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Latest property news
Leaders and Romans sign up to list all properties with Zoopla
Property Service Holdings (PSH), the parent company of leading estate agency brands Romans and Leaders, is to list all its properties on Zoopla. Until now Leaders, which is the largest independent estate agent in the UK, has listed the properties from its 120 branch network on Rightmove and Zoopla, while Romans’ 28 branches were only listed on Rightmove. But in May last year the two brands were brought together during a merger to create a £120m turnover company with a £35m war chest for further acquisitions. The announcement by the company means both brands will now advertise their combined inventory of some 40,000 sales, lettings, new homes and auction properties on Zoopla Property Group’s websites. The move ends speculation that PSH might have gone with OnTheMarket as its ‘second portal’. Peter Loverdos, COO at PSH (pictured, left) says: “We have been reviewing the property portal landscape for some time and as a result of the substantial marketing and innovative product ideas coming from ZPG, we decided that it is the right time to list all of our branches and properties with ZPG to the ultimate benefit of our customers. “We expect to expand materially over the next few years and need…
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Latest property news
Zoopla-backed Landbay launches landlord mortgages
Peer-to-peer (P2P) buy-to-let mortgage lender Landbay has launched a new range of products for professional landlords that meet new tighter lending regulations set by the Prudential Regulation Authority that came into force in this week. These require rent to be 125% of mortgage payments at 5.5% APR and are yet another squeeze on the buy-to-let sector. The move by Landbay, which gained full FCA authorisation on 22 December last year after launching in April, comes after Zoopla invested a ‘six figure sum’ in the company. Zoopla also now promotes Landbay’s P2P offering via its ‘investment channel’ on Zoopla.co.uk. “The buy to let market is set to become more complex in 2017, as landlords face an increasingly intricate lending landscape and tighter regulation,” says Landbay’s Chief Lending Officer Paul Clampin (pictured). “It’s in such a context that borrowers and brokers need solutions that meet their changing needs, so these new products have been designed to do just that for the growing number of professional landlords.” Landbay was one of four ‘promising and innovative start-ups’ that Zoopla pumped £1m into during February last year. The other three include online mortgage adviser Trussle, property management softwre company Fixflo and housing data firm Property…
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Features
The next big things for lettings tech in 2017
Organising viewings for potential tenants demands a lot of an agent’s time. Nigel Lewis looks at two new and very different, digital solutions.
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Latest property news
OnTheMarket.com highlights ZPG ‘inconvenient truths’
OnTheMarket.com chief executive Ian Springett has countered ZPG CEO Alex Chesterman’s assertion this week that the Agents’ Mutual portal is a ‘failed experiment’. Springett says that while it ‘clearly suits’ ZPG to position his portal this way, he challenges some of the ‘inconvenient truths’ for Zoopla. “The number of UK agents listing on the Zoopla platform remains 22% down compared to the period prior to the launch of OnTheMarket.com,” he says. His comments are based on ZPG’s own Annual Reports for 2014 and 2016 which show that the number of agents advertising on the site has dropped by 3,000 to 13,373 since OnTheMarket launched. Springett also says that he believes Zoopla has, unsurprisingly, been using price to try and wrestle agents back off OnTheMarket. “Our direction of travel remains clear. While Zoopla Property Group claims to have increased the number of UK agents listing on its portals by 5% year-on-year, meanwhile the number of offices listing at OnTheMarket.com at the end of October 2016 had increased by 15% year-on-year,” says Springett. “The consumer appeal of the service is clear from record-breaking traffic in September of more than 10million visits, an increase of 79% year-on-year. These are not the achievements of a…
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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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Latest property news
Zoopla buys another agency tech provider
