back to article Brit online property bazaar Zoopla ponders BILLION-pound flotation

British online property portal Zoopla is reportedly considering a stock market listing that could value it at £1.3bn. The UK's second-biggest property search website by page views is looking for new ways to compete with its main rival, Rightmove, and has appointed investment bank Credit Suisse to help it assess its strategy …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Slurp it all up

    I took a load of pictures for the sale of my property and these were explicitly only for the purposes of the sale of my house and given to the estate agent.

    The estate agent was useless and we pulled the property off the market, only to find a few months later that Zoopla had seemed to have downloaded/scanned in the sale brochure removing references to the estate agent and displayed it in their archive section.

    I contacted Zoolpa and advised them, I had taken the pictures and had not given permission for the reuse of them on their site. They responded with some lovely rubbish about Zoopla being a community site!?! and blaring away about providing their users with a richer experience.

    Needless to say I threaten legal proceedings and they remove them from the site but I wonder about their definition of the data protection act

    1. HamsterNet

      Re: Slurp it all up

      So what you're saying is Zoopla did more work in trying to sell your house than your actual paid for estate agent?

      I for one am looking forward to seeing the death of estate agents, who charge a fortune for very little.

      I'm perfectly capable of putting on pointed shoes, of doing a foreman's knot so loosely as to try and imitate a windsor knot, then turning up late to show people around my own home when the time comes to sell it :)

    2. Nick Kew

      Re: Slurp it all up

      Um, are you sure that was zoopla? If so it must be a long time ago, before they turned serious. Nowadays property details are exclusively put there by estate agents, just as with rightmove.

      Interestingly, Rightmove seem to keep a permanent archive of pics. If you have the URL, you'll find yours still there. Likewise, if you know where to look, you can doubtless find the old ads in your local paper for sales in pre-online days.

  2. Nick Kew

    Profitable already ...

    For some of us who invest in venture capital, Zoopla has already made good profits. A profitable flotation could make yet more. And you still have an opportunity - albeit now much watered down - to buy in, via http://www.octopusinvestments.com/!documents/pdfs/1535.pdf

  3. Richard Jukes

    Value? Where?

    I like zoopla, its a good website. However I just cannot see how they are worth 1.3bn - they cant be making that much surely?

    1. Cliff

      Re: Value? Where?

      It's a facebook valuation. Quick, cash in now before anyone notices!

  4. Paul Slater

    I had an idea for an estate agents house-sale aggregator website back in 1993 or 4 but there were only about 30 people on the internet back then so I didn't bother. Bugger.

    1. Nick Kew

      I had an altogether more ambitious idea which would've seen property search as just one of many layers on a map. But the cost of map data was too prohibitive back then.

  5. xj25vm

    Valuation

    50 times the earnings? I'll have whatever they are smoking. One would have thought that after everything that has happened in the last decade and a half with the stock market, people have managed to scrounge some sanity back into their heads. Hmm.

  6. bordersboy

    Here we go again

    So the consolidator is worth more than all the bits it consolidates.

    Give me a break, this has been tried before and we lost the world economy for 4 years, it was called the dot com bubble. Has no one learned anything?

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