Zoopla vs OnTheMarket United Kingdom | GPPI Independent Comparison
Quick Verdict
The most important fact framing this comparison is CoStar Group's £99M acquisition of OnTheMarket in December 2023, followed immediately by a commitment of approximately £45–47M in UK consumer sales and marketing for the first year post-deal. That single capital event transformed OnTheMarket from a loss-making agent-consortium portal into the best-funded property portal challenger the UK market has seen since Zoopla's own launch in 2007. Zoopla, meanwhile, generated £84.2M in audited revenue in FY2024 — more than twice OnTheMarket's last reported £34.4M — and holds a 4.8M-user base in MyHome, its homeowner valuation and equity-tracking product. These two assets — revenue scale and the MyHome seller-lead funnel — are Zoopla's most durable advantages and the ones hardest for any challenger to replicate quickly. OnTheMarket's most defensible counter-asset is its 'Only With Us' exclusivity programme, which gives consumers 24-hour or more early access to new instructions before they appear on rival portals. With approximately 4,000 new exclusive listings per month in 2024, this is a genuine behavioural hook that Zoopla structurally cannot match without persuading agents to embargo listings from its own platform. For agents, the practical implication is straightforward: Zoopla remains the higher-reach, higher-data portal backed by Houseful's Hometrack AVM, Alto and Jupix CRMs, and Yourkeys new-homes tooling — a full operator ecosystem. OnTheMarket is the high-investment challenger with momentum, CoStar's global data architecture behind it, and a differentiating early-access product. Use Zoopla when audience scale, seller-lead generation via Prospect Plus, and data integration across the Houseful ecosystem matter most. Use OnTheMarket when early-access listing exclusivity is a viable agent proposition, or when agency branches want to hedge against Rightmove and Zoopla pricing power by building a third-portal audience. Most UK agents with meaningful instruction volumes will run both alongside Rightmove — the question is whether OnTheMarket's CoStar-backed growth eventually makes it mandatory rather than supplementary.
GPPI Pillar Scorecard
Side-by-side assessment across the four GPPI benchmark dimensions. GPPI scores are assessed from public signals. They are not derived from portal subscriptions or commercial relationships. Methodology: GPPI v2.1.
| Pillar | Zoopla | OnTheMarket | Leader |
|---|---|---|---|
| Listing Quality | Zoopla: Listings benefit from Hometrack AVM data integration across the Houseful group, enabling automated valuation overlays on residential search pages. The portal enforces advertiser compliance with TPO and NAEA Propertymark standards. Commercial and new-homes listings draw on sister-brand tooling from Yourkeys, which manages reservation workflows and data completeness for new-homes developers. | OnTheMarket: The 'Only With Us' early-access designation acts as a listing-quality signal in itself — agents must decide to offer genuine exclusivity, which tends to mean newer, better-prepared instructions. Post-CoStar acquisition, OnTheMarket sunset its Glanty/teclet CRM product (announced October 2024 for 2025 closure), signalling a tighter focus on portal quality over ancillary tooling. Advertiser base was approximately 14,000 branches as of 2023. | Zoopla |
| Discoverability | Zoopla: Approximately 24M monthly sessions (third-party estimate, September 2025), supported by nearly two decades of UK brand recognition. The Zoopla.co.uk domain carries strong organic search authority in UK residential property queries. App ratings of 4.3–4.8 out of 5 support direct, returning consumer traffic. | OnTheMarket: Traffic figures are not publicly disclosed as audited totals post-acquisition; CoStar's own communications reference approximately 90% growth from a low pre-acquisition base. A £45–47M per year UK S&M commitment is accelerating paid discovery, but organic brand authority remains well below Zoopla's at the time of this assessment. | Zoopla |
| Market Experience | Zoopla: MyHome gives 4.8M registered homeowners a persistent, personalised experience beyond the search journey — equity tracking, valuation alerts, and property history. The Prospect Plus seller-lead product closes the loop between homeowner engagement and agent connection. Zoopla's guided search, alerts, and saved-search functionality are mature and well-reviewed. | OnTheMarket: The 'Only With Us' early-access alert is the strongest consumer-experience differentiator — registered users receive notifications ahead of the wider market, creating a genuine reason to set up alerts and return. The 'Help Me Choose' guided journey and keyword search are differentiating UX features. App experience is rated approximately 4.7 out of 5 on iOS. | Zoopla |
