The PPW Podcast

Hosted by Online Marketplaces Group

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145

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Aug 2026

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About the show

The Online Marketplaces team delve into the online real estate marketplace industry as well as the broader world of PropTech surrounding it. We bring you news, views and interviews from the industry as well as our own team's analysis of current events and trends.

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60 recent

September 11, 202644 min

News Roundup 11/09/26: Zoopla Opens The Books, The Narrative Lever & Claims Nobody Checks

In this week's news roundup, Zoopla breaks cover with a full set of FY2025 numbers, and that sets up a longer argument about the cheapest growth lever in the portal business: the story you tell about yourself. Chapters:00:00 Intro00:48 Zoopla Publishes Its FY2025 Financials11:56 Will Silver Lake Sell Zoopla, And To Whom?14:32 The Perception & Narrative Lever18:26 When Number Two Actually Overtakes Number One23:24 Inside The Claims Ledger: 19,300 Portal Claims32:11 Simon On Making Claims As A Portal CEO39:25 PPW Madrid Preview Zoopla Opens The BooksZoopla is no longer a public company and does not have to tell anyone anything, but it sent the market a press release anyway. Revenue of £83.2m for FY2025, down 1% year on year. Profit of £20.7m at a 16% margin. Homeowners tracking a property on the site up 39% to more than six million, and Prospect Plus seller leads converting to listings at 43%. What it did not disclose was agent or customer numbers, which is what the UK trade press led on. Simon reads a decade of roughly flat revenue as the honest picture of life as number two to Rightmove, and reckons the release is Silver Lake, eight years and around £2bn in, telling the market it is profitable and open to offers. His guess on the buyer: another PE firm rather than CoStar, Idealista or REA Group. The Narrative Growth LeverPaul Whitehead's comments to Harvey about customer perception set up the bigger question. Of the levers a portal CEO can actually pull, listings are hardest to move, traffic and product cost real money, and product has never once decided market leadership. Simon half agrees, and offers the two cases where number one genuinely fell: Casa losing Italy to Immobiliare, and Realtor.com losing the US to Zillow's Zestimate. Both needed the leader to slip at the same moment the challenger did something unusual. Claims Nobody Is CheckingWith 19,300 portal claims now in the OMP claims ledger, the question becomes who makes claims and why. Simon splits it four ways, leaders against attackers and listed against unlisted, and explains why he refused to make forward financial claims as a CEO, how survey-backed marketing claims really get made, and what to make of REA Group's disputed nine out of ten line. PPW Madrid PreviewThe conference runs 28 to 30 October. Around 300 of 500 places are already gone, Malcolm Myers and Mike DelPrete are on the strategic track, and more headline portal speakers are still to be announced. Tickets at ppweurope.com. Presented by:• Edmund Keith: https://www.linkedin.com/in/edmund-keith/• Simon Baker: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stbaker/

September 9, 202640 min

Reupload: The War on Portals, with Mike DelPrete

Hi everyone - we have reuploaded our interview with Mike as there was an audio dropout in the original episode. Sorry for this - it sounded great during recording and editing! Harvey Hancock is joined by Mike DelPrete and Simon Baker to unpack the war on portals. 00:00 - intros 00:52 - Mike's Madrid preview 04:12 - The FTC's settlement with Zillow and Redfin 07:19 - Why Rocket’s ownership of Redfin makes rentals strategically valuable 09:01 - The “war on portals” and why portal pricing is under attack 12:02 - Industry-wide self-inflicted wounds 19:44 - Are mature portal businesses losing their entrepreneurial muscle? 25:16 - Why unique inventory matters most 38:24 - OutrosGet your tickets to PPW Madrid here! https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/ppw-e...

