Purple Bricks Founders' New Portal Boomin Makes Waves in the Industry

As the UK property marketing industry changes, one anonymous and supposedly prominent commentator believes that only one new portal has what it takes to challenge Rightmove. 

Our recent UK Challenger Portal interview series profiled some of the portals and alternatives hoping to carve out a piece of the Rightmove and Zoopla pie for themselves as the UK industry evolves and incumbent portals come under pressure from increasingly squeezed agents. Among the companies featured was OpenBrix whose MLS style solution to the question of marketing property in the UK got some important backing from across the pond last week.

However, according to an anonymous source quoted in Estate Agent Today, none of the well-meaning challengers stand a chance of making serious inroads in the market as they don’t have the financial backing necessary to make noise and get eyeballs on properties. The unnamed source claims to have been given an inside look at the workings of Boomin, the new portal founded by the two brothers behind Purple Bricks, and says that its offering will be the only new portal to worry the big boys:

“None of the other emerging portals have any significant marketing proposals - outside of the agency industry nobody’s heard of them. Boomin has wads of cash and so will get eyeballs on the properties and therefore leads. It’ll work”

The comments follow tacit backing from Say No To Rightmove leader Rob Sargent who intimated last week that his company might be in line to sign up to Boomin’s offering.

With many of the challenger portals being bootstrapped entities, the theory goes that with little chance of gaining access to large amounts of capital needed to market their offerings they will come off second best to Boomin. Details of the funding behind Boomin and the USP of its product are scarce at this point however and Boomin declined our invitation to be part of the UK Challenger series preferring to keep their powder dry for a mooted launch date in October.