| Product Innovation | Zoopla: Named products include MyHome (homeowner value tracking, 4.8M users), Prospect Plus (seller-lead generation), Hometrack AVM (via Houseful sister brand), In-Search Ads, House Price Index (public data product), Yourkeys (new-homes reservation tooling), Alto and Jupix (CRM products across Houseful). Mobile app rated 4.3–4.8 out of 5. | OnTheMarket: Named products include 'Only With Us' early-access exclusivity programme (approximately 4,000 new exclusives/month in 2024), 'Help Me Choose' guided search journey, keyword search, valuation journeys, featured placements, and CRM integrations. CoStar's global product architecture (Homes.com, LoopNet, STR) is available as a long-term development resource. The Glanty/teclet CRM was sunset in 2025. | Zoopla |
Listing Quality
Zoopla's Hometrack AVM integration across Houseful gives it a structural listing-data depth advantage — valuations, sold prices, and market context are natively layered into the search experience in a way OnTheMarket's current platform does not yet match at scale.
Discoverability
Zoopla's audience scale lead is substantial at this stage. OnTheMarket's CoStar-funded growth trajectory is real, but a 90% increase from a lower base does not close the gap with Zoopla's 24M estimated monthly sessions within the comparison window covered by this assessment.
Market Experience
Zoopla's MyHome creates a depth of ongoing consumer relationship — tracking homeowner equity over time — that OnTheMarket's current experience does not replicate. OnTheMarket's early-access alerts are compelling for active buyers and renters but do not yet extend the consumer relationship across the full property lifecycle in the same way.
Product Innovation
Zoopla's Houseful ecosystem — spanning AVM data, CRM platforms, new-homes tooling, and a 4.8M-user homeowner product — represents a broader deployed product surface than OnTheMarket has assembled to date. OnTheMarket's 'Only With Us' is a genuine product innovation, but it is a single differentiating feature rather than an ecosystem. CoStar's backing gives OnTheMarket long-run product optionality that may close this gap post-2026.
Strategic verdict: Zoopla vs OnTheMarket in the UK
The UK's number-two and number-three property portals are separated by a structural revenue gap — Zoopla's £84.2M FY2024 audited revenue against OnTheMarket's £34.4M FY2023 pre-acquisition figure — but the more important fact is the direction of travel. CoStar's December 2023 acquisition of OnTheMarket for £99M and its commitment to approximately £45–47M per year in UK consumer marketing is the largest single capital event in UK portal competition since Rightmove's IPO in 2006. It transforms OnTheMarket from a struggling agent-consortium experiment into the most heavily backed challenger in UK portal history. For Zoopla, the strategic question is whether its Houseful ecosystem depth and MyHome's 4.8M homeowner users can sustain its second-place position against an opponent with a multi-billion-dollar parent prepared to absorb years of operating losses in pursuit of market share. Zoopla's core proposition is data-depth and seller-lead generation: the combination of Hometrack AVM valuation data, the MyHome homeowner-engagement platform, Prospect Plus seller leads, and a full CRM and new-homes tooling suite through Alto, Jupix, and Yourkeys gives it a durable operator-ecosystem advantage. Its consumer audience — approximately 24M monthly sessions — is the product of nearly two decades of brand investment and cannot be bought overnight. OnTheMarket's core proposition is exclusivity and capitalization: 'Only With Us' creates a genuine behavioural reason to return to the platform before competitors, and CoStar's balance sheet means the consumer marketing gap with Zoopla will narrow materially through 2026 and 2027. For operators evaluating this pair, the practical decision is not binary. Most agents with meaningful instruction volumes will list on both portals. The real question is where to invest incremental relationship and product-adoption effort: Zoopla's Houseful ecosystem rewards agents who want CRM integration, seller-lead data, and AVM-backed valuations; OnTheMarket rewards agents who want to offer a genuine early-access proposition to motivated buyers. The comparison's defining tension is between Zoopla's established depth and OnTheMarket's funded momentum — and the market's answer will not be clear until CoStar's S&M ramp has run for a full property cycle.
