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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
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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Latest property news
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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Latest property news
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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Features
How did the big property portals take over the industry?
Andrea Kirkby takes a tour through the property portals 10 years on...
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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
OnTheMarket takes legal action to prevent agency’s return to ZPG
OnTheMarket has taken legal action against one of its departing agents just hours after it had announced a return to ZPG’s portals. West-Sussex 15-branch agency Henry Adams had announced it was to leave OnTheMarket and rejoin Zoopla, its Chief Executive Philip Jordan (pictured, below) saying he was “very pleased to be back with ZPG”. The agency is based in Chichester but has branches in other parts of West Sussex as well as in Surrey and Hampshire. The corks were also flying at ZPG’s headquarters in London as Mark Goddard, ZPG’s Managing Director of Property Service, sounded equally ecstatic, saying he was “delighted to welcome back Henry Adams”. But the move proved too quick for OnTheMarket, which promptly issued legal proceedings preventing the move. Media coverage An OnTheMarket spokesperson said: “”We noted media coverage on 15 November 2017 that Henry Adams had signed an agreement with Zoopla to list all of its properties on its websites. “As at 16 November 2017, Henry Adams is not listing its properties on any of the ZPG websites. “The firm continues to list its properties at OnTheMarket.com in accordance with its current listing agreement and remains a valued member.” ZPG confirmed that the move by Henry Adams…
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Latest property news
GoCompare board rejects offer by ZPG to buy company
ZPG has confirmed it has made an offer to buy insurance, mortgages and loans comparison site GoCompare.com but, after the deal was leaked yesterday, is now “considering its position”. Both ZPG, the parent company of Zoopla and PrimeLocation, and GoCompare have confirmed that ZPG made an unsolicited offer to buy the comparison website at £1.10 a share to be paid for in ZPG shares, valuing it at £460m. “This was unanimously and unequivocally rejected by the Board which believed that it fundamentally undervalued the business and its prospects,” a GoCompare statement says. “Since May, [we have] delivered H1-2017 results which were ahead of expectations.” GoCompare also says the offer, which was made last waeek, represented a discount on the value of the company based on its 11 October 2017 share price of £110.5p, although the offer was considerably higher than its later share price of 0.95p on 7th November. Opportunistic offer “ZPG’s Proposal is highly opportunistic and fundamentally undervalues the Company and its prospects,” says the comparison website’s Chairman Sir Peter Wood (pictured, below). GoCompare only recently demerged from motor and home insurance specialist Esure after which, in November 2016, its share price stood at 74.5p valuing the company at…
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Supplier advice
The top 3 ways agents can impress vendors
Mark Goddard, MD of ZPG Property Services, says, if you look after the needs of your vendors, you're on the right track to win instructions and gives 3 tips to help you do that.
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Latest property news
Next year is make or break for proptech, say leading portal exec
The next twelve months are going to be a tipping point for technology in the housing market, two of the industry’s leading proptech figures have said. Speaking at this week’s conference organised by The Negotiator at The London Hilton hotel, Paul Whitehead, Chief Strategy Officer at ZPG and James Morris-Manual of 3D tours platform Matterport both made the prediction, although from different perspectives. Paul (pictured, below) told the audience of agents that although the past two years had seen a huge “flurry of activity” in the proptech world, he thought it was time for them to deliver. “A lot of these businesses are getting to the point where there needs to be either good traction in terms of customer usage or product deployment”. “I think the rubber needs to start hitting the road a little bit and the next year will see of the proptech companies either coming through and making a success of it, but inevitably some are going to fail too.” ZPG has invested in or struck partnerships with several proptech start-ups including neighbourhood info platform PropertyDetective, repairs company Fixflo, peer-to-peer lender Landbay and online mortgages firm Trussle. James from Matterport (pictured below) said he agreed that the…
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