If you thought the slant of the eBay playing field towards big business was limited to Fashion Outlet categories, think again: Property is going the same way, as last week, property site Zoopla announced a deal to partner with eBay and Gumtree to distribute both rentals and sales listings.
Zoopla is the UK’s second largest property portal: they’ll be listing property for sale on Gumtree, and for rent on both Gumtree and eBay. If that sounds like a nice way to find a tenant or a buyer, think again: Zoopla is open only to lettings and estate agents, so private landlords or sellers will need to be using an agent already before they can see their advert on the site.
At time of writing, there are 219,978 Property listings on eBay UK, of which 218,456 are from Zoopla – that’s more than 99%. Even so, in terms of the whole site, it’s a small change – one the majority of eBay users won’t even notice, and probably one the majority of Zoopla clients won’t notice either. But it’s a change that smaller eBay sellers ought to be regarding with alarm – and with an eye to how our businesses would survive, if this happened in our retail categories.
4 Responses
It would be so nice to see eBay replacing high st estate agents and their lofty commissions….