Where Zoopla has a structural edge
Zoopla's most durable advantage is the MyHome platform and what it creates: a registered base of 4.8M homeowners who track their property's estimated value and equity position over time. This is not a search product — it is a persistent ownership relationship that generates first-party seller-intent signals. The Prospect Plus product converts those signals into verified seller leads delivered to agents. No portal in the UK has a comparable owned asset at this scale, and building one requires years of consumer product investment and brand trust that cannot be replicated by a marketing spend alone. The second structural edge is the Houseful ecosystem. Hometrack — Zoopla's sister brand within Houseful — is the UK's leading automated valuation model and property data business, used by mortgage lenders, banks, and agents independently of the portal itself. This means Zoopla's data layer is institutionally trusted at a level that portal consumer traffic alone does not capture. Alto and Jupix CRM platforms, and Yourkeys for new-homes reservation workflows, create switching-cost relationships with agents that extend well beyond portal listing fees. Third, Zoopla's nearly two decades of UK brand recognition and approximately 24M monthly sessions (third-party estimate, September 2025) mean that its organic search authority and direct traffic base are not easily disrupted by paid acquisition campaigns, however large. CoStar's S&M spend can buy consumer awareness for OnTheMarket, but it cannot immediately replicate the depth of Zoopla's indexed property content and domain authority.
Where OnTheMarket changes the equation
OnTheMarket's most genuine competitive advantage is structural, not just financial: the 'Only With Us' early-access programme. By offering consumers 24 hours or more of advance notice on new instructions before they appear on Rightmove or Zoopla, OnTheMarket creates a behavioural reason to register and return that no competitor can match without fundamentally restructuring its listing terms. With approximately 4,000 new exclusive instructions per month across the UK in 2024, this is a real and growing pool of exclusive inventory. For agents, this is a differentiated proposition to motivated buyers — something they can point to in a valuation pitch. For consumers, it creates genuine urgency to monitor OnTheMarket independently rather than treating it as a duplicate of Rightmove. The second source of disruption is CoStar's capitalisation. At approximately $30bn market cap (early 2026), CoStar can sustain a UK investment programme that generates operating losses for several years while building audience at scale. OnTheMarket's post-acquisition trajectory — approximately 90% growth from its pre-acquisition traffic base per CoStar's own communications — is being driven by media investment that Zoopla's PE ownership structure is not designed to match. CoStar's global portfolio also provides long-run product optionality: commercial data from LoopNet, hospitality benchmarking from STR, and US residential learnings from Homes.com are all available as development inputs if CoStar decides to build beyond the residential search portal model in the UK. Finally, the sunset of OnTheMarket's Glanty/teclet CRM (announced October 2024 for 2025 closure) signals a strategic sharpening: rather than competing across CRM and portal simultaneously, OnTheMarket is focusing its capital on consumer audience and the core portal product where CoStar's investment is most impactful.
When to choose Zoopla, when to choose OnTheMarket, and when to use both
Choose Zoopla when seller-lead generation is a primary business objective. Zoopla's MyHome platform and Prospect Plus product are the most developed seller-intent funnel in UK property portals outside of Rightmove. Agents using Alto or Jupix CRM benefit from native integration across the Houseful ecosystem. New-homes developers who use Yourkeys for reservation management gain additional coherence when pairing it with Zoopla portal advertising. Zoopla is also the better choice when data depth matters — Hometrack AVM overlays and House Price Index data enrich the consumer search experience in ways that support agent valuation conversations. Choose OnTheMarket when early-access listing exclusivity is a viable agent proposition in your market. If your agency is active in a competitive, supply-constrained market where motivated buyers want to see new instructions before the crowd, the 'Only With Us' programme gives you a genuine differentiator to pitch at appraisals. OnTheMarket's 'Help Me Choose' guided journey and keyword search are also differentiating UX features for portals targeting less experienced buyers navigating a complex search. Use both when instruction volumes justify the dual subscription — which for most UK agents with ten or more live instructions they will. The critical metric for evaluating portal ROI is not cost per lead, but cost per closed transaction: Zoopla's Prospect Plus leads may convert at different rates than OnTheMarket enquiries, and agents should track this at branch level over a minimum six-month window before making subscription decisions. In 2026, the case for running both alongside Rightmove is strong for any agency seeking audience diversification against Rightmove's pricing power.
