UK Challenger PropertyHeads Buys Out Failed Rival and Claims Fourth Spot in Portal Wars

The British challenger portal PropertyHeads is now claiming to be the UK's fourth-largest player having acquired assets from failed rival ResidentialPeople.

According to a press release, PropertyHeads has been acquiring failed rivals for some time and now has listing feeds from 8,000 agencies in the country. By comparison, OnTheMarket has listings from around 13,000 sources and Rightmove has around 19,000.

The company claims that it is replicating a tactic employed by fellow British portal Zoopla in its early days by absorbing competitors and redirecting traffic to its leading portal.

Ben Davis, CEO of PropertyHeads, commented: “We are always opportunistically acquiring businesses and assets that will help us become the UK’s best property portal. It’s taken us four years to become both profitable and grow into the UK’s No 4 property portal without substantial outside investment. And now 2024 is set to be a transformational year for PropertyHeads and we will be making more exciting announcements in the first half of next year.”

The latest acquisition is from ResidentialPeople which appeared to have stopped operating when we studied UK challenger portals in February this year.

UK Challenger Portals

Another real estate website that PropertyHeads has bought out is the data specialist MousePrice which is being restored to a consumer-facing site for owners to find out the value of their property.

PropertyHeads claims to have made a small profit last year despite being free to list for agents. The portal monetises by selling leads to adjacent service providers.