Associated Northcliffe Digital (AND*), the parent company of The Digital Property Group (TDPG), has acquired 50% of the UK’s largest free-to-list property search engine Globrix which is to join the existing family of TDPG property search engines.
The move is part of AND’s ongoing strategy to invest in innovative businesses and talented entrepreneurial management teams, and is designed to give additional scale and reach to agents who advertise with TDPG. This latest acquisition takes TDPG to a total of 2.5m monthly unique users (source: comScore November 2009), further underlining its position as the UK’s second largest property network.
Globrix recently revealed a year-on-year traffic increase of 218.7% (comScore Dec 09 vs. Dec 08) and the new figures from comScore show that TDPG, together with Globrix, is now only 400,000 monthly unique users behind Rightmove – so the gap is closing.
As well as benefitting agents, the acquisition will see AND support the management of Globrix as the company extends its innovative technology platform into other classified vertical markets.
In a separate move just days after the Globrix acquisition, TDPG revealed that it had bought the domains of award-winning property search engine dothomes.co.uk and also extate.co.uk from London-based search technology company BytePlay.
Mark Milner, CEO of The Digital Property Group, says: “The primary reason behind the acquisition of these domains is to strengthen our already strong consumer reach and to drive even more home searchers to one of the core brands of The Digital Property Group, enhancing our offering with more visitors, enquiries and instructions to the agents advertising on the TDPG websites.”
Finally, after a strategic review of the portfolio of property portals operated by TDPG the group has decided to focus investments directly behind its core brands. And this means that the historic relationship between FindaProperty.com and Homesandproperty.co.uk has come to an end.
*Associated Northcliffe Digital is the digital consumer division of A&N Media (part of DMGT plc).
