Zoopla COO Rich Hayes on Potential Sale, MyHome Journey, and Internal AI

Zoopla is a refreshingly transparent business: more than happy to share insights across several topics.

The British number two portal, second fiddle to the runaway market leader Rightmove and under pressure from CoStar Group-owned OnTheMarket, remains an active communicator despite murky rumours around a potential sale.

I was given a 30-minute slot to ask COO Rich Hayes just about anything during our Proptech and Portal Watch conference in Madrid in October.

The tedious bit is handled first. I ask Hayes about what it's like to be the subject of gossip with its investor, Silver Lake, exploring a potential exit after nearly a decade of ownership. The fact is, Zoopla recorded lower revenues in 2024 than in 2023, and off-the-record conversations with several industry experts generally lean towards the opinion that Zoopla—the standalone portal, at least—is worth less today than it was when Silver Lake paid £2.2 billion to acquire the wider Zoopla Property Group in 2018.

But the Group as a whole, Hayes argues, is far stronger than the media narrative would have you believe.

"Our focus at Zoopla is to build a great business. We are focused on taking short, medium and long-term bets that add value to our business. The future is bright for Zoopla and we are making great progress with our plans."

Pictured above: Richard Hayes, COO Zoopla, on stage at the Proptech and Portal Watch Conference in Madrid, October 2025

Which brings us to the meat of our conversation today.

Zoopla's MyHome product is a fast-growing, consumer-focused offering that consistently delivers valuable insights to homeowners looking to understand the home-moving lifecycle and, by extension, sends those insights back to Zoopla itself.

And the product is growing, too. Whenever a Zoopla press release hits my inbox, more people are subscribing to MyHome, claiming their property, and tracking its value. More importantly, they're coming back for more and more.

Zoopla believes up to 1.4 million people are checking their home's value at least once per month, and a significant proportion of high-intent home movers nationwide. As far as sticky products go, this is one of the best in the business.

MyHome is a solid template for any portal that wants to tap into its homeowner audiences: to make its marketplace sticky, to increase the quality of the leads it sends to paying customers (agents), and to extract valuable consumer data and insights that shape strategies company-wide.

But what did the earliest days of MyHome look like? Where did the idea come from, and what drove the planning sessions? It's all about building habits, says Hayes.

"Our homeowner proposition has been one of our big successes over the last few years. When I arrived at the business, there was quite a parochial valuation journey. It was doing a nice job of generating valuation leads, but it wasn't building an audience. I wanted to grow and engage that audience. How do we offer them something that becomes habitual? Something that brings people back to us once a month, or once a fortnight?

"We started with house prices: come to Zoopla and understand prices on any given street. And that is really important because we know that consumers who are serious about buying and selling get serious about understanding prices across bigger areas."

The next step of the product's evolution involved allowing consumers to claim a property as their own, an idea that pre-dated Hayes' arrival in 2023. Zoopla took inspiration from businesses including Clearscore (UK) and Credit Karma (US), both of which successfully turned credit scores into a branded digital habit: checking your credit score. The application for Zoopla was a no-brainer. "We believed that property values changed more regularly and were more important to a homeowner than their credit score. We took a successful business model from another area and tried to use that as a way to build an audience."

He gives me another example: Monzo.

In its infancy, Monzo bank wanted to replicate the Clearscore model so much that it poached the company's CCO to build a user interface that let people easily track their bank balance.

Founded in 2015, Monzo announced in 2017 that over a quarter of a billion pounds had been spent by 200,000 card-using customers in just two years—100,000 of whom had signed up in the previous three months. The hook was the daily glance at the balance; the revenue driver was an extensive marketplace of attractive products and services, bolted on at the end.

Hayes explains that Zoopla started with simplicity—building products and features that engage users on a regular basis. House valuation changes were an obvious starting point, with Zoopla then tagging on an equity function to show homeowners their financial position and potential buying power. The next step was to make it as engaging as possible in as many ways as possible.

The common-sense thing? Ask Zoopla employees, who are also homeowners, what information they would like to see about their property. Responses included a "how long will it take to sell my home if I list it today" tool, and performance metrics for live property listings.

The product journey with MyHome involved its fair share of growing pains. The team packed the new product with as many features as they could ship. The result spread customer engagement too thin. "We went too far," concedes Hayes, "but then we pared it back."

One key learning included a handful of home management offerings. "We saw poor engagement with some of the features around managing a property," says Hayes. As for mortgage, increased MyHome usage has added "quite a bit of traction" this year despite previous struggles. "That one's been a slow burner."

Then Zoopla hit the jackpot. The introduction of demand metrics for properties that generated nearly two million visits within one month of launch. In fact, the tool was so popular that it crashed the MyHome app so hard that "nobody could log into the platform".

"Demand for the 'demand' tool has been incredible. We showed consumers what they would see if their property was live in search. What kind of demand would it get? How many views would it get? How many properties would you be competing against? And we allowed the consumer to check demand against its listing price. So if they listed for 300,000 pounds, what demand would there be? If they listed for 325,000 pounds, what demand would there be? We've been blown away by audience engagement, and now we're starting to double down on that feature."

Our final topic is tech, product and data analysis. Hayes reveals a major replatforming project 18 months in the making, and it involves agentic AI and a rapid search function. "We're doing a huge piece of data work at the moment."

"We're very close to being in a situation where all of our internal data is queryable via agentic AI. This frees up our analysts to do deeper work, and gives product managers, designers, and engineers the ability to query the same database that would have taken a sophisticated data analyst to query. We're handing our Product Managers an 'Ask Me Anything' for all Zoopla data. It's a nice use case for AI internally."

A smart data strategy and a great head of data helped get the project off the ground. "When he arrived, he was pretty adamant that the direction of travel in a complete replatforming of our data to improve access, quality, and consistency."

I remind Hayes that he previously told me he was "obsessed" with AI. He says this mentality exists right across Zoopla.

"We really try to think like a technology company. It's easy for us to think like a property business, which of course we need to remind ourselves of sometimes. But if we remain thinking of ourselves as a technology-first business, then we're likely to beat those that slip into thinking like a property business."