Alex Chesterman
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Latest property news
ZPG sells off Hometrack Australia to Oz portal giant the REA Group
Hometrack parent company ZPG has sold the property data firm's Australian operation to Oz portal giant the REA Group for £70m.
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Latest property news
First property, now petrol for serial investor and Zoopla founder Alex Chesterman
Zoopla founder and ZPG CEO Alex Chesterman (pictured, right) has been revealed as a key investor in an unusual, if not bizarre, new business start-up, which is his 12th to date. Zebra Fuels offers vehicle owners a new service that enables their car, van, lorry or bus to be filled up while they are parked up. Founders Reda Bennis and Romain Saint Guilhem (pictured, LtoR, below) have raised $2.5 million from several new investors including Brent Hoberman, founder of Lastminute.com, and Saul Klein, a co-founder founder of Lovefilm with Alex Chesterman. The duo say they hope to make petrol stations “obsolete”. After signing up to the Zebra Fuel app, customers then pick a time and date to have their car filled up and leave their vehicle parked at a specified location with its fuel cap open. The company, which currently only operates in central London and offers just diesel, is hoping to use the extra cash to expand to a London-wide service and offer both petrol deliveries and electric car charging. “Our goal is to replace the petrol station and in doing so make filling up your car faster, cheaper, less harmful to the environment, and hassle-free,” Reda Bennis told…
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Latest property news
ZPG’s Alex Chesterman awarded ‘golden handcuffs’ worth £3.1m
ZPG CEO Alex Chesterman has been given a set of golden handcuffs worth £3.12 million by the company’s remuneration committee. The share options, in which stock in the company is essentially given away free under ZPG’s Nil Cost Option plan for senior employees, can then be cashed-in at a later date. Alex can sell the shares based on a two-tiered set of rules. Half the shares can be sold when a pre-set level of shareholder return is reached, while the other half will be handed over or vested based on time limits. He will get the first tranche of shares at the end of September 2018 and the rest on the same date the following year. Alex is likely to get his shares, given the company’s past performance. In November last year ZPG revealed that it revenue increased by 24% to £244.5 million compared to the 12 months before, and that its share dividend payments had increased by 10%. He has cashed in shares in the past and takes home approximately £1 million a year, helping fund his well-known love of fast sports cars, and the recent purchase of a £6.6m holiday home in the US on Palm Beach in…
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Latest property news
ZPG results: buying spree dents profits but revenues increase
ZPG has published its full-year results, revealing a substantial increase in turnover but smaller than expected profits. The group, which operates portals Zoopla and PrimeLocation, saw its turnover increase by 24% but profits only rise by 2%, reflecting the costs of its many acquisitions over the past year including – it was announced today – a Dutch AVM provider called Calcasa. It joins other acquisitions including personal finance website money.co.uk, agent software firm Expert Agent, agency website provider TecniWeb, agent print media and signage specialist Ravensworth and data firm Hometrack. This buying spree helped push up ZPG’s debt by £45 million to £191 million, or nearly 80% of its turnover for the year of £244.5 million, while its borrowings have increased in value by £110m to £266m. ZPG says it now has 14,772 branches signed up to its portals, a 6% rise compared to the same time last year, which helped push up revenue within its property arm by 41%. Revenue per branch This, the company says, is in part down to the 1,000 agents it claims have left OnTheMarket and returned to Zoopla over the past 12 months. ZPG also now says it has 969,000 listing on its sites,…
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Latest property news
ZPG founder Alex Chesterman buys Palm Beach mansion
ZPG CEO Alex Chesterman has splashed the cash with a new home in Palm Beach, Florida which he has bought for £6.6m. The property, which has five bedrooms and seven and a half bathrooms, is in what Americans call the colonial style. It is a beach front property off Ocean Boulevard with a heated swimming pool and a beach garden overlooking the surf with its own shower and dining area. Alex benefited from the island’s prime property woes, which are akin to London’s current problems. Homes are taking a long time to sell and being sold at considerable discounts. A former Morgan Stanley banking executive had been trying to sell Alex’s property for several years through agent The Corcoran Group and it was originally on the market for $8.97 million. The price was later dropped to £8.14 million before selling for £6.6m, so the ZPG CEO got it at a 26% off the original asking price. Alex joins a community thronging with both US and international celebrities and business leaders including Donald Trump, whose Mar-A-Lago resort is just a few blocks down the road, as well as his former wife Ivanka Trump, Rod Stewart, Venus and Serena Williams, novelist James…
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Latest property news
ZPG buys share in Dubai-based Propertyfinder portal
