Investment and Funding Roundup: Zoopla Closes Acquisition, Grupo OLX enters Joint Venture

This week's roundup starts with an acquisition by the UK's second-largest real estate marketplace...

United Kingdom: Zoopla buys new homes portal

Zoopla has announced the acquisition of Newhomesforsale.co.uk for an undisclosed sum.

Founded in 1998, newhomesforsale.co.uk has become the UK's largest specialist new homes portal with more than 200 developer customers, including nine of the top ten national homebuilders. Newhomesforsale.co.uk will continue to operate independently under its current brand.

The acquisition is complementary to and builds on the momentum of Zoopla’s new homes offering. Zoopla has recently signed strategic partnerships with major developers, including Taylor Wimpey and Persimmon Homes, underpinned by product innovations that delivered a 53% increase in the volume of new home leads for home builders versus the prior year

Paul Whitehead, CEO at Zoopla, said:

“We’re delighted to welcome the team at newhomesforsale.co.uk to Zoopla. They have built a respected and highly specialised business that consistently delivers high-intent leads, strong conversion rates and strong ROI for home builders.

“This acquisition is a natural next step in our strategy. Our recent partnerships with Taylor Wimpey and Persimmon demonstrate the progress we have made and the value we deliver.”

Mark Hincks, Director of newhomesforsale.co.uk, added:

“Our focus has always been to connect developers with high-intent buyers and deliver a clear return on marketing investment. Joining Zoopla unlocks audience data, insights and innovation that will allow us to deliver even more value for our customers. Together, we can accelerate growth and support home builders with stronger sales pipelines and better commercial outcomes.”

Zoopla's decision to acquire a business while it is rumoured to be up for sale may raise eyebrows. However, an attractive data play will help Zoopla bulk out its consumer-facing products towards new build properties.

Latin America: Grupo OLX enters joint venture to analyse land purchases

Grupo OLX has entered a joint venture with Dataland to improve the infrastructure around land purchase analysis in Brazil.

OLX will provide Dataland with access to its Geoimovel service for analysing and tracking real estate development projects in Brazil. From the other side of the joint venture, Dataland—an AI-driven platform with access to data for land purchases, from zoning and planning rules to long-term value forecasting—will provide over 300 data points for analysing plots of land.

According to an article published in MetroQuadrado, OLX wants to help investment funds find the right land to invest in.

Marco Leite, CRO at Grupo OLX, told MetroQuadrado that "The real estate cycle follows the economic cycle. And the first stage of the real estate cycle is the search for land."

The joint venture will not be the first of its type in Brazil, but the companies believe analysis of land, which currently takes three to five days, can be reduced to a matter of seconds thanks to rich data and AI.

Ivan Bermudes, CEO at Dataland, said:

The land is worth what can be built on it, and we will provide this vision to the landowner. And there is also a movement of asset managers entering this land acquisition phase that we want to accelerate."