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Zoopla, the UK’s second-largest property website, returned to a pre-tax profit of £13.3m in 2025 despite a 1 per cent fall in revenue to £83.2m, which the company attributed to a change in its advertising strategy.
The Rightmove rival had reported a loss of £5.2m the previous year, when it wrote down the value of Yourkeys, a business it acquired in 2021 that helps developers manage their sales, by £19.5m.
Revenue had slipped by 7 per cent to £84.2m in 2024. Zoopla put the latest decline down to “lower programmatic and direct advertising revenue” as it moved towards promoting “more relevant property-related advertising” on its site.
The company does not disclose how many estate agents pay to list homes on its website but said its customer base “remained broadly stable” last year.
Paul Whitehead, chief executive of Zoopla, said: “Lots of marketplaces put what’s called programmatic advertising across their sites, but it’s generic.
“There’s some short-term revenue there, but is it the best consumer experience? Probably not. We want to work with [advertisers] that are contextual to the house move, whether that’s lenders or estate agents or credit score providers. It’s a tough decision because you lose some revenue as a result.”
Whitehead, 55, took charge as chief executive last year. He previously ran Cazoo, the used-car website that fell into administration in 2024.
Zoopla has been owned since 2018 by Silver Lake Partners, the American private equity firm that also holds a stake in City Football Group, the owner of Manchester City.
Rather than compete directly with the volume of leads Rightmove generates for its estate agent and developer customers, Whitehead wants Zoopla to offer fewer but better leads. Central to that approach is signing up more people to track the value of their current homes on the platform.
At the end of 2025 there were 5.4 million homeowners tracking their home’s value on Zoopla, a third more than a year earlier. The company says the figure has risen to 6.4 million so far in 2026.
“We believe [having a large number of homeowners using our platform] delivers great value to our partners who are getting more instructions,” Whitehead said.
“We can provide data insights even before people are in that actual moving window. You might start looking at particular types of properties or save a property, these are all signals to us that someone might be thinking about moving.”
He added that the new strategy was “starting to deliver in the numbers”. Alongside the return to profitability, Zoopla reported a 9 per cent increase in revenue in the first quarter of 2026.
Zoopla remains well behind Rightmove on earnings. In the first six months of 2026 alone, Rightmove generated a pre-tax profit of £149.1m on revenue of £225.8m, according to its half-year report, which also showed revenue up 7 per cent on the same period a year earlier.
Rightmove, which rejected a £5.6bn takeover approach from Rupert Murdoch’s REA Group in 2024, reported average revenue per advertiser of £1,726 a month in the first half of 2026. Zoopla does not disclose its monthly cost, which is thought to be as little as half of that.
“We’ll only increase prices if we’re delivering value, we won’t just do it for the sake of it,” Whitehead said. “Our competition is still very much focused on volume of leads, we’re more focused on intent and quality.”
