Zoopla CEO Has "No Desire" for Portal War With Rightmove and OnTheMarket

In the second part of Online Marketplaces' exclusive interview with Zoopla, CEO Charlie Bryant and COO Rich Hayes share their thoughts about rival portals Rightmove and OnTheMarket, the difference between home buying and selling in the United Kindom and the United States, and more...

Read part one here.

It is difficult to speak about Zoopla without understanding the pressure it faces from both above and below.

Above, the incumbent market leader Rightmove is (in)famous for its extraordinary success among the upper echelons of real estate portals worldwide. Below, the American-owned OnTheMarket (OTM), flush with billions in the bank, a long-term strategy, and a bullish CEO who hates losing.

According to Similarweb figures, Rightmove had 74.3 million web visits from November 8-December 8 2024. In the same period, Zoopla had 22.6 million views and OTM, 15 million.

Bryant's summation of the competitive landscape in the United Kingdom—a mostly three-horse race between Rightmove, Zoopla and OTM—is an excellent summary worth sharing:

"Rightmove was the first portal out there in the UK and that shows through today in that it clearly the number one portal in the UK from a traffic perspective, from a brand recognition perspective, and in some areas, from a listing perspective, as well.

"OnTheMarket is a more recent entrant (publicly launched 2015) as an agent-owned challenger. Most of that was driven by the fact that agents wanted to have a hedge against potential fee increases from Rightmove and Zoopla. It didn't really get traction in its ability to challenge either Rightmove or Zoopla, and this has been a fairly constant picture.

"Obviously that changed in 2023 when it was acquired by CoStar which has been successful in bringing in a number of agents through what Zoopla understands to be principally free offers. It's also been working hard on digital marketing to get greater visibility with consumers.

"From our perspective, Rightmove remains a clear number one, Zoopla remains a clear number two, and quite some distance ahead of OTM. But there's no question that there is a third challenger portal in town that now has more firepower behind it than the original OTM."

Andy Florance told Online Marketplaces that his CoStar business is willing to be patient to take market leadership in the UK from Rightmove—alluding to a ten-year investment strategy involving a huge amount of marketing spend.

I asked Bryant if the American CEO could realistically wrestle the number-two spot from Zoopla simply by spending his way to the top.

He's not so sure.

"It takes three things to be a successful portal, and there's no rocket science to this.

"One is content. You have to have the listings coverage. You know consumers will not go to somewhere that only shows them half of the homes for sale.

"Number two, you have to have a product, a consumer experience that really engages consumers and and gives them something that they are not getting from elsewhere or not used to seeing elsewhere. And thirdly, you need to go out there and develop the brand.

"Only if you have all three of those can you really change consumer preference. I'm not suggesting that any of our competitors are just focused on one of them, but what I would say is if someone did come into the market thinking that they could purely drive advertising and spending and shift consumer preference that way, I think [CoStar] would be missing two legs of the stool."

Andy Florance told Online Marketplaces in October that he is 'a patient man' and is willing to invest in OnTheMarket for at least the next ten years. Does Bryant agree that the long game is key?

"CoStar is a listed company and shareholders tend to be demanding. The business is not a charity and over time the shareholders will need to see that OnTheMarket is on a commercial footing. The idea of building up listings through free offers isn't a long term game. Whether that changes over the next two, five or ten years isn't for me to judge. But the shareholders need to be willing to wait for that change."

And this is where the conversation gets interesting.

Firstly, Hayes submits that the top of the pyramid isn't for the faint of heart: "The consumer experience leg of the stool will be critical [for OTM]. If they serve up a bog-standard listing that doesn't help a consumer move confidently, then you're making it much harder for yourself to win."

I push back. I put it to the execs that the harsh reality for Zoopla is that in CoStar—which already operates a hugely data-heavy set of marketplaces including Homes.com and Apartments.com in the United States—the purple portal has a deadly rival that loves buying and packaging data more than Zoopla itself.

CoStar is not in the game of bog-standard listings and has the billions to blow Zoopla out of the water. So won't Zoopla have to find a way of beating OTM away from its data-focused USP?

Bryant steps in:

"The UK market is, in this sense, much different to the US market. The vast majority of UK movers move less than three miles. So actually, the idea of really indepth education data and drone flights (an allusion to Matterport), are arguably less relevant in the UK market than they might in the United States.

"Pretty much everyone knows which neighbourhood they want to live in, a good percentage know what street they want to live in, and some even know which specific house they want to live in."

Zoopla has a functionality whereby would-be buyers can track individual properties whether they're for sale or not. But, the data is all publicly available, so what is stopping CoStar from using the exact same data for its own listings?

Rich Hayes says Zoopla has a headstart.

"We've invested heavily in it. The valuation element is also unique to us because we get the data from Hometrack (a Houseful business) which is the best in class of what portals can offer consumers. [CoStar] is not going to win on a great listing experience because we're all doing it."

Meanwhile, the duo are unbothered (and perhaps slightly unimpressed) by OTM's claim that it was the UK's number two destination for web traffic in September. Bryant said:

"We have no desire to be getting into a sort of prolonged game of 'he said, she said' here. The trade press loves to stoke the fire on what they call portal wars and honestly that's not our game.

"But when people are going out in a very public fashion with numbers we believe are manifestly misleading, we did feel it was necessary to correct it, especially when they brought our name into it as well. We don't intent to comment on this any further but if they poke the bear again and we feel something is injust, we'll correct it."

As for Rightmove, Bryant wants Zoopla to be an "and"—not an "or"—for agents in the UK.

"Agents are all grown ups. It's public record that Rightmove has seen substantial revenue growth driven in large part by growth in ARPA, and that inevitably garners the attention of agents, sometimes with frustration.

"They can make their own decisions on whether they feel they get an ROI for something. Yes, there is some frustration that is often publicly quoted around agent fees. But it really is up to every agent to make their own decision on ROI, and that's why it's something that we focus very, very heavily on: deliver the best ROI for agents."

Does Zoopla need to improve its ARPA to perform more like Rightmove? Bryant is quick to shut down this line of questioning.

"No. We need to deliver more value to our agents and products that work for them. What we talk about internally is offering something different. A great example: today, Zoopla knows one in four properties that are set to come to market before [the owner] has even thought about coming to market. If we can harness that information for the benefit of our agents, that will be really important to them."

This reporter will admit that, from the outside, a portal like Zoopla facing two kinds of pressure (or three if you include ROI for Silver Lake's investors) may be driven to conversations revolving around what its rivals are doing.

But what became patently clear, from this part of the conversation at least, is that Rightmove and OTM are not top of mind for Zoopla—nor should they be.

With Bryant and Hayes laser-focused on doing what they do best, the bigger picture view is that Zoopla has more than laid the foundations for its own success. With a suite of useful businesses like Alto, Jupix and Hometrack under the Houseful umbrella, Zoopla is not a business that will willingly hand over its silver medal to OnTheMarket/CoStar 'just because'.

Meanwhile, the shadow of Rightmove looms large, but Zoopla honestly doesn't seem to concern itself with the reputation or methods of the market leader. The short and simple message to agents appears to be: go for Rightmove if you want, but if the numbers stop making sense, Zoopla will be there—and you'll probably like it more here anyway.

Part three of Online Marketplaces' exclusive interview with Zoopla will go live next week.