propertyfinder.com Sold to zoopla.co.uk
August 7, 2009 by Emma Sorensen
The rumours of REA Group owned propertyfinder.com’s potential sale to zoopla.co.uk have been confirmed, with the two companies issuing statements today.
The REA Group issued a statement saying it and News International Ltd had completed a share sale of their jointly owned UK online business, which runs the propertyfinder.com, hotproperty.co.uk and ukpropertyshop.co.uk websites, to Zoopla Limited.
The sale ends their review of their UK online business. Greg Ellis, CEO of REA Group, said:
“We are pleased the review of our UK operations has resulted in the successful sale of the business. Zoopla.co.uk is an exciting entrant to the UK property portal market and we wish the team well for the future. Along with the sale of REA’s interest in its UAE business which we announced to the market last week, this sale of REA’s interest in its UK business has been taken in line with our strategy to focus on the Australian market and international markets where our market position is strong and the market size and market dynamics are attractive.”
Meanwhile zoopla.co.uk, which also acquired thinkproperty.com from GMG recently, is clearly trying to make a mark in the competitive UK portal market. The sale price remains undisclosed.
A press release from zoopla.co.uk says it will take over and integrate the propertyfinder.com website and other two websites, benefiting from an additional 3 million unique visitors a month. zoopla.co.uk says that the combined group will power an impressive range of property partnerships with leading UK websites including MSN, Yahoo!, AOL, Guardian, Tiscali, Sky and Virgin amongst others.
The deal stands to place zoopla.co.uk in a very strong position, providing it with the propertyfinder.com audience, its long-standing industry position and relationships which will enable zoopla.co.uk to further its growth. It remains to be seen if the acquisition will let it present a challenge to the dominant market leader rightmove.co.uk.
zoopla.co.uk is selling the deal as a win for consumers, who will benefit from more listings and information on the UK property market, and also for agents, who will gain more exposure and receive more leads as well as gaining access to the enhanced features and tools offered by zoopla.co.uk including owner leads.
Alex Chesterman, founder and CEO of zoopla.co.uk said:
“This is a transformational deal both for our business and for the online property landscape in the UK. Our organic growth over the past year has been exceptional but this acquisition is a great fit for us and will accelerate us significantly towards our goal of becoming the most efficient marketing partner for UK estate agents by providing them the widest possible exposure and best value online marketing services.”
Nicholas Leeming, co-founder of propertyfinder.com, will remain with the business. He added:
“The strength of zoopla.co.uk in consumer and data services are a perfect fit with the long standing agent relationships, industry expertise and established levels of consumer traffic of the PropertyFinder Group. Combined we will deliver enormous value to estate agent clients across the UK. Our focus remains on providing excellent service for our member firms and this deal will allow us to further deliver on that promise.”
- Zoopla Confirmed as Potential Propertyfinder Buyer
Last week it was revealed that the Propertyfinder's management buy out attempt had failed and that the REA Group and News International had entered into a heads of agreement with a mystery party. This mystery party has now been confirmed as being Zoopla. Zoopla is a relatively new entrant to the UK online real estate market having initially launched a site around home prices and more recently moving into advertising homes for sale in the UK using the pay per lead model. Earlier this year Zoopla closed out a £3.75m capital raising. Check out our coverage of Zoopla over the last year. On reflection, this deal makes sense by providing Zoopla with a boost into being a serious competitor in the market and it gives propertyfinder.com and its team a new lease on life....
- REA Group Sells Stake in propertyfinder.ae
The REA Group has exited the Dubai market by selling its 51% stake in propertyfinder.ae to its joint venture partner, the Swiss Media Group. The REA Group purchased 51% of Propertyfinder.ae in October 2007 with the objective of driving strong growth on online real estate advertising in the Gulf Region. The sales continues the retreat of the REA Group to its core Australian business....
- Zoopla Ltd Integrates its Websites
UK property portal and information website zoopla.co.uk will soon be integrated with propertyfinder.com....
- zoopla.co.uk Launches “Mega-Portal”
UK property portal zoopla.co.uk has completed its integration with propertyfinder.com, hotproperty.co.uk and thinkproperty.com, and says it can now offer new services to users and a bigger audience for agent members....
- zoopla.co.uk Acquires thinkproperty.com
Not only is zoopla.co.uk rumoured to be in negotiations to purchase REA Group owned propertyfinder.com, but the UK property portal and property information website has announced today that it has acquired thinkproperty.com from Guardian Media Group (GMG) for an undisclosed sum. ...
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propertyfinder is doomed for failure. Their customer service is the worst i have ever witnessed.
Hardly any of their ‘partner sites’ work or they don’t use propertyfinder anymore. (that was their USP!!)
i found out from our ‘account manager’(who we’ve seen once in 9 months) that they have reduced the field staff from 40+ to 9!!!!!
This can only make the entire process even worse than it is!!
The leads are poor quality mainly DSS.
Zoopla will never make this good.
I’m sure Alex Chesterton will scrape all the data from them and make his baby zoopla all the better, leaving propertyfinder a thing of the past.
RM is the the ONLY portal that does what it should do.
expensive yes, but worth every penny.
What is your position at Rightmove Shawcross? You come on here plugging RM all the time. Literally every single time I read a comment that you’ve made you’re trying to sell us RM. You’re either the only person in the UK that loves RM or you work for them. My money’s on the latter!
On the back of Alex Chesterman and Nick Leaming words this is definitely transformational deal and beneficial to both parties.
I wish the Zoopla and Propertyfinder teams all the success, with Zooplas cutting edge technologies, I am sure we will see them make excellent head way within the industry.
Kind Regards
Amul Raj Desai
twitter – property1
Amul, is there anyone who you don’t wish success to?
