The Business Case interview with Paul Whitehead, CEO of Zoopla

[Music] Welcome to the business case in partnership with the leading investor presentation hub Engage Investor. This is the podcast where we dive deep into the stories behind the UK's leading companies. I'm Mark Warrier and I'm Phil Clark and in each episode we'll be sitting down with top business leaders to uncover their career journeys, the challenges they faced, and the insights that have shaped their success. We've spent our careers analysing and investing in UK companies, meeting management to understand the business case and now we want to share those insights with you. We will hear about the companies our guests lead and how they are positioned for the future. But we also want to find out what makes these business leaders tick, the highs and the lows that they've experienced and the lessons of management that might apply to your life. Please remember this podcast is not investment advice and is for informational and educational purposes only. Just ahead up this recording of the conversation we had with Zouplur was actually made back in December 2025. I think this is still a great conversation, all of it is very relevant but there may be one or two comments that feel a little bit dated. [Music] Welcome back to the business case podcast. We're here with the start of season two. Mark and I are very excited we've got some fantastic guests and today to kick us off we had Paul Whitehead from Zouplur. Zouplur is part of a wider private equity-owned group of companies, many of which were formally part of a business listed on the London Stock Exchange until 2018. This business was acquired for £2.2 billion by a consortium led by Silver Lake Partners. Paul had been the chief strategy officer at the group when the business was sold and rejoined Zouplur, nearly a year ago as the chief executive officer. Paul, welcome. It's great to have you on the business case for an opening episode of season two. Great to be here. Great, well just to kick us all off Paul, there's a lot to discuss. Perhaps you could get our listeners up to speed. Could you give us a quick snapshot of Zouplur's activities and the scale of the business? Sure. Thanks a lot for having me. So Zouplur's a leading UK property website. It's now actually 17 years old and it's a really trusted consumer brand and we're very focused on empowering movers to make better property decisions. We have 9 million monthly users that come to the website every single month and that generates over 1 billion annual property searches. But we're much more than a property portal. We now have over 5 million homeowners who are subscribers and they are regularly tracking either their property value, demand for their property. And they provide effectively a pipeline of interest for our partners who we work with, whether they be estate agents, whether they be housebuilders or whether they be brands wanting to engage with people looking to move. Our business is primarily subscription revenue led and customers pay access to our high value audiences, our products and our unique data. And they get access to a wide range of products and services that are tailored to maximize their return on investment. Great. Thank you. Great. Well, there's a lot to dive into there. But before we talk about the business in detail, it would be good just to sort of touch on your career journey because you've worked in a range of high growth, high expectation digital platforms such as you switch, because you and Zoupler and each of them are supposed to be trying to change consumer behavior. So just sort of stepping back, what have you learned about what it takes to succeed in a digitally led business model? I think always try and start with what the problem is that you're trying to solve and what the consumer problem is that you're trying to solve. And that's always what's excited me about digital businesses and in particular market place businesses. So whether it's a kind of use switch, you're trying to solve the problem of navigating a sea of different tariffs, whether that's from energy suppliers, broadband suppliers and finding offers, which is kind of relevant and that works for you. At Kazoo, it was how do you make buying a car no different to any other product online. And then at Zoupler, it's how do you make every move better in what is a super, super complex transaction. So I think you always have to start with the consumer experience. That's really, that's the hardest bit. But then you never have to forget the business model and ultimately who is paying you. So, you know, for Zoupler, you know, the learning some that are, you know, you need great products that deliver really strong return on investment. You've got to have super effective operational efficiency within the core business itself. And then ultimately you've got to have brilliant customer perception because you're aiming to be their critical marketing partner. So whether that be the quality of traffic, you're sending them, it could be the leads you're sending them, it depends on the marketplace, you know, you could be going so far as that you're sending them actual, you know, customers themselves. And in our case, it tends to be kind of leads and prospects which are qualified in a variety of different ways. And you've had an interesting journey obviously because you worked at Zoupler, they did some other things and then came back. And you must have had an interesting perspective, particularly stepping up into the CEO role. You know, what