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Latest property news
Senior industry figure Nick Leeming steps down from Belvoir board
Senior industry figure Nick Leeming has stepped down from his position as a non-executive director at franchised lettings giant Belvoir after five years on the company’s board. Nick has helped steer Belvoir through a turbulent five-year period since it floated on the AIM stock market, raising £7 million to fund an aggressive expansion programme and, last year, an attempt to merge with The Property Franchise Group (TPFG), parent company of Martin & Co. He joined the Belvoir board after stepping down from a senior role at portal Zoopla. As well as his work for Belvoir, Nick has been Chairman of Jackson-Stops since 2013 and been a regular judge for The Negotiator’s industry awards. Nick, who says he is retiring from his position at Belvoir, will step down on 10th April and be replaced by another industry stalwart, Michael Stoop (pictured, left). Michael has an equally gold-plated and long-standing career within the industry having helped establish Belvoir’s franchising rivals Winkworth and TPFG, and in July last year returning to Winkworth in an advisory role. “On behalf of the Board, I would like to thank Nick for his considerable contribution since the Group floated on AIM,” says Michael Goddard, Chairman of Belvoir.…
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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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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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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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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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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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Proptech firm claims it can help agents banish email ‘tyre kickers’
Estate agents will soon be able to automatically sort out the useful portal email leads from the tyre kickers following the launch of a new proptech service. OneDome says its OneLead product will enable estate agents to respond instantly to any buyer or vendor email enquiry coming in from Rightmove, Zoopla or OnTheMarket and work out which kind of customer they are and then direct them to either a valuations or viewings booking page. The system generates an automated reply answer to an email enquiry depending on the information within it, helping agents answer them more quickly and filtering out the ‘chaff from the wheat’, it is claimed. OneDome says Rightmove’s own figures show that 65% of vendor and buyer leads from the portals arrive out of hours. “Consumer expectations are greater than ever and they expect instant gratification,” says OneDome CEO Babek Ismayil (pictured, left). “When sending an enquiry form from a portal, buyers often get a slow response or no reply at all because agents find that many of the enquiries they get from portals are low quality, or worse, spam. “This discourages agents from responding and unfortunately, this means that high quality enquiries are missed.” The company…
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ZPG refinances its debt following recent business buying spree
Zoopla parent company ZPG has revealed that it is to restructure its debt by raising £200 million through a bond or ‘senior notes’ issue. ZPG says the bonds will become due for repayment in five years’ time and will help it refinance its debt by securing more “attractive interest rates” until 2023. This gives it a further three years of breathing space – its existing debt, which is part of a £325 million facility, is due for repayment in 2020. In ZPG’s most recent financial report for 2017, the company says it spent £97.5 million repaying debt, up from £52.5 million during 2016. The bond issue, which will not be public and will be offered to investors through different financial channels, follows a significant spending spree by the company which has seen it acquire several businesses. Expensive acquisitions This has included most recently – and expensively – the acquisition of financial products website Money for £80m and Dutch property data firm Calcasa for £26.5 million. Within its latest results published late last year, ZPG revealed that it had a net debt (borrowings minus cash in the bank) of £191.5 million, up from £146.5 million in 2016, although its total borrowings…
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