The social media lead property portal PropertyHeads has today announced the purchase of fellow UK property portal Mouseprice. Originally launched as an analytics and data company by Calnea Analytics in 2004, Mouseprice was originally a property valuations site, but it launched its own free-to-list portal in 2010 and was sold on to the Daily Mail's property portal division in 2013 and was a stable-mate of Zoopla for a few years.
PropertyHeads founder Ben Davis is hoping that the addition of a reported 250,000 property listings and the valuation technology from Mouseprice will lend his nascent property portal business the boost it needs to challenge industry incumbents such as Rightmove. PropertyHeads is designed to be a cross between a property portal and a social network connecting all stakeholders in transactions as well as tradespeople and property managers. Speaking about the acquisition of the venerable legacy portal, Davis said:
"We have [now] pulled together hundreds of thousands of property consumers, 20,000 property businesses, almost 500,000 property listings and sat them alongside one another. The removal of these historic barriers of communication in exchange for seamless property social networking represents a step forward for the U.K’s property industry, in our opinion."
“Our social platform is the perfect tool to build and maintain relationships with estate agents, tradespeople and other property businesses, and that’s been sorely missing up until this point."
Check out our interview with Ben Davis from our UK Challengers Spotlight series in July