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Latest property news
Market is feeling cold winds of the general election, research reveals
The looming general election is beginning to affect confidence among home buyers and sellers, research has revealed. The number of people planning to sell their home within the next six months has dropped to 17%, says Zoopla, down from 23% in October last year. Its figures also reveal that a similar drop in the number of people planning to buy a property, down from 25% in October to 17% today. The portal says these drops in confidence are directly attributable to the looming general election called by Theresa May for the 8th June. Homeowners may be reluctant to move home in the current political and tax environment, but 87% of them across the UK are confident about the value of their home and expect house prices to increase over the next six months. According to Zoopla’s Housing Market Sentiment Survey, this is an increase of 4% since its last survey six months ago. General election “Despite a continued period of political uncertainty, it’s encouraging to see a rise in confidence for property price growth,” says Zoopla spokesman Lawrence Hall (pictured, left) “[But] we can’t ignore that there’s been a rise in reluctance to buy and sell properties. With the upcoming general…
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Latest property news
Zoopla TV ad gets its claws into the property market
The new Zoopla TV ad has been released. And it’s got legs. Plenty of them. And the stars are hermit crabs with model homes stuck to their backs. Hermit crabs, it seems, are the only creatures that move house more than humans. Rather than struggle with the elements on Brighton beach in January, Zoopla’s ad agency 101 enlisted the help of David Attenborough’s director of photography Doug Allan and trekked to Costa Rica to find appropriately qualified and one assumes, Equity-licensed actors to star in the film. Zoopla’s Chief Marketing Officer Gareth Helm says: “This is an exciting moment for the Zoopla brand, which has long been associated with helping consumers to make smarter choices when it comes to moving home. “We are looking forward to revealing our fresh take on the topic and to showing how even the house-moving experts of the animal world – who, quite literally, carry their homes on their backs – can benefit from all the tools and advice that Zoopla has to offer. “The launch of our new campaign and the use of hermit crabs, who themselves are moving experts, provides an ideal platform to talk more about the evolution of Zoopla. We expect…
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Agencies & People
ZPG purchase of Expert Agent to be reviewed by competition watchdog
ZPG’s purchase of software company Expert Agent earlier this month has been called in by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and is now under review, prompting shares in ZPG to drop this morning. The CMA has served an initial enforcement order to ZPG under section 72(2) of the Enterprise Act 2002. The announcement was made by ZPG this morning, saying that “having been informed of the review and the order ZPG is now engaging in a consultation with the CMA and will make a further announcement in due course”. The move has been widely anticipated within the industry after ZPG acquired Expert Agent – which trades under the name Websky Ltd – from private equity firm Metropolis. It in turn bought the company off founder Mike Griffiths in 2004. The ZPG acquisition of Expert Agent gave it a substantial slice of the UK agent software market, as it had already bought Property Software Group in April 2016. PSG at the time of acquisition by ZPG claimed to be used by over 40,000 estate agent letting agent branches across the UK, while Expert Agent is used by over 2,500 branches. The CMA has been in the warpath within the property…
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Latest property news
Hybrid bridging-lender-cum-agent Nested wins £8m of new funding
As if agents needed more competition from digital start-ups, a company called Nested that offers to buy a client’s home if a buyer can’t be found has won a fresh £8 million injection of cash. Launched 14 months ago, Nested promises vendors that it will sell their homes via its own listings on Rightmove and Zoopla within 90 days or provide them with an interest-free loan to buy their next property. Nested is chasing the 40% of home movers in the UK who do not have a mortgage and therefore find it frustrating when they caught in lengthy buying chains. Hefty fee There are some catches to the deal. Nested guarantees to sell a vendor’s property, but only for 95-98% of the asking price in return for a hefty 2.5% sales fee. If the property is sold for more than the valuation range, it splits any ‘profit’ 70/30 in favour of the lender. But if the property does not sell, Nested then takes out a first-charge mortgage on the property and advances the necessary cash to enable the vendor to move home. When the property sells, the ‘bridging’ mortgage is then cleared. “There are lots of people in this situation and…
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Latest property news
Agent makes lone stand against landlords who advertise direct on property portals
Newcastle-under-Lyme letting agent Rocket Homes Rentals has locked horns with the two largest property portals over listings by two local student lettings companies. It says they are advertising on the big portals even thought they are landlords who only market their own properties. Hybrid agent/landlords like these are springing up across the UK at the moment to enable a single landlord, or group of landlords, to bypass letting agents entirely and advertise their properties to rent directly on the large portals. Rockett Home Rentals, which has a single branch in Newcastle-under-Lyme but covers Crewe, Stafford and Stoke on Trent and has been in business since 2003, says its two rivals are advertising on Rightmove and Zoopla. “I’ve talked to both portals and no matter how they want to dress this up, they seem happy to let these ‘agents’ list because they have paid money and that’s it, regardless of how their business works,” says director Bill Rockett (pictured, below) “The only properties they have are the ones they own – they’re not an agent for anyone and they don’t service any customers except themselves. “It worries me that in the small area around my business I’ve seen ‘agents’ like this…
