YOPA
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Latest property news
Hybrid estate agency Yopa’s huge new contact centre opens for business
Hybrid agency Yopa's large new customers service has now opened for business in Watford and is where up to 100 staff will be based.
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Latest property news
Yopa gets ANOTHER £20 million to fund its expansion
Savills has injected another tranche of cash into hybrid estate agency Yopa alongside several other investors, taking the total invested in the firm to £75 million. News emerged over the Bank Holiday weekend that Savills was one of four shareholders to raise a further £20 million for the company on top of previous cash calls. This latest round includes Savills’ subsidiary Grosvenor House and the Daily Mail’s parent company DMGT. “We’ve closely followed the dynamics of the property market and believe that technology-driven consumer demand will move estate agency transactions from the high street to online hybrids such as Yopa,” says Manuel Lopo De Carvalho, CEO of dmg ventures. Yopa says the new cash will be used to recruit more local representatives, upgrade its tech and fund a new customer services operation in Watford. The total raised so far includes £16 million in 2016 just a few months after it launched, while last May it raised £15 million in a similar cash-call on investors plus a further £27.6 million in September. Market share This means the business has now completed all the traditional funding rounds that start-ups usually attain, and it’s likely that investors will be expecting Yopa to start grabbing…
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War of the fees! HouseSimple criticises Yopa and Purplebricks for their upfront charges
Online estate agency HouseSimple has taken a sideways swipe at rivals Purplebricks and Yopa over their up-front fee structures. The agency’s soon-to-be released latest TV ad features a gastro pub at which a cheeky but persistent waiter asks punters to pay upfront for their drinks and food before they are served. One group of friends are asked to pay £250 upfront for their meal, while one couple are asked to pay £50 for their bottle of prosecco before its brought over. Unsurprisingly, the apparently real-life customers at the pub are baffled and even let rip with expletives when faced with a compulsory up-front payment for their nosh and splosh. Experiment “We wanted to make a point with this experiment; that in certain situations people don’t react well to paying upfront for a service they haven’t yet received and in some cases, never will,” says Sam Mitchell, CEO at HouseSimple (right). “If we don’t expect to pay upfront in these situations, why should this differ when buying or selling your home? The film captured and reinforced our decision to be the first online estate agent to have a No Sale No Fee only proposition.” HouseSimple charges vendors a £995 flat fee…
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Hybrid estate agents will take longer to grab significant share than previously thought
Emoov ceo russell quirk has admitted its going to take hybrids much longer to grab the promised 30-35% share of the sales market he predicted.
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Emoov attracts YOPA and Purplebricks agents as latest crowdfunding hits £1.5 million
Hybrid agency Emoov is pinching agents from rival firms YOPA and Purplebricks as its prepared for an IPO later this summer.
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Hybrid estate agents – if you can’t beat ’em, might as well join ’em?
A new deal between Reapit and OneDome now enables agents to give their customers a Purplebricks-style hybrid estate agent service.
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Purplebricks is being caught up by rival YOPA says leading investment bank
Purplebricks’ growth is stalling and it’s being caught up by rival YOPA, say analysts at Swiss banking giant UBS It has released a research note that both highlights Purplebricks’ slowing growth and cuts the likely final market share in the UK from 15% to 12%. UBS has subsequently dropped its target price for Purplebricks from £3.05p to £2.85p. Shares in Purplebricks are currently trading at approximately £3.36p each. The bank has also reiterated its advice that investors should sell their shares in the company. As well as flagging up slowing growth for the hybrid agency, the bank says its Subject to Contact market share has been flatlining since September last year at approximately 5%. Raise questions “Given the importance of the Spring Market, we believe that this level of progress will be below management’s expectations, and will raise questions around the potential market share Purplebricks is able to achieve,” it says. UBS also says that one of its key competitors, Savills-backed YOPA, is beginning to catch up Purplebricks and now has 0.5% of the market, and that many hybrid and online agents are now offering ‘no sale, no fee’ options to customers, something Purplebricks does not. “Whilst [YOPA’s market share]…
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Savills says YOPA is now 10th largest estate agent in UK – but by what measure?
Savills has claimed that YOPA, the hybrid estate agency it invested in last year, is now a top ten UK agency. The claim was made yesterday within its preliminary full-year results for 2017 in which it also said its multi-million pound investment into the agency was its largest to date within the tech sector. Savills claimed that YOPA has grown during the past 12 months to become the 10th largest estate agent in the UK, although it didn’t reveal how this was measured. After a long exchange between Savills and The Negotiator, we can reveal that last year Savills believes YOPA was the 10th largest estate agent by new listings, rather than existing listings, branches or employees. Savills has achieved the ‘top ten’ status for YOPA by comparing brands rather than groupings of estate agents such as Countrywide or LSL, whose combined new instructions from all their brands are likely to be considerably higher than YOPA’s. YOPA, which has approximately 100 local agents, also has some way to go before it can claim to be the largest agent by existing listings on Rightmove. It has 3,000 while Savills has over 6,000 and Purplebricks currently lists over 16,000. Newspapers’ cash In…
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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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Online agent YOPA investigated again by advertising watchdog
Online agent YOPA has been investigated by the advertising watchdog just two weeks after being reported for potentially misleading claims on its website. This time the London-based sales and lettings agency was reported by a member of the public for a mailshot sent to them that advertised its sales service but, they claimed, wasn’t clearly marked as marketing material. After being approached by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), YOPA has now promised not to repeat the mailshot and that future advertising of this kind would be clearly marked as such in future. YOPA has been reported five times since it started two years ago including three times this year and once in 2016 and 2015 all of which have been informally resolved, although this hasn’t deterred investors – both Savills and LSL have put substantial amounts of money into the firm. Online agents Among the online agents, Emoov leads the pack for complaints to the ASA with ten referred to the watchdog so far including two serious complaints, one of which was upheld and another upheld in part, and eight informally resolved cases. Not far behind it is Purplebricks, which has had been referred to the ASA nine times including…
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