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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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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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