GPPI pillar implications for Zoopla vs OnTheMarket
Across all four GPPI pillars — listing quality, discoverability, market experience, and product innovation — Zoopla leads in the current assessment. The practical implication of this scorecard is not that OnTheMarket is weak, but that Zoopla's advantages are embedded in a structural ecosystem depth that takes years to replicate rather than in audience metrics that can be shifted by marketing spend alone. On listing quality, Zoopla's Hometrack AVM data integration and Houseful's new-homes tooling create a data-layer advantage that informs listing context and valuation overlays across the consumer search experience. OnTheMarket's 'Only With Us' early-access designation is a listing-quality signal of a different kind — agent curation at point of instruction — but it does not yet match Zoopla's systemic data integration. On discoverability, Zoopla's approximately 24M monthly sessions and nearly two decades of domain authority give it a lead that CoStar's marketing spend is narrowing but has not yet closed. Agents advertising on Zoopla are reaching a larger current audience. On market experience, Zoopla's MyHome creates a depth of ongoing consumer relationship — homeowners returning to track equity, not just to search — that OnTheMarket's current product set does not replicate across the full property lifecycle. OnTheMarket's early-access alerts are the strongest single consumer-experience innovation in this comparison, but they address one phase of the journey. On product innovation, Zoopla's Houseful ecosystem spans more deployed products across more operator segments — AVM, CRM, new-homes reservation, and portal — than OnTheMarket has assembled. However, the GPPI scorecard should be read with one important caveat: CoStar's global architecture gives OnTheMarket a product optionality trajectory that may materially change this pillar comparison by 2027. Operators should reassess annually.
Who Leads Where
Independent GPPI dimension-by-dimension assessment. Methodology: GPPI Methodology
Consumer audience scale and revenue
Zoopla's £84.2M FY2024 audited revenue is more than twice OnTheMarket's last reported £34.4M. Third-party estimates place Zoopla at approximately 24M monthly sessions (September 2025), a lead that reflects nearly two decades of brand investment against OnTheMarket's nine-year history.
Seller-lead generation and homeowner engagement
Zoopla's MyHome product had 4.8M registered homeowners tracking their property's estimated value and equity as of the sources reviewed. This creates a first-party seller-intent signal — the Prospect Plus product — that OnTheMarket has no structural equivalent to. It is the single most defensible product moat in this comparison.
Listing exclusivity and early-access differentiation
OnTheMarket's 'Only With Us' programme delivered approximately 4,000 new exclusive property instructions per month in 2024, giving registered consumers 24-hour or more advance access before listings appear on Rightmove or Zoopla. No competitor offers a comparable structural early-access product, making this OnTheMarket's most genuine point of differentiation.
Capitalisation and investment runway
CoStar Group (NASDAQ: CSGP, market cap approximately $30bn) is funding OnTheMarket's UK growth with approximately £45–47M per year in consumer S&M — a spend level that dwarfs OnTheMarket's entire pre-acquisition revenue. Zoopla's PE ownership (Silver Lake consortium) does not carry a comparable commitment to escalating marketing spend.
Data and operator ecosystem
Zoopla sits inside Houseful, whose sister brands include Hometrack (the UK's leading AVM and data business), Alto CRM, Jupix CRM, and Yourkeys (new-homes reservation and workflow software). This full-stack operator ecosystem has no OnTheMarket equivalent, and creates switching-cost depth with agents beyond simple portal listings.
