Portals Gear Up For A Bumper Year

Date Published 21 January 2014

The UK's two leading property portals Zoopla Property Group (ZPG) and Rightmove have both reported record levels of website and mobile activity during the first part of January.

Zoopla says that last week there were 1.6m visits to the ZPG websites in a single day, up 35.3 per cent compared with the same day last year. ZPG mobile downloads are up 99 per cent over the first two weeks of January compared to last year with mobile app usage up 123 per cent over the same period.

Alex Chesterman, CEO of ZPG said, "Our continued investment in our product and marketing is helping us to consistently deliver great results for our members. These record levels of traffic on our websites and mobile apps indicate a strong pipeline of home mover interest and activity to come. With Help to Buy applications and completions on the rise we expect the current levels of enquiries and activity across the ZPG sites will translate into a more buoyant market with higher levels of transactions in the first half of the year.'

Meanwhile Rightmove's Miles Shipside says that in the first two weeks of 2014 the number of pages of property viewed on Rightmove rose by nearly 20 per cent on the same period a year ago. This is a new high for this time of year, and with e-mail enquiries to agents and developers also up by nearly 20 per cent, the interest is being followed up. Home-movers made more than 1.75 million enquiries in the first two weeks of the year, another new year record.