ZPG
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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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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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Latest property news
ZPG founder Alex Chesterman buys Palm Beach mansion
ZPG CEO Alex Chesterman has splashed the cash with a new home in Palm Beach, Florida which he has bought for £6.6m. The property, which has five bedrooms and seven and a half bathrooms, is in what Americans call the colonial style. It is a beach front property off Ocean Boulevard with a heated swimming pool and a beach garden overlooking the surf with its own shower and dining area. Alex benefited from the island’s prime property woes, which are akin to London’s current problems. Homes are taking a long time to sell and being sold at considerable discounts. A former Morgan Stanley banking executive had been trying to sell Alex’s property for several years through agent The Corcoran Group and it was originally on the market for $8.97 million. The price was later dropped to £8.14 million before selling for £6.6m, so the ZPG CEO got it at a 26% off the original asking price. Alex joins a community thronging with both US and international celebrities and business leaders including Donald Trump, whose Mar-A-Lago resort is just a few blocks down the road, as well as his former wife Ivanka Trump, Rod Stewart, Venus and Serena Williams, novelist James…
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Latest property news
Countrywide signs with ZPG for another three years of ‘partnership’
Countrywide has revealed this morning that it is to renew its listing with Zoopla and PrimeLocation for another three years for its multiple brands, which between them have nearly 1,000 branches across the UK. The new agreement starts on January 1st next year and covers both sales and lettings, although Countrywide CEO Alison Platt says she wants to maximise “the strategic benefits from their partnership”. Alison’s signature on the new contract means ZPG has passed an important test a year after Countrywide sold its remaining stake in ZPG for £29.2 million. It was one of the three key agent groups to invest in Zoopla in 2010 alongside LSL and Connells. The extent of this new partnership has not been revealed but is likely to see Countrywide leverage its listing power to access deals for some of ZPG’s other property-related businesses such including recently-acquired market analytics firm Hometrack and consumer finance portal www.money.co.uk and utilities switching portal uSwitch. “As the leading property services business across the UK, Countrywide is pleased to have cemented a refreshed and extended relationship with ZPG,” says Alison Platt. “The benefits to our Group and to our brands are significant and give us a strong platform to…
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Housing Market
So that’s why sales are slowing down! Brits now move home every 23 years
The time gap between people moving home has increased from nine to 23 years since the late 1980s as high house prices have made moving up the property ladder more expensive, research by market analyst Hometrack has revealed. This may explain why property transactions have not recovered their pre-financial crisis crash. Before the global banking meltdown approximately 120,000 properties were sold each month, a figure which is currently running at just under half that number, according to latest Land Registry figures. Scottish movements Hometrack, which was purchased by ZPG recently, says the average Brit moves home every 22.7 years. Those in Scotland are the most frequent home movers, changing address every 19.6 years followed by the South West at 20.6 years and the East of England at 20.9 years. The Welsh are the most reluctant movers, changing home every 26.8 years on average. Residents in Powys, mid-Wales only move home once every 33.1 years, the data shows. On a very local level, Midlothian in Scotland, which covers the area south of Edinburgh between East Lothian and the Scottish Borders, is where people move home the most frequently, or every 14.9 years, five years faster than the rest of the UK.…
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Latest property news
ZPG snaps up comparison website money.co.uk
UPDATE: Zoopla has today gained approval from the FCA to acquire Dot Zinc Limited, which operates the Money.co.uk website. The sale will now go through on 1st October 2017. Also, at almost the same time the FCA approval was announced, ZPG revealed that its CEO Alex Chesterman today sold 4.25 million of his shares in the company, or approximately 1% of its issued share capital. The sale of the shares, which were sold at £3.63p each, will see Chesterman cash in just under £15.5 million. Original story starts: Zoopla parent company ZPG has bought financial products comparison website Money.co.uk for £80m, prompting shares in ZPG to rise briefly by 7% after the announcement yesterday. The Cirencester-based company behind the website was set up in 2008 by CEO Chris Morling and, until now, had been one of the few independently-owned online comparison services for consumers buying financial products such as credit cards, insurance, mortgages, loans and investments. The FCA-regulated firm offers products from some 600 providers and attracts over two million visits a month to its website and has 50 staff and ten million registered users. The deal will see the company’s shareholders paid £20m in cash in December this year…
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Latest property news
ZPG says its vendor leads have surged by a third
ZPG has revealed that the number of vendor leads it has passed on to its agent customers has increased by a third just days after OnTheMarket announced it is to raise £50 via a flotation on the London Stock Exchange’s AIM. The company, which operates Zoopla and PrimeLocation, the UK’s second and third largest property portals in the UK by the number of agents listed on its sites and traffic, says it has so far sent 300,000 vendor leads and over 13.7 million applicant leads to its members so far this year. This, ZPG claims, has created fees for its member agents worth £225m. But although the company claims the pick-up is largely down to its online home valuation tools, the increase in vendor leads is also an early signal that the UK sales market may be picking up. Leads from vendors seeking an agent to sell their home increased by 31% compared to the first six months of last year, ZPG says. “[ZPG] continues to generate more appraisal leads than any other website as a result of [our] unique valuation tools,” says Mark Goddard, Managing Director of ZPG’s Property division. “We continue to deliver the best value and most…
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Latest property news
Hundreds of agents go back to ZPG
ZPG, owner of Zoopla and PrimeLocation, reports that over 800 estate agency branches have left Onthemarket (OTM) to re-join ZPG over the past two years.
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Latest property news
CMA clears ZPG acquisition of Expert Agent
The sale of Expert Agent to ZPG has been cleared by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) following a three-month investigation into the deal, which it called in at the end of March. ZPG had bought the company earlier that month but the deal was almost immediately called in for review by the CMA via an enforcement order under section 72(2) of the Enterprise Act 2002, after which shares in ZPG dropped. Expert Agent was acquired by ZPG from a venture capital firm called Metropolis, which in turn bought the firm from founder Mike Griffiths (pictured, left)in 2004. He continues to work at the company. ZPG says that now that the transaction has been given a green light by the CMA, it will now proceed with its integration plans for the business, although it will “continue to operate Expert Agent as a standalone brand and platform”. “We are delighted but not surprised by the outcome of this review by the CMA,” says Mike Goddard, Managing Director of ZPG’s property division (pictured, right) “We always felt that the UK property software sector is well-served by numerous players who offer strong, effective competition and are pleased that the CMA has come to…
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Latest property news
ZPG buys share in Dubai-based Propertyfinder portal
ZPG has made a surprise investment in Dubai-based property portal owner Propertyfinder Group (PFG) for an undisclosed sum, giving it a door into the global property market in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. PFG is a parent company of seven property websites across the region including the UAE, Qatar, Lebanon, Egypt, Morocco, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. PFG was started up in 2005 by US businessman Michael Lahyani (pictured, left) and through both acquisition and growth was recently valued at $200 million following a $20m investment by a Bermuda-based but Russian company called Vostock. The deal, which was announced last year, was described by Lahyani at the time as enabling the company to become the biggest online real estate “destination” in the MENA region. But although Lahyani describes himself as the founder, PFG’s UAE website was originally 51%-owned by Australia’s REA Group before being sold off when the company pulled out of what had been early attempts at a global property portal empire. Lahyani started a magazine in Dubai called Al Bab World which was later bought by REA and then turned into the Propertyfinder.ae website. At the time during the mid-to-late noughties the REA network included sites in Italy,…
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