September 8, 202640 min

The War on Portals, with Mike DelPrete

Harvey Hancock is joined by Mike DelPrete and Simon Baker to unpack the war on portals. 00:00 - intros 00:52 - Mike's Madrid preview 04:12 - The FTC's settlement with Zillow and Redfin 07:19 - Why Rocket’s ownership of Redfin makes rentals strategically valuable 09:01 - The “war on portals” and why portal pricing is under attack 12:02 - Industry-wide self-inflicted wounds 19:44 - Are mature portal businesses losing their entrepreneurial muscle? 25:16 - Why unique inventory matters most 38:24 - Outros

September 4, 202636 min

News Roundup 04/09/26: Portal Shares Rebound, Compass vs StreetEasy & Silver Lake Sells Hometrack

In this week's news roundup, Ed, Harvey and Simon look at a portal share price recovery that's outpacing the market, the escalating Compass–StreetEasy standoff in New York, and Silver Lake's sale of Hometrack to Providence Equity Partners.Chapters:00:00 Intro01:00 Portal Share Prices Bounce Back13:43 Compass vs StreetEasy: The New York Standoff23:48 Silver Lake Sells Hometrack to ProvidencePortal Share Prices Bounce BackA composite of eight listed portals — Rightmove, REA Group, Scout24, Hemnet, CoStar, Zillow, Baltic Classifieds Group and Swiss Marketplace Group — appears to have bottomed out in mid-June 2026. Off that low the composite is up roughly 18%, with the median portal rising about 12% over three months against 2–5% for the benchmarks. The rebound is uneven: Hemnet and SMG around 29%, KE Holdings 26%, REA 22%, Rightmove 20%, Scout24 20%, CoStar 13%. Portals are still around 42% below where they were a year ago, while the S&P and FTSE sit at or near record highs. Simon's read: the sell-off had less to do with portal fundamentals than with capital rotating into AI stocks and a fear that LLMs would route around portals — while the businesses themselves kept posting strong numbers.Compass vs StreetEasy: The New York StandoffStreetEasy, Zillow's New York portal, has capped how many new agents can join its Experts programme from any brokerage already holding 20% of its user base — a threshold only Compass and its subsidiaries (Anywhere, Corcoran, Sotheby's, Coldwell Banker) meet. It follows Compass's autumn 2026 marketing playbook, whose first suggestion to agents was to delist from StreetEasy. With Compass controlling an estimated 80% of Manhattan listings by one study, Simon frames this as a battle over unique listings and a genuine existential question for StreetEasy — and asks whether the tit-for-tat response is for StreetEasy to become a brokerage itself.Silver Lake Sells Hometrack to ProvidenceHometrack, the AVM business inside Silver Lake's Houseful, is being acquired by Providence Equity Partners. Harvey's original read was that this signals Silver Lake gearing up to sell Zoopla; Ed's is that a data engine is now an easier asset to sell than a consumer-facing portal. Simon — a Hometrack director twenty years ago — explains why it's so defensible: decades of UK housing data, an AVM used by 16 of the 20 largest UK lenders, and a repeat-revenue model around quarterly loan-book revaluation that took the cost of a valuation from roughly £200 to £20. He's unconvinced a portal group loses much by selling it, and explains why putting an estimate next to an agent's asking price is a problem of its own.PPW Europe runs 28–30 October — https://ppweurope.comPresented by:• Edmund Keith — https://www.linkedin.com/in/edmund-keith/• Harvey Hancock — https://www.linkedin.com/in/harvey-hancock/• Simon Baker — https://www.linkedin.com/in/stbaker/

September 1, 202639 min

Going Viral with 'Moving Out', with Rita Goh

Harvey speaks with Rita Goh from Property Guru about the company’s “Moving Out” micro-drama campaign, a social-first marketing experiment that went viral in Singapore, and beyond! 0:00 Intros1:46 Property Guru context 3:34 What is this social first marketing strategy? 5:40 Moving Out in context 18:04 Storyboarding and Creative 22:19 Anonymous Vs Branded content 26:26 Gen Z demands and activities 31:07 Advice to other Marketers and other topics

August 28, 202646 min

News Roundup, 28/08/2026: Idealista, Zillow, Bezrealitky, and more...

Harvey joins Simon for a fast-moving news roundup covering Idealista’s planned expansion into France, Zillow’s FTC settlement over its Redfin rentals deal, and results from KE Holdings and Swiss Marketplace Group. We discuss strategy, market structure, cross-border expansion, and where portals may need to evolve beyond pure advertising to stay relevant. 00:00 - Introduction and the news roundup format 00:53 - Idealista’s France expansion and the market context 16:28 - Zillow’s FTC settlement and the Redfin rentals deal 22:34 - Czech Republic and Bezrealitky 30:03 - KE Holdings Q2 34:54 - Swiss Marketplace Group interim report and market reaction 44:41 - Wrap-up

