Following a briefing by Zoopla’s CEO Alex Chesterman and CFO Stephen Morana, Exane BNP Paribas yesterday issued an alert document to investors stating that the effect of Agents’ Mutual on Zoopla is “challenging for now” but that Zoopla is confident longer term.
The report goes on to say that the Zoopla management “cited the continued return of agents from Agents’ Mutual and limited consumer traction as evidence of its weakening momentum”.
Zoopla told the Exane BNP Paribas team that the 4,000 agents that had left it for OnTheMarket divided into three camps of roughly equal size.
They were the founders, who were emotionally entrenched; the middle ground – agents keen for it to succeed, but who wanted to see results; and unhappy agents seriously considering a return to Zoopla.
William Packer of Exane says: “Despite Zoopla’s progress since April (when membership troughed), we continue to expect Agents’ Mutual to remain a major third player in the UK property portal market for the foreseeable future.”
The report also gives an indication of the direction of travel for Zoopla in the future, building on last year’s acquisition of u-Switch.
Zoopla told Exane that it considers its circa 40m visits per month to be “currently under-monetised” in its core portal business with only about 6% of households moving at any time. Zoopla plans to target the entire property-related marketplace, especially consumers’ acquisition of comparison and professional services.
Exane says its rating for Zoopla remains neutral, citing the tail-risk threat of Agents’ Mutual current Letters of Intent recruitment campaign.
However, this is balanced against Zoopla’s “well-underpinned near term forecasts and upside from u-Switch”.
“Zoopla considers that its circa 40 million visits per month [to look at data essentially provided by Agent’s local reputation, good will and expertise in winning instructions] are currently under-monetised”
In other words Agents are daft enough to pay a subscription to advertise on our portal and we get keep the Lion’s share of revenue from related service sales, from the enquiries generated, for ourselves.
You really would think it a basic error in the art of PR and marketing not to crow to loudly at the customer base one is exploiting.
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“provided by Agent’s local reputation”
So your saying individuals are aware of every agents reputation in every area they search in and this the only reason they buy, rent or sell a property through them? Or could it perhaps be something to do with the property they are looking to buy/rent, or just happens to be closest/cheapest?!
“Agents are daft enough to pay a subscription to advertise on our portal”
I suppose you also believe that people selling property also pay thousands of pounds in fees to agents to just answer the phone and turn a key to let people in a property. There is much more to it, in terms of effort, products (financial, surveying etc. – monitise) skill and overheads. I can recommend a good book.. it’s called “business basics”
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Don’t worry, I’m sure OTM can rectify all this – just need to wheel out and publish a few quick testimnials and all will be right as rain
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A post by El Burro on 6 Jan reproduced here for the benefit of harry hood:What I don’t get about the anti OTM brigade is why are they bothered?If OTM is as rubbish as they suggest and all their agents are just flushing their money down the pan in a Ponzi scheme (HarryN) why aren’t they just letting their competitors get on with it?Surely you’d love them making complete ars*’s of themselves, after all it’s money on a doomed project that they could be spending on much more effective platforms competing with you?It seems to me Zoopla were openly rubbishing OTM at the start, that has given way to an almost evangelical campaign to teach others the error of their ways by a band of non OTM agents. Or are they? Maybe Zoopla decided that openly rubbishing a competitor was never going to get them many votes and a different approach was needed . . . . . .Who else would give a monkeys?So why do you give such a monkey harry hood?
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It’s like counting sheep…
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‘The report also gives an indication of the direction of travel for Zoopla in the future, building on last year’s acquisition of u-Switch.’
‘Zoopla plans to target the entire property-related marketplace, especially consumers’ acquisition of comparison and professional services.’
This indicates to me clearly that Zoopla will wish to cross sell products to your clients using data that you have provided ! This may also, in the near future cross into the areas that many agents wish to sell and therefore have a secondary effect of REDUCING our secondary income streams. This cannot be good news even for the online agents, who may very well need to start selling other products and services in order to survive with such low selling fees.
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from personal experience and that of friends in the industry, zoopla are becoming ever more desperate – relentless chasing of my offices and at at monthly rate less than that of a good lunch.
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So out come the hypocrites who knock the otm knockers for exactly the same thing and as for relentless chasing! what do you think otm and rm are doing!! and again with regards to cross selling that is called diversifying and rm have been doing it for years or have you not noticed that, jeez.
There are some on this site that seem to have an inordinate amount of time to comment on here that I wonder what you do for a day job as some of you I know aren’t Estate Agents and I’m sure others that just aren’t busy within their own businesses, this site is the most active of the two I read and the most argumentative,bitter,clever,funny and biased towards otm so do carry on but remember your past posts could come back to bite you.
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