OTM nears 5,000 agents as row goes on over traffic

An analysis of portals shows the extent to which OnTheMarket has eaten into Zoopla's agency membership - but also the size of its task to become the second portal'.

Home.co.uk has analysed portals' agency figures on two dates - December 15 2014 and March 10 2015.

Homes says that with 4,927 agents signed up by March 10, OTM is fifth behind Rightmove, Zoopla, Primelocation and Mouseprice, and just ahead of sixth-placed Nethouseprices.

The agents figure from Home is actually higher than the most recent figure released publicly by OnTheMarket itself, which last week said it had 4,800 member agents.

Home's figures show that the day after OnTheMarket's launch on January 26, Zoopla was used by 10,712 agency offices. But by March 10 this had fallen to 9,072.

Meanwhile, over the same period, the number of agents using Rightmove barely moved, with its January 27 tally of 12,850 falling by just 138 to 12,712 by March 10.

Home says that there is evidence that the exodus from Zoopla is tapering off, however.

On March 10, there were 6,933 agents continuing to use both Zoopla and Rightmove, a tally that has fallen by just 108 since February 25, compared with a much larger fall of 1,142 between January 27 and February 2.

Home also claims that online traffic figures from the Alexa Traffic Rank - a firm operated by Amazon - OTM was in 38,233rd place whereas Rightmove was ranked 859, Zoopla 1,920 and Primelocation 11,741.

OnTheMarket has not yet commented on the Home figures consistently criticised data from other sources apart from itself.

However, Knight Frank's Noel Flint tweeted a very different interpretation of the Alexa data late last week, with the words: "#onthemarket traffic fastest growing in UK Alexa.com shows 1.7m places up in global rankings now 604 most popular in UK."

Last week OTM chief executive Ian Springett, announcing two million visits to his portal since its late-January launch, said: We state again that we are confident in becoming the number two portal within a year to replace Zoopla/PrimeLocation, and even after just a few weeks we are now stronger in certain areas of the country with our numbers of property listings.

We have more than 4,800 contracted offices - 90 per cent of which have chosen to leave Zoopla - and [we] are growing in size as the impact of our multi-million pound advertising campaign hits home and our reputation as a cleaner, fresher and faster property website becomes firmly established.