If Brexit has damaged the property market this year then Zoopla has managed to dodge the worst of it, its full year results reveal. Profits at parent company ZPG increased by 44% to £36.7m in 2016 while revenue jumped by 84% to £197.7m. Revenue from agents is up by 5% and the number of agents listing with Zoopla increased by 10% this year. ZPG says all its sites, which includes Zoopla, PrimeLocation, uSwitch and recently-acquired agent software provider PSG, totalled 600m visits over the past year. PSG is not its only tech acquisition. ZPG also reveal that it has bought Essex-based cloud agency website design provider Technicweb. ZPG hasn’t quite seen off the OnTheMarket threat despite the upbeat full year results. During a webcast this morning ZPG said its portal-only revenue is down 1%, due to both ‘churn’ created by OnTheMarket and ‘other headwinds’. But it is clear from the results that the purchase of PSG has been a major plank in ZPG’s strategy to grow its agency customer base by luring back OnTheMarket switchers, and today’s announcement that Welsh agent Robert and Co has returned to Zoopla from OnTheMarket would seem to confirm this. The Newport based company said ZPG’s PSG…
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Latest property news
Welsh 12-branch agency quits OTM for Zoopla
Leading Welsh multi-branch agency Roberts and Co has says it is to leave OnTheMarket and re-join Zoopla. The company is based in Newport in South Wales and has a further eleven offices around the region and operates in both the sales and lettings markets covering Monmouthshire, Caerphilly, Torfaen and Blaenau. Roberts & Co, which was established in 2002, says that following an internal portal review it concluded that returning to Zoopla Property Group offers its vendors and landlords the best possible marketing for their properties. Director Mark Roberts (pictured), said: “It was the right time to review our portals [after a] Roberts & Co re-branding – the opportunities that Zoopla Property Group can now offer us as a result of the Property Software Group acquisition [by ZPG] are very exciting and now is the right time to be part of this.” OnTheMarket.com has already taken Roberts and Co’s properties and listing off its website. The Negotiator contacted OnTheMarket but its spokesperson said they did not want to comment. Roberts and Co are well known in the industry, and locally, for another reason. One of its other directors, Alan Darlow, is a friend of singer David Essex and in 2008 backed the…
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Latest property news
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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Latest property news
22% of public recognise OnTheMarket, says Zoopla research
The marketing mountain that OnTheMarket must climb to catch up its two main rivals has been revealed today after Zoopla published its latest brand awareness figures. Parent group ZPG paid market research firm Harris Interactive to quiz 1,100 people about which of the three main portals – OnTheMarket, Zoopla and Rightmove – they recognised. It found that 22% recognised OnTheMarket, an increase of 1% compared to May this year, while 90% recognised Zoopla and 83% Rightmove. The responses from the research were prompted – meaning the people surveyed were shown the portals’ logos and then asked if they recognised them – but Zoopla in addition asked them to recall the main portal brands unprompted. Zoopla says this research revealed that 47% of respondents recalled its name while 39% remembered Rightmove and 3% recalled OnTheMarket. The fruits of Zoopla’s ‘always on’ promotional activity is clearly bearing fruit. In recent years it has often outspent Rightmove on TV and, for a time, had a virtual monopoly on London’s black cab advertising. Also, in July this year it wrapped an entire fleet of London buses in purple. Gareth Helm, Group Chief Marketing Officer for ZPG (pictured), says: “Our ongoing investment in brand resulting in consumers…
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Latest property news
Zoopla claims 40 branches have returned to it from OTM
Zoopla Property Group has announced that over 40 agent branches have recently returned to it after initially leaving to list with on OnTheMarket, including a raft of multi-branch agencies and several independents. These include Howard Cundey which has 12 branches in Surrey, Sussex and Kent as well as Jeffries with nine branches in Hampshire (including a recent purchase of a single-agent rival). Other smaller but still multi-branch agents include TaylorMilburn with two branches in Essex; Jon Simon with three branches in and around Manchester and Midcalf Nichols, which has two branches in Stourbridge. “Agents now firmly grasp the ZPG value proposition and cannot afford to be at a competitive disadvantage, using services that simply do not deliver value for their business,” says Mark Goddard, Managing Director, ZPG Property Services (pictured, left). “We have the most effective marketing platform, the best software solutions and are now generating new revenue streams for our partners through products such as MoveIT.” Earlier this month the company claimed that in total over 500 agents had returned to it from OnTheMarket. Zoopla currently lists at least 6,446 sales and letting agents on its site while OnTheMarket lists 3,217. These figures do not reflect the number of…
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