UK property portal zoopla.co.uk has acquired houseprices.co.uk, which allows users to search the UK Land Registry database of houses sold in England and Wales since 2000, for an undisclosed amount.
This acquisition comes after zoopla.co.uk raised £3.25 million in funding in mid-December, which the portal said it planned to use for its January advertising push.
houseprices.co.uk was established in 2005 and zoopla.co.uk says the database now sees over 1 million visits per month according to Nielsen figures.
zoopla.co.uk explains that houseprices.co.uk will continue to be operated as a separate brand and website, but will now link directly to the portal. zoopla.co.uk stops short of saying that it will use houseprices.co.uk’s data on zoopla.co.uk itself.
This acquisition follows two similar deals for zoopla.co.uk over the past year and a half. In mid-2010, the portal bought property technology company Byteplay, whose products included map-based property search engine ononemap.com and US property search engine dothomes.com. A year before that, zoopla.co.uk bought REA Group and News Limited’s jointly-owned UK online business, which ran propertyfinder.com, hotproperty.co.uk and ukpropertyshop.co.uk.
“This acquisition adds to the growing list of websites that we now either own directly or power exclusively, extending our reach even further and allowing us to offer our agent and developer members exposure to a unique and unrivalled online audience,” says zoopla.co.uk CEO Alex Chesterman. “houseprices.co.uk has built a very strong following over the years by offering a great service, which we intend to continue.”
Chesterman recently told propertyportalwatch.com that zoopla.co.uk is seeing approximately 5 million unique visitors per month, placing it within the top three property portals in the UK.
