BREAKING NEWS – top 5 stories 15/04/2021
STORM CLOUDS OVER FOXTONS BIG PAY TO CEO
CEO Nic Budden is in the hot seat as he looks to scoop a pay package of around £1.6M, at a time that Foxtons took over £2.5M in business rates relief, and over £4m in furlough payments. This looks like a mis-managed situation that Foxtons would do well to sort quickly, bearing in mind that many others have repaid furlough payments, making the present scenario questionable by some senior commentators, especially as it is a listed company.
ADDLAND A NEW LAND SOURCING PORTAL LAUNCHES
Headed up by Thomas McAlpine, a new portal has launched to cater for the sourcing and transacting land as a solution to the piecemeal process currently in place, the name of the site is aptly title Addland.com.
CHANGE OF GUARD AT COUNTRYSIDE PROPERTIES
Stock exchange listed and London centric Housebuilder Countryside Properties has announced that it will have a new Chair. John Martin will take up the role next month following the departure of David Howell.
‘MY HOME’ INNOVATION LAUNCHES WITHIN ZPG OFFERING
Zoopla has unveiled its ‘My Home’ inniative a new way for the general public to engage with the portal. It seems that some of the portals are waking up to the fact that UX is now everything, probably spurred on by the realisation that Amazon an e-commerce platform has seen exponential growth during the lockdown.
Property portals and platforms if they become of use and are easy to navigate and ‘do something engaging’ can navigate the change in user sentiment. Rightmove are less agile and their higher pricing model for agents, with a very fixed 20-year-old plus model is starting to creak a little, especially with new 2030 aligned portals such as Boomin and Moovshack launching.
Those in the know, will be aware that I was never a lover of Purplebricks as it was agency and tech lite, but Boomin is a different proposition, curated to nurture the digital native.
Those who live in the analogue world of yester year will soon be waking up and realising the world has moved on, leaving them far behind, as over a third of the global generation is Gen-Z and they do things very differently to the Millennial class who are now in their early 40’s.roperty portal, a response to making their offering more engaging for users, and upping the UX.
BOOMIN AND CHANGE OF ROLE FOR MICHAEL BRUCE
It has just been announced that Michael Bruce will now become the Group Chief Executive Officer for Boomin.