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Writer's pictureMal McCallion

Will CoStar Rebrand OnTheMarket?

Really enjoyed this podcast from Simon Baker and Edmund Keith about CoStar, and its bare-knuckle attempts to take out portal market leaders, Rightmove and Zillow, in the UK and US.


However, during the chat (around 41.40) there's a lot of scepticism that CoStar would rebrand OnTheMarket as Homes.com, for reasons including technical limitations, UK cultural attachment to .co.uk suffixes, lack of precedents and strategic risk. I think they're wrong - and that OTM will be rebranded as Homes.com, for the following reasons:


1. Technology: Using Homes.com, then enabling the site to deliver localised property content based on the location of your IP address, already works really well in other sectors, eg Booking.com and The Guardian. It's relatively straightforward for the site to identify if you're in Cardiff and present homes.com/uk.


2. Culture: We're weirdly not that fussed about using .co.uk exclusively. Loads of British sites have a .com - it is even considered a measure of achievement for a business to have acquired the 'global' domain, consumers respect it.  Ocado.comDeliveroo.comMonzo.comAsos.com ... presenting homes.com as a UK destination will have negligible impact. Just try and go to onthemarket.co.uk - it switches you to ... onthemarket.com.


3. Precedent: At Zoopla we hoovered up the likes of decades-old Findaproperty, Propertyfinder, ThinkProperty, Globrix and a bunch of others and ruthlessly sacrificed them at the altar of Zoopla.co.uk. None was allowed to survive longer than a year (apart from luxury brand Primelocation for other strategic reasons, never fully realised) - we pointed the domains at a zoopla.co.uk/findaproperty page, badged 'part of Zoopla' across the old logo, milked the 301 redirects where we could and cracked on. It worked in establishing the standalone brand, Zoopla. I'd argue that OnTheMarket has less consumer credibility than Findaproperty had before it disappeared - particularly as people still shudder at that Chas 'n' Dave OTM TV ad ...


4. Strategy: There are relatively few unique weapons that CoStar has, as it looks up at Rightmove's (so-far) impenetrable fortress and tries to take it over. One is the name Homes.com (intuitive, short, MUCH better than OnTheMarket) and another is the SEO juice that this domain has already secured globally with Google. As CoStar's shrewd, $30Bn-business-building CEO Andy Florance casts around for better knives to take to this particular gunfight, he can't - surely - be willing to leave Homes.com in the shed?


 

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I do think that this will happen - and that the powerful image of the Homes.com/OnTheMarket logos juxtaposed in CoStar's London office really does indicate that the latter will be chiselled off relatively shortly. 


The longer they leave it, the more cash Rightmove will have gouged from agents' wallets, throttling agents' ability to support any kind of competition at all ....

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