20
2011
Zoopla merger will still struggle against Rightmove
Earlier this week Zoopla and Digital Property Group announced a merger which will bring together the collective online strength of Zoopla, FindaProperty and Primelocation. The deal will create a new consolidated force in the online property market to take on Rightmove.
Currently Rightmove is the lone dominant brand in the online property space, accounting for almost 29% of all visits to property websites from UK Internet users.
FindaProperty, Zoopla and Primelocation were ranked as the second, third and fourth most popular property websites in September 2011 but as it stands, Rightmove receives four times as much traffic as its closest competitor. If the proposed merger were to go ahead today, this is how the property market might look.
In the pie chart above I have aggregated visits to Rightmove’s mobile and main website to demonstrate its dominance in the market. Looking at the growth of both Rightmove and the combined Zoopla mergerr properties you can see that both have consolidated their position in the property market, growing market share since September 2008 when no one player dominated the industry. Since then Rightmove has pulled away from the competition but the merged proposition would at least provide the industry with two viable competitors.
With three strong brands to merge Zoopla and Digital Property Group have some tough challenges ahead – principally in deciding which brand will become the figurehead of the new enterprise or whether to create a completely new digital property brand. However, even with the combined traffic of all three domains, Rightmove will still be the dominant player in the market. We will track the progress of these developments with interest and as always you can follow the latest online trends via our Twitter feed.
it is really good information for estate agents like us.
The problem with this market is that there are so many companies offering wildly different data tracking internet traffic that it’s hard to know which is accurate. Hitwise does ‘share’ of market while Cognesia, Comscore and others do unique visits (UVs); trouble is they all differ so vastly. For example the difference between Cognesia and Comscore for a large national portal can be a million UVs. When is someone going to come up with a credible single figure that’s accurate and policed by a central body?
I think how the new property portal is rebranded will be key to its success. Zoopla, Prime Location and Find a Property are all big well know portals in their own right so if they opt for a new brand name all togther marketing will be key to its success. If they opt for one of the existing brands which would most likely be Zoopla or Find a Property then this could be a safer strategy. Good news for estate agents though as hopefully advertising fees will drop.
Thanks for your comments.
James to answer some of your points, it is difficult to navigate the plethora of data offerings out there as they all use different metrics and have different samples of data. Hitwise has the largest data sample in the UK, with a quarter of the British Internet population in our data. Unlike other providers who use panel data to calculate an estimate of UVs, Hitwise prefers to use market share, which is a share of voice of our sample, and does not require any multiplying up or guesstimating. Data sources will always differ because of methodology or sample sizes, but ours is the best – even though I am a little biased.
Rightmove answer to share holders they have a plan in place to increase revenue over a period of time by increasing fees to agents. Agents will start to leave. The only point that is holding some agents is that reposession companies only recognise Rightmove as the main portal to advertise their properties. This is being addressed at the moment, when it is more will leave.
We are all being flexible on pricing but they are holding firm they need to be taught a lesson.