Facebook partners up with online giants in move into UK property market
Facebook is to list properties from two of the UK’s largest online estate agent on its website, in a sign that the social media giant is dipping its toes into the UK property market.
In a partnership with Facebook Marketplace, Zoopla and OnTheMarket (OTM) both announced yesterday that their UK agents’ home rental property listings are now available on the tech site.
The move to provide a forum for buying and selling houses on its social media page comes after Facebook’s success in advertising property for rent in its US market.
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However, experts in the industry fear that while joining Facebook might benefit online portals in the short-term, it could impact on their revenue in the long run.
“Facebook Marketplace is going to a competitor to firms like Zoopla and OTM because its a discovery channel – it is where someone would go to find a house that they would like to buy or let,” according to Taylor Wescoatt, a general partner at a European proptech investment firm Concrete VC.
Wescoatt added: “With such tremendous distribution power, Facebook is putting firms like Zoopla under threat by the fact that people won’t be visiting Zoopla’s own search tool, which would cut its revenue stream.
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“This is still probably a worthwhile trade off for Zoopla, as it still gets more traffic and exposure by joining the market place…but this sort of thing could end in Facebook moving into property, just as Google has done for many things over many years. There’s a lot of money to be made if Facebook dived into this.”
OTM’s share price climbed more than three per cent yesterday on the back of yesterday’s announcement.