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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
Venture capital group that backed Zoopla sells its last ZPG shares
Octopus Investments, the venture capital firm that backed the start-up of Zoopla in 2009, has sold its last stake in what is now ZPG plc, it has been revealed. Its Octopus Titan VCT, which claims to be the largest venture capital trust in the UK, invested in Zoopla via its Zenith investment vehicle from 2013 onwards in preparation for a flotation on the London Stock Exchange. This took place in June 2014, valuing ZPG at £919 million. Since then Octopus Titan has been slowly selling its remaining interests in ZPG as the portal’s share price has peaked and troughed, particularly over the past 18 months. During this period the ZPG share price has risen from £2.10p to £3.83p a share, an increase of 82%. Octopus Investments said that it has now realised its last remaining investment in ZPG after a more recent surge in ZPG’s share price following the announcement that it has bought Hometrack for £120 million. “The board is delighted that it has been part of Zoopla’s success story and that shareholders have benefitted investment in the first billion dollar business to have been backed by a venture capital trust,” says a statement from Octopus Titan. The biggest major…
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Latest property news
Big three portal traffic approaches 200 million visits a month
Both Zoopla Property Group (ZPG) and OnTheMarket have reported record traffic during January while Righmove appears to have stopped reporting its traffic entirely, although total portal traffic to the three sites is likely to be just under 200 million visits a month. But both ZPG and OnTheMarket have at least stopped throwing brickbats at each other and neither of their traffic reports mention each other, a change from recent times when both sides have questioned their competitor’s figures. ZPG says visits to its property sites Zoopla and Primelocation increased to a record of 53 million during January driven largely by mobile-based searches, which now constitute 72% of its traffic. The company also says the number of leads it generated increased by 73% year-on-year which, it says, are worth £50 million to its partner agents. “This is a great start to the year for both the business and the property market,” says Mark Goddard, MD of ZPG’s property division (pictured, left). “The numbers demonstrate that we continue to deliver incredible exposure, value and results for our partners.” OnTheMarket also had a record January, it says, receiving 11.2 million visits, an increase of 85% on the same month last year, when just…
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Latest property news
ZPG snaps up Hometrack for £120 million
Zoopla Property Group (ZPG) has bought Hometrack, the London-based property information company co-founded in 1999 by entrepreneur Giles Mackay, one of the richest men in the UK. Mackay (pictured, left) was Hometrack’s CEO for many years before stepping aside in 2013 to become chairman and is likely to be adding several million to his estimated £354 million fortune now that ZPG has agreed to pay £120 million for the company. Hometrack is the UK’s leading provider of residential property market data and works with over 400 partners including lenders, new home developers, investors, housing associations and local authorities. The company is best known for its Average Valuation Model (AVM) which is used by 15 out of the top 20 lenders such as Barclays, Abbey and Nationwide, mainly as a tool to value homes for mortgage lending purposes, without the need for a site visit. ZPG says the acquisition creates ‘the UK’s most valuable residential property resource’ and that it is part of a strategy to develop its data services business. The acquisition also gives ZPG a door into the Australian property market, where Hometrack is one of the leading AVM suppliers. Hometrack is also a fast-growing company despite its vintage and…
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Latest property news
Zoopla claims 700 branches have now returned from OTM
Zoopla parent company ZPG has today claimed that over 100 branches who initially left for OnTheMarket have returned to it since October, bringing the total number of returnees to 700. The company says recent returnees have included a clutch of multi-branch agents (see list below) and that the number of total property listings on its two sites (Zoopla and Primelocation) has increased by 10% compared to a year ago. Bacon & Co, (West Sussex) – 5 branches Jeanes Holland Burnell (mid-Somerset) – 3 branches Belvoir (Central London) – 1 branch Porter Glenny (Barking) – 4 branches Dixon & Co. (Stafford) – 2 branches Reid & Roberts (North Wales) – 3 branches Roberts & Co. (South East Wales) – 11 branches Sheens (Essex) – 2 branches Hodders (Surrey) – 4 branches Corrie & Co. (Cumbria) – 3 branches Loveitts (Midlands) – 5 branches Ian Odam of Somerset agency Jeanes Holland Burnell (pictured, left), says that in January 2015 he decided to join OnTheMarket after leaving ZPG. “After two years of supporting the OTM project we felt unable to sustain the membership with them any longer as we believed we were missing out by not listing our stock with ZPG,” he says. “In…
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