The verbal battle between Zoopla and its new competitor and estate agent-owned Onthemarket, is hotting up. Zoopla previously announced that it has lost 11% of its estate agent branch members over the past year as its younger rival has sought to lure them away. In a recent blog I stated how many agents were moving all their properties to OnTheMarket from other popular websites to advertise. Zoopla is now saying that they have already re-signed “a number of agents who had previously cancelled to join Agents’ Mutual” although, they failed to reveal their names.
The spokesman for Zoopla Lawrence Hall says: “These agents have already realised that the Agents’ Mutual experiment is hurting them and they are no longer prepared to be guinea pigs in this process and lose out on valuable exposure and enquiries”.
OnTheMarket have a ‘one other platform’ rule, meaning estate agent members can only list their properties on that portal and one other, but this is restrictive as they are not visible to the major audience offered by all the key portals.
The latest data obtained by independent web monitoring firm Hitwise, reveals that over the first two weeks since the launch of OnTheMarket in January 2015, it has attracted a total of 194,000 visits (an average of 14,000 per day) compared to 18.8 million visits for Zoopla over the same period.
The Hitwise data indicates that Zoopla’s daily audience has averaged 97 times that of Onthemarket over the two week launch period and that Onthemarkets share of all UK property website visits during this period stands at just 0.22%, in comparison to Zoopla’s market share at 22%. This data is implying that at current levels an Onthemarket agent would get equal levels of exposure and enquiries in 3 months that an agent on Zoopla would get in a just one day.
Onthemarkets representative Ian Springett said: “As we have stated previously, the Hitwise figures which continue to be reported by Zoopla are inaccurate and demonstrate Zoopla’s increasing desperation to reduce the number of agents who are removing their properties and advertising expenditure from them to list with OnTheMarket.com”. Onthemarket believe they have already overtaken Zoopla in certain spots of the country with their property listings and are confident of becoming the number two portal within a year.
Zoopla feel compelled to respond to OnTheMarket’s claim of one million unique visits to its new portal by saying that it lacks any authoritative source to back up that figure. They insist that they will continue to do what they do best, which is to provide innovative and market-leading tools for both consumers and agents. They believe that their members are enjoying record levels of exposure, enquiries, instructions and value from them and that the figures speak for themselves.