were the surprises, the things that you didn't appreciate stepping up into Chief Executive role? Yeah, I, from day one, it's that, for me, it's the innate sense of responsibility and our field for the team. Yeah, it's, I don't know whether that's just me or whether other kind of CEO's kind of experience that, but, you know, I've been a CEO, before commercial director, a variety of kind of different roles. And there's probably always someone else to blame or was someone else to kind of lean towards. But the moment I certainly feel this, when you'll see, I have ultimate responsibility for my team, my stakeholders, the customers, my shareholders. And how can I, you know, best deliver for each of those constituent kind of parts? You know, that, I think, is the biggest difference. You know, the actual functions that kind of sit within that, you know, as often depends how big the company is, but there's often kind of teams that can kind of support you for that. I think the other, the difference is is just how do you give people the broader kind of perspective and get focus in the right areas, but at the same time, you know, trying to be strategic and think about kind of the future direction, not just about tomorrow. Great. Well, let's, let's dive into some of those areas, Paul. I mean, in your opening commentary about the business, you know, you talked about Zouplers sitting in, you know, somewhere between a property portal, your data business, you referenced a huge number of data points that are coming into the group. You're a marketing platform, you know, you're a significant lead generation business. Yeah, what business are you in really? What's the real kind of value creation proposition for you? Yeah, it's a good question. I think, you know, we're if today we're in all of those. Yeah, but we are definitely moving towards and leaning towards being a audience data kind of business. You know, the core of where our focus is at the moment is how do we engage with high intent kind of homeowners using our proprietary valuation data that's been built up over the last kind of 17 years, this incredible brand we've got, you know, this is home track. We actually use our own data. We do work with home track. You know, they're one of the other companies kind of in the group, you know, Zoupler actually when Zoupler launched it only launched it launched with this valuation models. It didn't have property listings. Right. Launched with this thing called Zestimate. And so, you know, that people came to Zoupler to start with to that was a differentiator again. You know, there's lots of other property portals kind of around and time. So yes, look, we definitely use home track data. We use our own data and then how that links through to kind of demand and kind of listings. But, you know, homeowners is kind of the core. And, you know, we've, I think we've been successful at building up that base of kind of homeowners, you know, a year ago, we're about 3.8 million, we're now over 5 million. And they give us huge richness of kind of data as long as there's an effective value exchange back to the point I made about consumer experience. We've added new features for homeowners this year, such as now you can see how much demand there is for your home if you change the price of it. And actually now if you send a, what we call a valuation lead, if you, you know, want an agent to come and value your property because you're thinking of selling it. selling, if you then go on to list that property, will then allow you to see how your property is performing on kind of Zubler. How many views did you have on your listing last week? And it's all part of kind of informing homeowners to a better kind of property decisions and back to the original point of making the move easier. But we're definitely shifting, I would say, away from a traffic-oriented business to an audience-dated business. How do the revenue opportunities differ between those two models? Because I'm not sure, I'm clear in my own mind, whether this is just Word Smith or whether there are fundamental differences to being a lead generation business versus an audience business. Sure. So look, if you look at the property marketplaces 101, effectively you are paying a fee per month to list your properties on the platform, could be ours, could be someone else's, and you are getting people who are interested in buying that property or renting that property kind of in return. Yep, that's it. So, yes, we still, as I said at the start, we're all kind of free or for those kind of buckets, where we are shifting towards is when someone is looking to sell their property, how do we engage that consumer and then send that lead or that prospect to an agent, to a builder, and then they pay us in return for that kind of lead. So that's one iteration of it. And then the third iteration of it is with brands and we work with banks, we work with mortgage brokers, we work with furniture brands, who if you think about in that kind of moving kind of window, which affects us probably about six or seven month kind of window, there's audience signals that we can kind of get from that, that we want to contextualize and pull that in front of brands and kind of partners. Got it? And so that's a third kind of revenue. Yeah, okay, no, that's much clearer. Thank you. And then, I mean, you just touched John it, I mean, I go that there's obviously been quite a product evolution journey for you as a platform and as a business. Can you just talk about maybe, you know, how your background