delighted to be marketing all of our property listings with ZPG again. “ZPG have historically served our business very well and have considerably developed their platform over the past few years in terms of the…
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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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