New Report on Portal Performance Shows OnTheMarket Trailing Rightmove and Zoopla

A new report published by digital leads tracking company homehere.co has highlighted the disparity between the performance of the big-three UK portals. Although the report is quick to state that it is not to be taken as a national or regional benchmark and that as yet the sample size is not big enough to draw firm conclusions, the figures published today may make unpleasant reading for new OnTheMarket CEO Jason Tebb.

After analysing around 25,000 email leads and 9,000 phone calls from their agent customers, homehere's report not only shows that OnTheMarket (0.97%) lags behind Zoopla (1.93%) and Rightmove (2.65%) when it comes to the conversion rate of the leads it sends, but that it also has the highest cost per converted lead at £161 compared to £112 for Rightmove and £83 for Zoopla.

The data homehere collected from its agent customers threw out a few surprises for homehere Founder Lou Quinn who said that "Areas that we thought the portals would be stronger in, such as valuation leads, actually aren’t, with very few of them actually converting to instructions". The report shows that Rightmove delivered 54% of all the valuation leads tracked with 6% of these converting to instructions, Zoopla delivered 43% with the same conversion rate and OnTheMarket delivered only 3% of these leads with no conversions.

The other area highlighted by ex-agent Quinn as a surprise was the volume of leads delivered by the big-three portals after a property had already been taken off the market. Ironically 40% of all leads delivered by OnTheMarket came through when the listing in question was already off the market (compared to 5% of those from Rightmove and 6% from Zoopla). OnTheMarket was also found wanting when it came to email lead quality where only 55% of email leads the portal sent were responsive beyond their initial enquiry compared to 75% for Zoopla and 78% for Rightmove.

While there are obvious caveats around drawing conclusions from data with such a small sample size, homehere intends to grow its sample size and publish quarterly reports around portal efficiency which could have a meaningful impact on the property portal industry in The UK as they become more and more representative of the industry.

Read our interview with homehere.co Founder Lou Quinn from January here.