Home » News » ZPG results: buying spree dents profits but revenues increase
Products & Services

ZPG results: buying spree dents profits but revenues increase

Listings fees from member agents rise by 5% but the cost of buying so many companies over the past year shows in its full year results.

Nigel Lewis

Alex ChestermanZPG 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, up 5% year-on-year while average revenue per branch was £358 a month, an increase of 5% year-on-year.

This compares with Rightmove’s comparable figure of £911 a month.

“Our Property division performed very well driven by strong demand for our additional products, further migration of our software partners to cloud-based products and a continuation of returning portal partners,” says ZPG CEO Alex Chesterman.

“We significantly enhanced the partner cross-sell opportunity with the successful integration of our acquisitions in website, software, data and print products and saw the average number of products per partner increase by 27% over the period.

“Our audience continued to grow and remains highly engaged with a new record of 648 million visits to our websites, of which 72% were via mobile devices.”

November 29, 2017

What's your opinion?

Please note: This is a site for professional discussion. Comments will carry your full name and company.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.