Zoopla revenues soar amid housing boom

Zoopla Property Group announced strong results and an interim dividend of £14 million on Tuesday for the first half to 31 March, prompting more speculation that now would be a good time to float, following Foxtons' successful IPO last year.

Daily Mail and General Trust has a 52.6% interest in the property portal company which boosted its revenue in the period by 26% to £38.3 million.

The company, which runs UK online property portals including Zoopla and PrimeLocation, is experiencing record levels of traffic to its websites with 39.9 million monthly visits on average during the six months, up 37% year-on-year.

Mobile devices accounted for over half of the monthly visits as consumers use the services to research the property market on the move.

The number of members paying subscription fees to advertise their property listings on the Group's platform at the period end was 19,239, up 8% year-on-year.

Estate agents using the service are benefiting from 40 million visits per month and over two million enquiries per month and increasingly purchasing products on top of the standard subscription packages, such as premium listings.

The firm aims to add more useful features to its Zoopla site than its rivals so that consumers can research the market by combining market data, local information and community tools. For example, it allows users to look at price histories and search the database by those properties that have been most reduced.

Its other sites are Primelocation, focused on house-hunters in the middle and upper tiers of the market, SmartNewHomes, focused on new builds, and HomesOverseas, for the holiday market.

The company also runs the property search facility on a number of websites including The Times, The Telegraph, Independent, Evening Standard, The Daily Mail, Homes & Property, AOL, MSN and Homes24.

The firm says homeowner confidence is at a 5-year high, according to its latest Zoopla Housing Market Sentiment Survey, with over 1.1 million customised property value estimates (over four per minute) obtained on the Zoopla website during the period.

A sale or float of DMGT's stake would alleviate concerns around the Rothermere family-run media company which in March announced that advertising had fallen 4% year-on-year, even accounting for the timing of Easter, and that the launch of risk management product RMS (one) had been delayed for at least six months.

In recent years DMGT, which owns owns Euromoney and MailOnline, has been praised for its transformation from an ageing newspaper franchise to a hungry global business, tapping the business-to-business markets for events and research.