This morning, ZPG announced that it has acquired Ravensworth for an undisclosed sum.
The company, led by Suzie Pattison, supplies extensive print and other marketing services to the industry, with its products including property particulars and canvassing materials.
In a statement to the London stock exchange this morning, Zoopla said: “The acquisition of Ravensworth is a continuing part of ZPG’s mission to provide the best value and most effective solutions to all UK property professionals.
“The deal further increases the number of estate agency partners that ZPG provides its services to and enhances ZPG’s comprehensive one-stop-shop product offering for its property partners to now include portal, software, website, data and print marketing services.
“Ravensworth’s in-house team of brand, design and creative marketing specialists, headed up by managing director Suzie Pattison, will become an integral part of ZPG’s wider property marketing business, enabling ZPG to offer fully-integrated, on-demand print and creative marketing services to its more than 23,500 property partners.”
Alex Chesterman, founder & CEO of ZPG, said: “We are delighted to announce the acquisition of Ravensworth, which gives us a market-leading position in the provision of on-demand print and creative marketing services to UK estate and letting agents.
“In keeping with our strategy, by combining Ravensworth’s products with our sales and marketing capabilities we will be able to offer our partners a fully integrated, best-in-class print solution and once again confirms our position as the most effective partner for UK property professionals.”
Pattison said: “Over the years we have continuously innovated our products and marketing toolkit and have built an industry-leading platform and talented team who are now looking forward to working with even more customers to help them improve the effectiveness of their property marketing.”
What’s next? Review sites?
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How about another portal?
Once a company floats and issue shares a controlling chunk of those shares are essentially up for grabs- would a ‘Corporate Event’ led by an associated Z company be likely?
Has Z’s principal shareholder, Daily Mail Group recently invested £15 million into YOPA?
However, to make this more attractive the portal would probably have to drop the OOP rule and allow a shareholding on line call centre agent onto the platform?
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It’s getting a bit overpowering now Zoopla ….
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Have a bottomless pit and you can.
Their plan clearly after OTM disrupting them was buy more and more software companies and service companies agents use and that way we will still bleed them dry!
Also now means if a non ZPG software company has their member agents using Ravensworth via the software, they have data again through the back door! and no doubt that order via Ravensworth button will soon turn to order through ZPG.
Well good on em, they are a business looking to make money out of agents. Can’t knock em can you!
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“….ZPG’s mission to provide the best value and most effective solutions to all UK property professionals.”
They appear to miss the bit about leverage and driving profits to shareholders.
If you all give me your eggs I’ll pop them in this ruddy great big basket to keep them safe.
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Isn’t that why you’re in business PeeWee? To create profits for shareholders? Or are you run as a social enterprise?
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Whilst what Spongeit has done with OTM and what Perpbricks do is technically legal, it isn’t the best for customers and consumers.
No, I wont work for shareholders.
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So you work in the public sector or you don’t work at all?
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I wonder what your comment and feelings would be if you owned shares in Z and they weren’t driving the markets and earning profits so their share price rose and dividends were a plenty!
Grow up people, if you are in business it is generally to make money however and in any legal way you can, now tell me different!!
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Supposing OTM stayed Mutual and developed a high level easy to use end to end product that every agent wanted because it did everything they needed including driving business to them and traffic to their website?
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Cost a fortune and very much why the IPO is required. OTM need to develop and pay people to continuously improve and support such tech features.
I brilliant Agency Software could be key…. but go cost up developing one and staffing it to deal with 10k plus agents customer support and tech issues.
The current model (income stream) cannot handle that investment AND was never meant to, to be fair. They (we and I) assumed Agents would just get the core idea behind OTM and all support it. As they have not, more money would mean more features to woo the fence sitter with, and if they (fence sitters) see member agents pulling away with market share because of other OTM products such as software, they will more likely follow. (That I think is a fair enough gamble which won me over!)
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New marketing on social media and software could be developed for less than 20% of one years income, if it was done in an intelligent way….perhaps joining up with some already in development.
If it delivered extra business to members, surely many would be happy to pay an extra £50 to £100 per month, retain Mutual status and attract more members.
I totally believe it has not been tried and can be done,
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It is patently obvious that Zoopla are, quite simply, eating the elephant one bite at a time.
And every bite they swallow comes with a SuperSize helping of tender data.
Nom… nom… nom.
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