ZPG has made a surprise investment in Dubai-based property portal owner Propertyfinder Group (PFG) for an undisclosed sum, giving it a door into the global property market in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. PFG is a parent company of seven property websites across the region including the UAE, Qatar, Lebanon, Egypt, Morocco, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. PFG was started up in 2005 by US businessman Michael Lahyani (pictured, left) and through both acquisition and growth was recently valued at $200 million following a $20m investment by a Bermuda-based but Russian company called Vostock. The deal, which was announced last year, was described by Lahyani at the time as enabling the company to become the biggest online real estate “destination” in the MENA region. But although Lahyani describes himself as the founder, PFG’s UAE website was originally 51%-owned by Australia’s REA Group before being sold off when the company pulled out of what had been early attempts at a global property portal empire. Lahyani started a magazine in Dubai called Al Bab World which was later bought by REA and then turned into the Propertyfinder.ae website. At the time during the mid-to-late noughties the REA network included sites in Italy,…
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Latest property news
Alex Chesterman? He’s so Moneysupermarket
Alex Chesterman has revealed his disappointment with the way Brexit has been handled by the government but, despite the challenges of leaving Europe, says he wants ZPG to become one of the world’s most influential tech companies. These and other views were revealed today during an interview with London’s City AM newspaper. In it Chesterman says he hopes ZPG would become the ‘Amazon of the home’ and that his nearest competitors were Rightmove – as you might expect – but also comparison website Moneysupermarket.com. But Chesterman also says Brexit has put the property market – and his £2 billion baby – on shakier ground. “We saw property sales volumes fall quite significantly in the second half of last year, compared to the period before the vote,” he told the paper. “Buying a home is one of the biggest and longest term decisions that people make so they tend to hold off making such important decisions in times of heightened uncertainty.” He also said that public sentiment and uncertainty would not improve until there was “clarity and what Brexit actually mean” although the ZPG CEO is not entirely a Remainer, his comments reveal. Good Brexit The 47-year-old says a good Brexit could…
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Latest property news
Zoopla’s Alex Chesterman says OTM is a ‘failed experiment’
Alex Chesterman yesterday made several inciendary comments about rival OnTheMarket during a presentation and Q&A session with City investors. Chesterman was quizzed by one investor about why thousands of agents remain with OnTheMarket despite the ‘compelling ZPG proposition’ and why only 600 have returned. The ZPG CEO then went on the attack calling OnTheMarket a ‘failed experiment’ and that it was only ‘contractual reasons’ preventing more agents returning to Zoopla. Here is the full text of his reply. “We don’t pay much attention to it to be honest. If you look back two years when it started we didn’t think it would play out. “We didn’t think it was going to survive long term and would take a couple of years to play out. We’re approaching that now and I think we’re seeing the results of everything that we said. “It’s a failed experiment of their own making as a result of this one other portal rule. There are three very specific things you can point to that mark the end of OnTheMarket as far I am concerned, which have all happened in the past two or three months. “Our win-backs are accelerating, and for the first time since September…
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Who are the best paid CEOs in property?
In April this year it was revealed that Foxtons CEO Nic Budden had been awarded a 19% pay rise which is likely to boost his salary to £2.3 million for 2016, up from his 2015 salary of £856,000, making him one of the best paid CEOs in property. He is one of an elite group of business leaders in our industry who earn six and seven figure total pay packages and lead companies with thousands of employees from multi-agency group to the big portals. But except for Alison Platt of Countrywide and Alex Chesterman of Zoopla, this high-flying club of top executives is a largely anonymous and invisible bunch who rarely venture out into the public eye, and whose performances are rarely examined or discussed despite being responsible for the livelihoods of many thousands of property professionals. So how do they measure up – are their public limited companies doing well? 1. CEO: Mark Allan (until June), £2.4m Company: Unite Sector: Student accommodation Revenue: +10% Share price: -12% Profit: +260% 2. CEO: Nick McKittrick, £2.3m Company: Rightmove Sector: Portals Revenue: +25% Share price: +83% Underlying profit: +16% 3. CEO: Jeremy Helsby, £2.29m Company: Savills Sector: Sales and lettings…
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Marketing
Zoopla returns to growth
Zoopla ended last week as the one of the highest risers on the FTSE 350, as it returned to growth, the portal announced last week. According to its latest trading update, the property website has attracted a net rise of 213 branches in the four months to 31st July. The news triggered a ratings upgrade for Zoopla from ‘sell’ to ‘buy’, with Broker Panmure Gordon suggesting that shares in the portal look undervalued. Zooplalost a significant number of agency subscribers due largely to the launch of OnTheMarket (OTM) earlier this year and its restrictive ‘only one other’ portal rule. However, the group said that it had won back 100 agents in recent months – many from OTM – with market churn also nearing historic levels, according to Zoopla. The group also announced that the volume of people visiting its website remained flat at 45.6 million, which is significantly below Righmove, but towers above OTM’s 5.2 million visitors. Panmure Gordon analyst Jonathan Helliwell told the press that “near-term, OTM’s growth appears to have stalled.” He added, “Zoopla’s inventory and traffic are holding up pretty well, and the housing market looks to be picking up. We think the stock could continue to…
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