Zoopla builds momentum to deliver results for agents and consumers

The end of Q3 marked my one-year anniversary as Chief Operating Officer at Zoopla, as well as milestone progress on our journey to become the UK’s trusted home decision partner. There’s no doubt in my mind that Q3 has been our best quarter in terms of delivering both ROI and innovation for our agent and builder customers, and we’re only just getting started.?

Here are a few exciting ways we’re delivering on our strategy:

Nurturing the highest-intent seller audience

Over the last couple of years, we’ve invested in our unique homeowner experience - prompting consumers to ‘claim their home’ in order to access exclusive personalised insights on its value, their equity position, what their local market means for them and loads more. We’ve moved a big chunk of UK homeowners from ‘I don’t know’ to ‘in the know’, and this insight-rich experience has enabled us to grow the number of UK claimed homes by 25% this year - meaning we’re on track to hit 4 million claimed homes in 2024.?

As a result of continued product development in this area (and some smart comms from our CRM team), we’ve managed to nurture a unique, highly engaged, high-intent seller audience. 60% of these homeowners return to Zoopla every month to track changes in the value and demand for their home - a great return rate - and 1 in 4 homes for sale on Zoopla have previously been claimed by a homeowner ??.

That’s right, a quarter of UK sellers are researching the value of their property on Zoopla before pressing the trigger to sell. This is cementing us as the no.1 destination for potential vendors in the UK.?

Driving vendor lead growth for our agent partners

We’re always looking for better ways to connect sellers with the UK’s best agents. Often this is in the form of micro-optimisations to ensure we make it as frictionless as possible for consumers to contact agents on Zoopla - particularly in our homeowner experience, where we know there’s incredibly high selling intent. But this month alone, we’ve revamped our ‘find agents’ page, scaled up our search-optimised selling guides to 113 articles and we’re about to launch advertising that explicitly tells local sellers to find their next agent on Zoopla.?

All of this has contributed to a 16% YTD uplift in the vendor leads we give to our agents - and we’re confident there’s more growth to deliver here as we move into 2025.

Optimising the homefinding experience

We’ve never been more focused on optimising our search experience - it’s critical to strengthening our property marketing offering for both consumers and customers. Q3 improvements included adding a new ‘hybrid map’ to listings, a feature that enables consumers to simultaneously view the map and listing cards, enhancing their search experience. This has resulted in a 20% increase in ‘for sale’ email leads from Zoopla’s listing results search page (below).?

We’ve also improved the range of filters we offer buyers, a win-win as we can deliver more relevant search results for consumers, and higher quality leads for agents as a result. (And yes, you can now filter your home search by your ideal amount of bathrooms ??).

All of this is delivering on our ambition to be the UK’s trusted partner for home decisions. With our unique audience, highly-engaged homeowner base and established brand awareness, we’re in an exceptionally strong position to push hard for more innovation and stronger ROI for our customers. I couldn’t feel more excited as I look to the remainder of the year and into 2025.?