British PropTech Homesearch Gets Funding From Original Zoopla Backer Octopus Ventures

Property data prospecting system and one-time challenger portal operator Homesearch has secured £5 million in funding from Octopus Ventures.

Founded in 2017, having evolved from a lifestyle magazine answering readers' questions about house pricing, Homesearch is today a tool used by British agents to get property insights and win instructions. The company claims to have the most comprehensive data available on every home in the country and allows agents to send marketing directly to all of them.

The funding is significant for Homesearch not only because it will allow the company to improve ad enrich the underlying data it uses to help agents win instructions, but also because it comes from Octopus Ventures, a company with plenty of experience in the UK property sector having been an early backer of Zoopla with ties to its founder Alex Chesterman.

Speaking of the funding, Homesearch CEO Giles Ellwood said: “We believe that information should sit at the very heart of an agent's prospecting, marketing, and customer service and it was this vision that Octopus shared with us immediately.

“Our unique way of interpreting and processing data into usable information with straightforward tools allows estate agents to support their clients with finding their dream homes in record time. And that results in more instructions and many more satisfied clients. This major investment is a key stage in our exciting journey towards transforming the way estate agents do business.”

Homesearch briefly launched a user-facing search portal back in 2020. Having claimed that the portal would be free to list and that it had 10,000 agency branches set to publish their listings, the Homesearch portal disappeared in early 2021 having, at the very least, made the brand a lot better known among agents.

Read our 2020 interview with Giles Ellwood and Sam Hunter from Homesearch here.