from a product and strategy point of view has influenced the product roadmap that you have at Zouplor and then maybe kind of a few of the things that you've launched more recently and then maybe some things to come. Yeah, yeah, sure. Look, I think this year, you know, Zouplor's got a kind of a great set of kind of products and I'll talk about some of the things that we've been doing it in a second, but this year has been a bit more kind of transformational because Zouplor was part of, as you said in your introduction, this broader kind of group of companies and in some areas that have been deeper integration with some of those companies than kind of others. But this year has been all about establishing Zouplor as a standalone marketplace business. Right. And so, you know, we've integrated commercial teams with integrated kind of product teams and so we've really had to focus on the core, you know, marketplace and establishing that first. We've also focused on, you know, this hidden gem, you know, when I came back of this base of kind of homeowners which hadn't been kind of monetized before, doubling down and kind of investing on that to really kind of grow it. And then the third leg of that is making some tech team investments to make the platforms kind of more AI ready, you know, having spotted the trend that was kind of coming, you know, what can we do to turn in some cases 17 year old legacy kind of platforms into ones which arrived for today. And I think the learnings with the base are how do you balance and it's always a constant tightrope at times between consumers and customers. So, getting those consumers back to that consumer experience point to continue to come to you, those nine million that come every month and engage with you and then customers, i.e. those that are paying you. I think Zouplor perhaps had shifted a bit too far towards the consumer end and not forgotten but, you know, deprioritized the customer kind of focus. So, that's been one of the big kind of areas of kind of balance this year. And then you touched on AI a minute ago there Paul, there's obviously so much being talked about AI in terms of, you know, new business models, operational efficiency, you know, this is the golden future for lots of people. How practical from your perspective has the AI opportunity been because, you know, you have a lot of customer interaction, you've got a huge amount of data that I'm sure there's a data mining opportunity. So, can you just bring it to life for us from an AI perspective? Yeah, certainly. We certainly take the view that leveraging those data kind of insights is the key to kind of the future and the homeowner base that we're building and kind of growing is the foundation for that. You know, when I was just talking about the kind of the business model, historically market place businesses have relied on traditional web search and SEO to win and drive traffic to the site. You have as many listings as possible and then you turn that traffic, blend that to the listings and you try and drive as many leads as you possibly. And there's the efficiency source machine. Correct, exactly. But, you know, we're seeing already that AI is disrupting traditional search. And so, you know, our belief is if you rely on listings only, then you might be challenged. And you may have seen the recent market reaction to write moves announcements in this space. Yeah. You know, I think they've kind of recognized that on our needing to kind of invest in some of those kind of AI tools and kind of services. You know, back to our belief, you know, we think if you invest in homeowners, it's an example of how you can leverage data, it's proprietary data to us. And that enables us to unlock real value in the future. But when it comes to search, and you know, we're doing some testing on our app with free form kind of tech search on that, it replaces filters for AI power service sessions and we're seeing some, you know, really interesting results in, you know, it's teaching us in terms of what new filters to add. Because traditionally, you type in, you know, I'm looking for a two-bedroom you flat in near Old Street and with a balcony maybe and there's filters that enable you to do that. Whereas with free form, you just type that all in. And what it's taught is actually those filters which we currently don't have that we're going to have and travel time is a good example of that. But it's relatively early days that the proportion of kind of traffic from the AI platforms is relatively small. But look, it's growing and we're tuned to it and you know, we're definitely going to lean into it. I mean, what you've described, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but it sounds to me, what you've just described is it's taking your existing business model fundamentally and making it more efficient, more effective, rather than a fundamental reshaping of the business. Is that, would that be a fair co-actualisation today? Or do you see it differently? I think when it comes to search, I think that's probably fair. I think when it comes to home owners, though, I do see it slightly more revolutionary. Because back to my point around how marketplaces have operated in the past, which has been to go and acquire that traffic from Google Meta, TV advertising and the light, you know, we see today of all of the traffic that comes to Zoupler about a quarter of it now is coming directly from our home owners. It's not linked to listing. We're not having to go out and acquire that traffic coming back. They want to come back and engage with kind of Zoupler. And then in return, they're giving us all of this kind of data, which we can then go on to kind of monetise. So I think there is a bit more of a fundamental shift kind of happening, but nevertheless, the business model is still pretty much core on that original kind of marketplace proposition. And that's, you know, which we're evolving. So that's the shift from the traffic led business to an audience led business? Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. But in terms of collecting that data, I know you've got this interesting product called My Home, where you can get an monthly update of what's actually your property price. And I suppose the journey when somebody's deciding to sell their house, it's not just a kind of binary, right? There's a lead up towards it. And, you know, there must be ways, you know, the behaviour of people on that product and what they're asking, you know, AI must help you sort of think, well, actually, there's a very good chance this person in three or four months time is thinking about selling their house. Therefore, that's a valuable potential lead for the agent. Couldn't have said it better myself. But yeah, that's exactly right. And, you know, homeowners who are tracking the value of their home, and then if they start to play around with some of the demand tools, we know that they then go on to perform a to great proportion than someone who isn't a homeowner on the core site. So, you know, I'll give you one stat. They are two and a half times more likely to perform what we would class as a high performing kind of action. So they may save a property. They may put some details into a mortgage calculator. They may save it. and a lead about looking at a future property. So by investing in homeowners, it not only has the benefit of reducing marketing costs over time, it also has the benefit of what we would say powering the core marketplace flywheel and getting those signals from them, which, and there's large language models kind of sitting behind that, as to how we drive the business forward. - Yeah, it's really interesting how it's evolved over the last generation, 'cause I remember as a fund manager investing in companies like Johnson Press and Unity Merit. They basically had monopolies of regional newspapers in towns and every year the price just went up and the agent hadn't paid because there was no other, that was the funnel, right? - Yeah, of course. - No other way to market. - But it's obviously you replace that in terms of classifiers and now it's gone to the next level of being embedded in the workflow of the agent. So given the agents are at the center of this, what do they tell you in terms of what they want today and going forward to make their life easier and to generate more revenue? - Yeah, I think I would say even until recently, that model which you described of the traditional newspaper classified, massive kind of listings, get leads or telephone calls as it was then or walk ins as a result, has fundamentally kind of not changed but is definitely shifting. It goes back to my point, I think if you rely on listings alone I just don't think that's good enough. Now, it's a tough market out there. It's still a very fragmented market out there. I think there are of the 15 to 20,000 or so kind of estate agents, let's call it 15,000, roughly 6,000 of them, just own a single branch. There's only nine companies that own more than 100 branches. So it's incredibly fragmented and competition is high when it comes to kind of local areas. They're looking for more value for money. They're looking for products to your point in terms of where we're embedded in kind of their workflows. How can they engage with platforms like us to help them grow their business? It's not a simple case as just, okay, send us 100 leaves this month, we'll sort through them. That's tough. Yeah. So pricing is an interesting topic. I think there is a difference between pricing and value. I think that's what the regional newspaper industry probably forgot and then just putting it up the pricing. Obviously there's a lot of, it's a live topic in your sector at the moment with your big competitor. How do you think about pricing power versus value for money and kind of combine that with what you've got in the pipeline in terms of more services that are going to be useful to the agent? Yeah, certainly don't think about pricing power. We certainly, and we've backed away, we've been focused this year on what I've called the marketplace kind of basics and the shift bit more to be customer or partner focus. You've got to focus on return on investment. You go back to our mantra, you want to be a critical and effective marketing partner. How do we, in terms of the spend that our partner spend with us? How do we demonstrate that they're getting really good return on investment on that? And we're doing that and there are some significant variances from postcode to postcode, high street to high street. And I think, look, we as a number two have to work a bit harder on that. But we're going hyper local and kind of recognizing what's our performance on Leonard Street? What's the market's performance on Leonard Street? Because actually the property prices or someone's performance on that street, maybe quite particularly in London, they'd be quite different to one, two streets away. So how can you be a lot more effective and demonstrating the value that we deliver? And I think actually in that shift to being a bit more customer