A new analysis of portals shows how OnTheMarket has eaten into Zoopla's agency membership - but also claims the new site has a struggle to achieve its second portal' objective.
The analysis - by Home.co.uk - has looked at a range of portals' agency memberships on two dates, December 15 2014 and March 10 2015.
Home says that with 4,927 agents signed up by March 10, OTM is fifth behind Rightmove, Zoopla, Primelocation and Mouseprice, and only just ahead of sixth-placed Nethouseprices.
The agent 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 analysis also shows 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 changed, 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 - an internet analytics firm owned by Amazon - show that OTM was in 38,233rd place worldwide whereas Rightmove was ranked 859, Zoopla 1,920 and Primelocation 11,741.
However, OnTheMarket has strongly refuted the traffic figures produced by Home, calling them inaccurate and misleading.
OTM chief executive Ian Springett told Estate Agent Today over the weekend that: If Alexa is used as a measure, it is its UK rankings which are most relevant. After only eight weeks since its launch, OnTheMarket.com is already ranked at 604, placing it among the country's most visited websites.
He goes on to say that Home.co.uk itself is ranked only at 2,789 - and that is after more than 18 years in existence.
Our progress will continue as we add more members and properties, extend consumer awareness as our multi-million pound advertising campaign continues and begin to gain high rankings on major search engines. Our entry to the portals market increases competition. No agent or consumer has any less choice than they had before says Springett.
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Comments
OOOOOOH - There are also no Agents using OTM in KT8 0DL - Mo would have gotten away with it too if it wasn't for you meddling kids. :o
Question for Mo: if you have 'come off Rightmove' why is your website a Rightmove feed
And for any matter why is it that in the first place
http://www.dowlingstyles.co.uk/
@Mo Styles - 30 years experience - why the heck did you drop rightmove!!! Dropping rightmove, at the moment, is commercial suicide!! ALL of the other portals are a way behind at the moment. I would love OTM the succeed because of pricing etc however RM is essential at the moment.
Experienced in the field of Lettings over the last 30 years and once a Beta tester and developer for the original FindaProperty website, I was keen to see a new rival portal with OTM. We signed up to all the hype at the beginning and will definitely be exiting at the VERY EARLIEST opportunity in June 2015 - at 6 months.
OTM must be one of the worst organisations we have ever dealt with in our 30 years, and thank goodness we were able to renegotiate terms when we reactivated our RightMove account.
The business strategy at OTM is wrong. I can reason with the 48 hour exclusivity deal but how can OTM expect that independent Agents like ourselves will sacrifice over 50% of our web traffic while they are still learning how to get market share
OTM won't be on the 1st page of Google for a long time yet and they aren't getting the benefit of Google click-rates for the sake of a clean template. I checked out 32 major search engines for our KT8 postcode last weekend - OTM were not on any page 1 and in some cases did not show at all! Of course Zoopla, Rightmove and Prime Location were up there along with Hamptons and Foxtons. If the market can't find you, Agents will lose out badly.
We never received any email clicks or telephone leads during the whole time our properties were live on OTM, which was very damaging to our business.
OTM won't release us from our minimum contract term so it's dead money for us, as OTM only allow us to be represented on one other portal as well as our own. So for all those agents who have dropped a major portal and are losing out on market share, it makes a lot of sense to drop OTM even if under contract.
I expect we will not be alone in taking this necessary action to discard OTM and stay with the recognised leaders in the field. We've lost a few deals to our local competition whilst we had come off RightMove, but after dropping OTM we have got the business back on track once again.
I think the admin operation at OTM is awful. No one calls back and we never worked out a workable solution to resolve teething difficulties. There must be serious issues when I get my 2:00pm call returned eventually at 8:30pm on a Friday night!
Direct uploading was fraught with problems - even the tech department at OTM admitted that to me. I wrote a lengthy email highlighting the obvious issues for a manual upload, but I'm still waiting for a reply. It won't be long before patience and profit is lost by the independent OTM users. Even the bigger franchisers using OTM do not agree with the restrictive practice of only being allowed on ONE other portal when it is clear OTM is too new to the market and not particularly liked by it's end users in our experience.
The interesting statistic will be how many Agents stay loyal to OTM once the 6 months break clause can be exercised. I expect agents who want to survive difficult economic times will have already made up their minds by then.
Interestingly we've had the best ever response from Zoopla - fee reduction; very helpful staff and brilliant advertising campaigns, and now our enquiry level has more than doubled month on month this year. RightMove however remains static; lead results are ok and their costs are always increasing, but it's the interface users like most.
I really cannot see OTM being a realistic competitor on portal feeds if every agent is free to choose, and OTM certainly won't push Zoopla out of their #2 slot (which is their clearly stated objective) if they carry on operating in such an arrogant fashion.