Lets hear what they paid first.
Sure it may have been a bargain but ,Its a clear admission from Zoopla that the zillow copycat strategy was not going to be a winner,
You still need deep relationships with agents and listing/subscn income.
scott my position is certainly not with RM, that i can assure you.
I was all in favour of propertyfinder.com being a huge success that is why both of my businesses are on it. Nothing would give me greater satisfaction than to save the huge sum of money i pay RM each month, please believe me when i tell you every month it grates, but PF and FAP just do not deliver the same volume of leads or the quality. thats it. I bought into the whole concept and with the ‘partner’ sites being used to gain instructions and landlords it was great, but it just doesn’t work. i think that when they lost ‘times online’ it was the beginning of the end.
By the way as you seem to dislike RM so much then am i right to assume you work for a competitor? (pf??)
if you do then maybe you could let me know when you are in the office so at least someone could answer their phone………….
This deal looks like a winner to me – after these guys properly combine as I assume they will over the next few months they will have more traffic and deliver us agents more leads and there will only be one of them to pay instead of paying both separately. Rightmove has been the only serious game in town for a while now and the propertyfinder+zoopla tie up has made things a lot more interesting and a lot tougher for dpg which is going to end up a weak third over time. the newspaper groups are cleary getting tired of being in this space with both guardian (thinkproperty) and news international (propertyfinder) selling to zoopla in last few weeks – i would be polishing up my cv if i worked at dpg!
Everyone needs to remember that Zoopla is backed by Venture Capitalists who will want to see profit in this venture. It was very clear that the private listings and pay per lead strategy were not working here, therefore they had to buy a traditional business. This now means that Zoopla have to compete with Rightmove and DPG on a level playing field which is going to be tough. If the VC backers are to make a profit then Zoopla will also need to make a healthy profit over the next 2 – 3 years which will mean that they need to make money (and that money will mainly come from Estate Agents). It is really quite simple, in order to create the profit of Rightmove you have to ultimately charge the same as Rightmove so I am afraid that this is not great news for Estate Agents. We should also bear in mind the millions that have been invested in Propertfinder and the fact that it was still worthless despite backers such as News International and REA. I have to say that once the dust has settled I cannot really see how Zoopla is going to offer more.
[...] in den letzten Jahren gekauften Immobilienportalen trennt. Propertyfinder.com aus UK wurde nun an zoopla.co.uk verkauft. Werden weitere Verkäufe folgen? Im deutschsprachigen Raum gehört AtHome zur REA [...]
The more competition amongst portals the better for estate agents – simple really. If agents want to foster competitions they should like widely and spread their market budget widely amongst every portal. If they only put cash into Rightmove, they can’t complain if Rightmove subsequently rape them.
Mark Shawcross – you obviously work for a portal, maybe ‘PF’?…you say all the right things or abbreviations, PF, FAP, RM. So get over the fact you were made redundant. Agents don’t read this blog.
Amul – I am with Trent C, stop commenting! You have nothing to bring to any blog. Mind you, neither does this comment I am typing now
Trent C – you work for PropertyFinder
Craig Daniels – mmm…propertyfinder or the AUS business??? mmmm…I think PF.
At least Kurt knows who he is, or where he is…at Inman. Lucky man. Pity I can’t translate his comment!?!
It can only be good news, we highly regard Zoopla as a great property portal.
Bob
Comerty commercial property search
Solihull office space
work for a portal.
maybe you should, apologies for knowing the abbreviations for propertyportals!
Sadly propertyfinder hasn’t been sold because it was doing a bad job in the market for agents, as some people have commented here. It was because it lost money and vast amounts of it.
Cutting up to 70% of the staff (as has been done) was the only solution – or trying to charge agents more, but the USP of the Rightmove competitors is that they are cheaper! So all of the Rightmove competitors are caught in a vicious circle – I would guess few of them make much money or more probably all run at cost or small/big losses. I notice findaproperty is recruiting hard at the moment – but they had similar traffic and status as propertyfinder – so what gives?
The only way agents are going to break the Rightmove strangle hold is to stop using them and give the others a chance; otherwise nothing will change; even the best technology, millions of venture capital pounds and the hard sweat of techies won’t break it.
On another note, I gather propertyfinder was sold for less than £2 million – a snip given REA and News International spent in the region of £25 million buying and then keeping the business going.
Strange business isn’t it?!
well appointed you obviously work for PF from your previous comments on here.. , we all need as many portals to survive in their own right it improves technology innovation and retains competion freshness within the industry . It is part of the landscape in that in property portal industry some will fall by the wayside ;so it not strange , just simply survival of the fitest. is RM the google of the uk property portal industry ? at the moment yes. But. it is the agents perogative to choose’ what is working for them ‘ without more advances in technology from more portals offering more to the end user and agent , they will always make the rightmove.
tom
Thanks Tom for your counter-arguments. A couple of point I would pick up on; Rightmove can’t be compared to Google (or only in the sense that it is the dominant player). None of the prop portals come close to being strong enough to be a comparable Yahoo! or AskJeeves or Bing! and take TM on.
Too many of RM’s competitors buy too much of their traffic through pay per click, etc, and don’t have the money to market or advertise themselves; so how will they ever get the natural traffic and brand to take RM on?
Also, your argument that there should be as many portals as possible to encourage competitonson many levels is fair – but while four or five portals scrabble to gain a clear No.2 position (which they have been now for nearly TEN YEARS), RM continues its dominance. It would be better to have one, strong, well-funded, brilliant search engined rival – but I guess that won’t ever happen.
[...] the closure of the UK print business earlier this year, the company’s UK online operations were sold to zoopla.co.uk in August 2009. The company’s UAE operations were sold to its joint venture partner, the [...]