focus, I think we've forgotten that we have to work harder on that and demonstrating kind of Zouplers value in return, particularly when it's such a fragmented customer base. Is lead generation still the number one ask for your customers in terms of the agents? It does vary in terms of given how fragmented the base is. I would say some of the larger customers still like the lead volume. And they're just a bit more sophisticated. And they've got big call centers and they'll sift through it. They're perhaps a bit more sophisticated in database management that say a lead today may not be in the market, but they may well be in kind of three months time. So we've still got a focus on delivering volume. But for the long tail and the vast majority of our customers, definitely more quality focused. And also it's not just about what we would call applicant leads. So someone looking to buy a home, you go back to how does in this state agent make their money, they make their money by someone coming to them to list their home with them. That's where they get their commission. So back to our focus on homeowners, that's all about how do we drive kind of greater valuation leads. But I do think business models and platforms which rely on just a fire hose of leads and putting up prices unilaterally without demonstrating that return on value. That's not what game I want to be in. Yeah, that makes sense. Just to jump in a second, just on the kind of the share of pie. I guess what Mark was talking about earlier was that there's obviously been this fundamental shift of value away from classified print to businesses like Zootpler. In order for you to grow, it's a really basic question. But in order for you to continue to grow, what other value pulls are you tapping into in order to bring more revenue into to what's yours attractive consumer model proposition? Yeah, so there is still broader growth, which kind of exists. I think actually if you compare percentage of marketing spent on property platforms and portals today, compared to when it was all on print, there's still some headrooms kind of go there. And you know, property values are increasing. Yes, I recognize it's tough for agents in terms of kind of commissions, which are kind of relatively kind of flatlined around the sort of the 1.5% level. But look, there's still some growth there to come. But also, I see some market share games to be had in terms of where we're doubling down our focus on kind of valuation leads. For example, there's not really been a business model, which has been established so far. So we would urge all of our partners to think as they look across all of their marketing channels, where are they getting the greater return on investment and value for money? I guess if you think longer term and the wider sort of house purchasing journey, elements of it are still pretty analogue, quite sort of old fashioned, very clunky, from kind of conveyance to planning and all the kind of services. Do you see you're going to have a bigger role there in terms of being the force that kind of brings down the cost digitization, other that kind of revenue pulls up and up longer term for you? Yeah, I think so. And look, it's been one of the big things which has surprised me, I guess maybe I shouldn't be surprised, but it's in coming back to kind of zooplough. If you look at, back to that point about how does an agent make their money? They get it from the commission when a property kind of sells. So effectively, they are for sales, rentals are different, but they're in a stock turn kind of business. The time it has taken from offer made on a property to completion in the seven years I've been away from this business has got longer. And just think about all the digital innovation that we've seen, A, high blockchain, everything, how many is ridiculous people? It really is. The good news is there are some moves underway. The demand is there from platforms like us and right move. It's definitely there from agents in the industry. I was with the CEO of the largest agent last week talking about this. They're going to think finally the government have recognized this. So consultations have started to do this, but it's a very fragmented journey. A lot comes back to data. How do you make that data more available, more kind of visible? So if we can do a good job of that, I talked earlier about, how do we show someone's performance once the property is live and kind of in the market? There's no reason why we can't show progression through the chain on that. So I think we've got the consumer kind of eyeballs. So definitely kind of see a role to play there. I think if a version of what did exist before was, if you remember material information packs, so how do you bring the information kind of up front to educate kind of the consumer? So there's no surprises. Definitely kind of advocate for a version of that, providing. The other constituent parts in that journey, whether that be lenders or whether that be conveyances, can rely on that data. There's no point in just putting that data there if then they're going to do all the searches again. Yeah, exactly. Which was a bit of the challenge kind of the last time around. So we're definitely advocating, you know, putting that information next to kind of every kind of single listing kind of on the site. Yeah, we're all about kind of transparency and how do you just make that move better? It does feel like it's such an antiquated process. Yeah. That it's right for efficiency and technology. It is. It just needs. I