If OTM were going to make a difference to us agents they would not only have to challenge the fee structure at RightMove, but also be equally user friendly and get good response rates. However Zoopla is competitively priced and now cheaper than OTM, so I can't see that our new entrant will be of a great benefit to agents in the longer term.
Of course he is on the defensive because he constantly gets attacked by those who stand to lose from a third more agent related portal! How many of the comments have you seen from OTM and how many have been in response to what others have wrongly suggested
How do the majority of comments here show you that....you show me those, the only two I remember were a couple of jokers that were suggesting they were leaving an agent because their boss was on OTM. Like anyone believed that!!
"OTM supporters also get defensive over every little bit of criticism" Lets look at your posts shall we " it isn't having the impact" "sounds like desperation" Why does not agreeing with your opinions counts as defensive unless of course you are arrogant enough to believe that you are categorically right!
I will just share this with you Rob in the chance that you are actually an agent and not one of the many "non" agents the proliferate these sites. Yes OTM has given RM a stronger hand, but portals serve agents in two ways. They produce leads and they are a USP to market. We now have a irrefutable source of the best internet leads, we have our extensive local marketing and we have a site that promotes houses in a better way than Z without the damaging valuation tool, and also because of the complexion of agents on it Ie higher end, gives us something we can sit in a sellers living room as promote as really different to RM.
You won't be hearing many complaints about the uses of the site from many estate agents!
No, of course not, but neither should he blindly refuse to accept stats from an independent source. Of course he's going to defend OTM to the hilt - it's his brainchild - but it seems like he's on the defensive a lot of the time.
The majority of the comments here suggest that OTM isn't having the impact Springett says it is having. Obviously it will take time, but with a multi-million pound PR campaign rolled out, including TV ads in primetime slots, it might reasonably have been expected that they'd have caught up more ground on Zoopla.
We keep hearing that OTM is going to knock Zoopla off 2nd spot in a matter of months, but these findings suggest otherwise.
OTM supporters get so defensive against any little bit of criticism. Why is that
Interesting comments you've made today Rob. So who exactly do you think Ian Springett should be listening to, you perhaps If not I don't see many of HIS customers jumping on here to comment do you It seems to me you just have another agenda here because the article clearly states that he was asked to comment on a report that SOMEONE ELSE had released. Fair enough to defend their findings wouldn't you say I didn't notice you being quite so vociferous when Lawrence Hall from Zoopla came out with his defensive stance a few weeks ago!
I see from an earlier thread that OTM isn't having the impact its supporters would like to think. Again you know that how exactly Given that one has to assume from your posts that you don't subscribe to OTM, then I think you are going to have to concede that actually you haven't a clue what agents that have are getting from it do you!
Would also go to show that OTM isn't quite having the impact its supporters would like to think. Despite the glossy primetime ads, it's not yet achieving what it set out to do. The main things it's done is to make Rightmove even stronger. Inspired.
Yep, he's not very good at listening, is he A bit like a politician, the research and facts say one thing, Springett says something else. Maybe he could release his own figures to bring a bit of balance, to prove his own words. At the moment it just sounds like desperation.
A bit like our very own PM, Springett seems to be full of hot-air and just goes on the defensive whenever his own rosy worldview is challenged.
What a load of tosh. Mr Springett is burning a lot of money on OTM popup ads. But on clcking them and searching agents on board, their numbers are week still. With groups of agents where managers may be there out of order from their MD rather than choice. Onwards a few independents.
If OTM was launched with around 5,000 agents - then to now be at nearly 5,000 agents tells me that they are losing agents.
Looks like they need to be on the Jerry Springer show rather than the Ian Springetts website.
When posting these result you also have to consider how the site is structured and how many time these results occur
I think is strange how Ian Springett is still in denial when he makes comments on the low traffic figures perhaps he has his own special traffic counter and every other traffic monitor is wrong looking after the agent I think not honesty has to part of the process in order for realistic expectations to be for filled. It's all about results now not sabre rattling
Raw traffic figures to a site is only a small part of the story. Potentially what's more interesting is how engaged people are when they get to the site.
Using the Alexa data again it's possible to look at the number of pages viewed by visitors and the time spent on the site.
Here's how the 3 sites stack up...
[b]Rightmove:[/b]
15.42 page views
12:24 mins spent on site
[b]Zoopla:[/b]
7.87 page views
8:09 mins spent on site
[b]OnTheMarket:[/b]
6.6 page views
7:52 mins spent on site
Unsurprising results really but intersting to see just how much more engaged visitors are on Rightmove compared to the other two.
Can anyone tell me how much it costs to advertise on mouseprice, I say this as I cannot remember ever receiving an invoice from that company.
Zoopla and Rightmove are one of the same, if you advertise on one you go on the other.
I don't think anyone is under Andy illusion in that for 2015 the battle is between Zoopla and OTM.