August 20, 202650 min

News Roundup, 21/08/26: Silver Lake, Redfin, Boneo, and Expansions

Simon and Harvey get together for a roundup of this week's news stories, including Silver Lake's Housetrack divestment, new data on Redfin and Boneo, and a long conversation about international expansions. 0:00 sponsor messages and intros 1:04 Silver Lake and Hometrack 12:09 Redfin and Boneo 26:00 International Expansions

August 14, 202650 min

News Roundup 14/08/26: Financials Season Continues

Simon and Harvey catch up on some financial results around the world, with some adjacent conversations including traffic, hirings, amortization, LLM traffic, legislation changes, going public, and more... 0:00 Intros and PPW Europe update 3:00 Rightmove HY 2026 results 11:30 Scout24 H1 and Q2 2026 19:25 REA Group FY2026 results 31:00 Idealista FY2025 results 42:00 Square Yards Q1 2027

August 7, 202645 min

News Roundup, 07/08/26: Financials in the United States

Harvey Hancock and Simon Baker break down the latest US portal results from Zillow and CoStar Group. 00:00 Intros 06:13 Zillow’s Q2 results and wider context 09:57 Zillow layoffs and the AI efficiency question 15:16 Realtor.com, Redfin, and the broader traffic trend 19:32 Turning tire kickers into qualified prospects 20:07 AI assistants as qualification and nurture tools 23:36 CoStar Group, Homes.com, and revenue mix 38:39 Depth advertising at Homes.com 43:11 Final conference reminder

July 31, 202647 min

What AI Search Means for Marketplaces, with Esteve Castells, Founder at LLM Pulse

Ed Keith is joined by Esteve Castells — former Head of SEO at Adevinta and founder of AI search visibility platform LLM Pulse — to work through what generative search actually means for real estate marketplaces. Chapters: 00:00 Intro 01:53 From Adevinta's global SEO lead to founding LLM Pulse 04:01 What running SEO across a portfolio that size was really like 05:59 Evangelising SEO inside a business that didn't believe in it 09:32 How LLM Pulse started, and what it does now 11:55 Executives vs operators: who's actually taking AI search seriously 13:10 Will portals lose the search phase to LLMs? 16:58 The strategic case for — and against — building ChatGPT apps 22:23 Real estate vs other verticals, and the unique inventory problem 26:15 Domain authority is out. What replaces it? 29:26 Why 96% of what an LLM sees about your niche is other brands 33:54 Scraped listings, attribution, and whether to block AI crawlers 37:38 Will ChatGPT pick a favoured marketplace in each country? 41:54 Ed's theory: portals will lose the consideration phase 45:00 What portals can actually do about disintermediation The evangelist's job never really ends Esteve joined Schibsted Marketplaces in January 2019 into an organisation with almost nobody working on SEO full time — a business that had grown on brand and TV without needing it. The hardest part of the job, he says, was never the SEO itself. It was getting resources and getting people to care. The eBay Classifieds Group acquisition brought a stronger SEO culture with it, and the team finally had a tailwind. He now sees the same cycle starting again with AI search, except this time nobody has the playbook. The disintermediation question The boardroom worst case is straightforward: ChatGPT serves every house on the market by going straight to the agency, and the aggregator in the middle disappears. Esteve points out that real estate is unusually exposed here because almost nobody has unique inventory — the same listing sits on the agency site, several portals and the meta-aggregators on top of them. Generalist goods marketplaces are far better protected, because they're the canonical source and they own payment and delivery. SEO and GEO are the same ingredients, a different dish Esteve's view is that SEO is the foundation for AI search, but the actions diverge. LLM Pulse data shows 96% of what an LLM sees when answering a query in your niche is about other brands, not yours — which pushes the work off your own site and onto third-party sources and PR. He also flags the brands that quietly went invisible because an IT decision blocked ChatGPT's crawler. The attribution problem, and who ChatGPT partners with Citation CTR is under 1%, so the marketplace that sourced an answer rarely gets credit for it. Esteve's research has found ChatGPT typically favours one media partner per country — Prisa in Spain — and the open question is whether that pattern extends beyond media. If it does, he argues it may favour the number two or three player rather than the incumbent, since the big marketplaces are the most hostile to partnering with OpenAI. Guest: Esteve Castells, Founder at LLM Pulse — LinkedIn Presented by: Edmund Keith — LinkedIn