Online Marketplaces Exclusive: Zoopla CEO Charlie Bryant and COO Richard Hayes

Houseful and Zoopla CEO Charlie Bryant says UK number two portal Zoopla is consistently profitable and has an innovative product pipeline for 2025.

In a wide-ranging exclusive interview with Online Marketplaces, Bryant and COO Rich Hayes discussed competition, artificial intelligence, quality listings, and industry standards.

The main takeaway? Zoopla is confident, profitable, unconcerned by "noise" surrounding its business—and a portal that truly celebrates its relationship with its customer base and its role as a data provider to the industry.

What noise, readers may ask? One of the wealthiest real estate companies in the world (Rightmove) under offer from another one of the wealthiest real estate companies in the world (REA Group), and an upstart challenger (OnTheMarket) funded by, you guessed it, one of the wealthiest real estate companies in the world (CoStar Group).

Rightmove (which recently rejected four takeover bids by REA Group) and OnTheMarket (owned by the ambitious CoStarGroup) have rightly dominated the headlines for British real estate portals this year with vast sums of money bubbling away in the background.

Zoopla, meanwhile, sandwiched between the two and with a couple of years of losses under its belt, has had fewer fireworks to set off—so much so that Online Marketplaces discussed Zoopla as an 'under threat #2' along with Australia's Domain and American portal Realtor.com earlier this year on the PPW Podcast.

Yet, Zoopla—ever the savvy competitor—remains a consistently active company with an equally consistent pipeline of useful new releases. Rarely a week goes by without Zoopla announcing the launch of something or other, and Bryant and Hayes both agree that Zoopla's vision of putting data in the hands of buyers, sellers and agents is at the very core of what makes it a going concern for consumers and investors alike.

Charlie Bryant explains the context behind Zoopla, where it sits in the British market, and the business's financial performance since 2018:

"Zoopla started as a challenger portal in 2007. When sales prices became public in the UK, Zoopla was one of the first places that you could go and find that information, and over the years we have supplemented that with our own AVM (Automated Valuation Model) and a number of other valuation tools.

"We tend to be the place in the UK where people start their property journey—what makes us stand out from the market leader (Rightmove) is that we get to people earlier in the journey when they're looking for information. We have a very data-led audience, particularly in the city centre and particular in younger age brackets.

"The conventional wisdom is that Zoopla tends to serve a slightly more, a slightly younger, more digital savvy group demographic than than the competitors do. Something not often appreciated is that we're number one in London by a meaningful margin and we're number one in lettings in London by a very, very significant margin.

"We're also in a complex holding structure in that we operate several different businesses. We have our three property businesses [at Houseful], HomeTrack, Alto Software Group and Zoopla. We also have a number of comparison sites including Confused.com, Money.co.uk, and Uswitch.

"We have been consisently profitable at a significantly larger numbers than the ones you've quoted.

"If you look across the journey since we went private, we've seen uptick in ARPA [average revenue per agent], we've seen uptick in branches. We've had good, solid profitability, and our cost per lead is lower than the competition. We really pride ourselves in offering agents the best ROI out there."

Zoopla, part of Houseful, is owned by Silver Lake, which acquired the business in 2018 for circa $3 billion (GBP 2.2 billion), but public filings from the portal paint a disappointing picture driven in no small part by 2020's COVID-19 pandemic.

How is Zoopla's relationship with Silver Lake?

Bryant said:

"There isn't any formal message [from Silver lake]. There are few certainties in life but one of them is that what goes into private equity must come out.

"We're six and a half years into the journey and there is no rush or time pressure from Silver Lake. They tend to be a very-long-term fund with a lot of patience.

"At some stage they'll be beginning to think about what the next step is but we're not in that position yet."

How has Zoopla performed in 2024? At this stage of the conversation, COO Richard Hayes, who has been with the Group since September 2023, joins in.

"It's been an important year for Zoopla. We've found some big wins including a 10% increase to our search performance, and we've also focused heavily on consumer exerperience, particularly the ways in which users of Zoopla engage with the listing, the quality of the listing itself, and our first meaningful foray into AI.

"We're investing in bringing even more data to the listing itself, allowing our consumers to understand more about individual properties as well as the surrounding area as well."

These are unsurprising answers—Zoopla's approach to the consumer experience has always been to empower homebuyers and sellers with information and data. The question is, what data is Zoopla leveraging? Hayes said:

"We focus on two key areas, data we can find and redistribute to users, and data we can create ourselves—all greater than the sum of their parts.

"We've given users access to planning data, planning applications, and much greater insight into the local area such as noise pollution.

"We're seeing more users looking to understand their property's value, then start broadening their search to find out about neighbourhoods much further afield than previously. Area data had been less useful in the past, but it's becoming more important today.

"We then have our own data—data that we curate—and we are currently testing giving consumers access to data so they can understand demand for their home. Zoopla is focused on growing its homeowner base, so it is critical for us to help homeowners understand whether anyone wants to buy their house and is now the right time to sell? We'll be delivering more of this type of data and insight in 2025."

What's the next big win for the company? Hayes says:

"Growing our audience of homeowners. Zoopla will end the year with circa four million homeowners tracking the value of their home with a 60% active return rate.

"Zoopla also knows circa one in every four listings before they come to market, so we believe we will be able to provide extreme value for our customer base once we develop the products that allow them to access a selling audience before they publicly list their property. Without giving too much away, we want to to give our customer base access to more motivated movers than any other portal, including Rightmove."

Does Hayes have any pushback on recent comments by OnTheMarket that it is beginning to snatch the number two spot away from Zoopla?

"For the past few years, certainly this year, portals have made a lot of noise about fighting for share. At Zoopla, we feel very strongly about this idea about growing the market for our customer base. We want to be the business that rises the tide for all boats.

"While other people are talking about positions and session volumes, we have a very very high conviction in our ability to connect far more vendors than any other business with our customer base. We want to deliver demonstrable ROI for our customer base.

His CEO agrees. Bryant said, "If we can help more home movers in the UK move to the next home of their dreams, that's what we want to do and frankly everyone will benefit from that."

Further quotes from Charlie Bryant and Rich Hayes will be published this week, from topics including Rightmove and OnTheMarket, industry problems, the specifics of the British real estate journey, and what the industry is ignoring about its agent customers.