Zoopla boosts quality leads for housebuilders, defying market trends
Zoopla, one of the UK’s leading property websites, has delivered a 30 per cent year on year increase in quality home buyer leads for its homebuilder customers.* This follows the successful roll out of a series of innovative, consumer focused product upgrades to the Zoopla website over the last 12 months.
Importantly, the strong growth in quality leads from Zoopla comes at a time when buyer demand for new homes has been weaker across the wider market, although there are signs that buyer demand for new homes is now improving.
Customers are already benefiting from these improvements, with Stephen Parker, Head of Digital at Taylor Wimpey commenting: "Zoopla is a valued partner of Taylor Wimpey and we're consistently impressed by the quality of leads they deliver, with a sector-leading percentage of leads delivered by the portal in 2024 converting into reservations. This has been enhanced by improvements they have made to their site to make new homes more visible to consumers."
Product improvements boost lead quality
The key improvements include increasing the visibility of new-build homes on the Zoopla website, particularly on its most viewed pages. This has helped to encourage more consumers to consider a new build property. Specific buying scheme filters and call-outs have also been added to the search experience, resulting in a 40% increase in new home leads from this specific buyer journey on the Zoopla website.
New homes specific selling schemes to support home buyers purchasing new homes has been a consistent feature of the market in recent years. Help to Buy was the main Government backed scheme which has now ended while current schemes available include Own New - Rate Reducer and The Deposit Unlock Scheme which enables buying a new home with just a 5% deposit.
Zoopla is the only property portal in the country that enables consumers to search specifically for new-build homes which are part of these schemes, helping build awareness amongst consumers of the different ways they can buy a new home.
Industry first affordability tool driving new-build consideration
Affordability is becoming an ever greater influence on home buyer demand. In order to address this need, Zoopla has developed and launched a new affordability tool which is
currently being tested by four major housebuilders. The tool helps serious buyers assess their budget and matches them to new home developments that meet their budget and property requirements within an end-to-end journey.
Zoopla research has revealed that 70% of buyers are open to new builds, but only 7% explicitly look for them and this exciting new tool is designed to encourage more would-be buyers to consider new build properties.
Alex Rose, Commercial Director at Zoopla comments: “Zoopla empowers consumers to make more confident moving decisions. This includes encouraging potential buyers to consider all types of properties, including new builds. Our dedicated new homes product team has made some big strides over the last 12 months and these innovations we have implemented are driving direct benefits for our homebuilder customers..
“This is just the beginning for Zoopla and we are focused on introducing further improvements to maximise the visibility of new homes on Zoopla’s website and app in the months to come as we look to drive a stronger ROI for our housebuilder customers and boost the pool of potential demand for new-build properties.”