Mobile app consumer experience
Both portals report strong mobile app ratings: Zoopla's apps are rated 4.3–4.8 out of 5 across stores, while OnTheMarket's iOS app holds approximately 4.7 out of 5 and the Android app has exceeded 1M installs. Public app-store signals do not establish a material gap between the two portals on mobile experience quality.
Global platform backing and commercial data integration
CoStar's portfolio includes Homes.com (US residential), LoopNet (US commercial), and STR (global hospitality data). OnTheMarket's long-term roadmap can draw on CoStar's cross-market commercial-data infrastructure and international product learnings in a way that Houseful's more UK-specific group structure does not match.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Is Zoopla or OnTheMarket better for UK property advertisers in 2026?
- It depends on your agency's priorities. Zoopla offers the larger current audience — approximately 24M monthly sessions (third-party estimate, September 2025) — the deeper data ecosystem through Houseful's Hometrack AVM, and the MyHome seller-lead funnel with 4.8M registered homeowners. OnTheMarket offers CoStar-backed audience growth, the 'Only With Us' early-access listing exclusivity programme, and the long-run product optionality of a $30bn global data business behind it. Most UK agents with meaningful instruction volumes will run both alongside Rightmove. The practical test is cost per closed transaction rather than cost per lead: track this at branch level over at least six months before making subscription decisions.
- What did CoStar's acquisition of OnTheMarket change for UK agents?
- CoStar Group (NASDAQ: CSGP) acquired OnTheMarket for £99M at 110p per share, completing on 12 December 2023. The immediate change was a commitment of approximately £45–47M in UK consumer sales and marketing for the first year post-acquisition — a spend level that exceeds OnTheMarket's entire pre-acquisition annual revenue of £34.4M. This injected a consumer audience growth trajectory the portal could not have self-funded. For agents, it means OnTheMarket is no longer a low-budget alternative to Rightmove and Zoopla; it is a platform with a multi-billion-dollar parent prepared to absorb losses while building audience. CoStar also sunset the Glanty/teclet CRM product (announced October 2024 for 2025 closure) as part of a strategic refocus on the core portal and consumer marketing product.
- What is the 'Only With Us' programme and does Zoopla have an equivalent?
- OnTheMarket's 'Only With Us' programme allows agents to designate new instructions as exclusive to OnTheMarket for 24 hours or more before the listing appears on Rightmove or Zoopla. The portal reported approximately 4,000 new exclusive instructions per month across the UK during 2024. Registered OnTheMarket consumers receive alerts when new 'Only With Us' listings match their saved search, creating a behavioural incentive to monitor OnTheMarket independently rather than as a Rightmove duplicate. Zoopla does not have an equivalent programme: it would require persuading agents to withhold listings from Zoopla's own platform, which is structurally incompatible with Zoopla's audience-scale business model.
- What is MyHome and why does it matter in this comparison?
- MyHome is Zoopla's homeowner-facing product: it allows registered property owners to track their home's estimated value, equity position, and local market context over time. As of the sources reviewed, MyHome had 4.8M registered homeowners — a first-party audience of people who own property and return to Zoopla independent of any active sales or rental search. Zoopla's Prospect Plus product converts MyHome engagement into verified seller-intent leads delivered to agents. This is Zoopla's most defensible product asset in this comparison: it creates a persistent consumer relationship across the full property lifecycle, not just the active-search phase. OnTheMarket does not have a comparable homeowner-engagement product at scale.
- Do Zoopla and OnTheMarket carry the same listings, or are their inventories different?
- The overwhelming majority of UK residential listings are submitted by agents who advertise on multiple portals simultaneously — Rightmove, Zoopla, and OnTheMarket typically all carry the same instructions from the same agents. The practical difference is timing and exclusivity: OnTheMarket's 'Only With Us' programme means that approximately 4,000 new instructions per month appear on OnTheMarket 24 hours or more before they appear on Zoopla or Rightmove. Outside of these early-access exclusives, the core listing inventory across both portals overlaps substantially for agents who advertise on both. Consumers who want access to the full market — including early-access exclusives — have a genuine reason to monitor OnTheMarket as well as Zoopla.