totally agree. It just needs some of the constituent parts to think broader rather than serving their own interests. You're not going to name names, but which parts of the value change you think are the most resistant to that fundamental change? Yeah, right. Yeah, I think. But that's a little bit the nature of the sector. I think little banks will get there. They're open to it. You know, why wouldn't they want to kind of make the lending process kind of simpler? That's going to drive operational efficiencies down to kind of their own kind of balance sheets. But a bit like a state agency, you know, conveyances, it's a kind of very fragmented market. So and there's some great convincing firms out there, which are starting to think that things in a kind of digital kind of way. I also think it actually starts as well with the consumer that start about a third of all transactions from offer, don't actually go on to complete, you know, for that transaction and make them back into kind of the market. So it's how do you set valuation expectations kind of up front? How do you set the total cost of kind of moving home and educate consumers rather than perhaps just punting your kind of property out there and seeing what kind of happens? I know there was a piece in the FT last week about the Lloyd's CEO talking a lot about some initiatives that they've got underway in terms of digitisation, tokenisation of deposits which was all a little bit over my head. But there's clearly appetite for driving efficiency and I guess from an account. Yeah, and we work closely with them actually. And you know, we're kind of on that journey with them and want to kind of work to kind of help that because it just it benefits everyone. There's there's there's pent up demand for moving house. And either it's you know, we may come onto it in terms of property taxes and the like, which is a barrier is one. But also just the pain of the transaction is certainly another. Well, you've teed me up nicely there Paul. I mean, maybe let's talk about the housing market more broadly. I mean, it's a national pastime for us Brits to talk about house prices, housing market. And I'm sure you're the man with all the debt with all the insights and all the data. But there'd been so much talk about all sorts of changes around the budget from the budget in terms of stamp duty planning in various other taxes. Seems like it was a sort of relatively muted outcome for the industry. So just curious on what was your take from the budget for the housing market particularly? Yeah, I think you put that very diplomatically. I'd call it more of a damn squib to be honest. The biggest challenge with it all was just the length of that window of kind of speculation. So it's just totally unnecessary. And you know, which as you say, you know, we see leading it kind of indicators. It really clogged up, you know, people bringing properties to kind of market and that, you know, they didn't know would there be shocks to kind of mortgage rates? Yeah. They didn't know where they're going to. Maybe there's an opportunity. The stamp duty would be abolished or so. Yeah, it wasn't great at all. What we do expect though, and look, we can delve down into the data kind of more, but the properties price between half a million pounds and two million pounds were the ones which totally kind of got clogged up. So we expect probably to about 200,000 homes to come to market in the next kind of few months and kind of unlock that because as I said before, the demand and the desire to kind of sell, you know, is there? Yeah. You know, we've got the largest sales pipeline in four years since the pandemic, the 350,000 homes available for kind of sales. So the demand and the supply and the appetite is there. It's just a shame that all that kind of lead up and kind of speculation. You know, if we talk about kind of productivity kind of for the UK, almost came to a halt. Yeah. You know, that's kind of, you know, in housing. But yeah, I think look, more broadly, we're very supportive of reform to property taxes. There was, you know, one of our guys was involved in the Treasury Select Committee in the lead up to kind of the budget talking about property taxes and stamp duty. You know, stamp duty is very outdated. 60% of stamp duty is paid in London under Southeast and we're seeing suppressed transactions in the other areas. So if you want to drive productivity, you've really got to kind of focus on it. So I think it's very easy to kind of criticize and definitely want to get behind, you know, UK PLC and supportive of any kind of changes that the government kind of might make there. So, but, you know, we want to focus on the positive and get Britain moving again. Presumably, you're going to have a role in the valuation of the properties above two million pounds with the US and pension tax. And, you know, how did the government appreciate how difficult that's going to be? I don't know whether they appreciate how difficult it's going to be and the emotions that it's going to create and maybe the changes of behaviour that it is going to create. But, you know, we're certainly ready and waiting for a phone call or an email in terms of the valuable data that we can provide them. I mean, not to go down this rabbit hole particularly, but given this is a new government initiative, you know, there can't be many people that they're going to phone and want to get that help and support from. I mean, if you really not had a conversation with the government about how this is going to be implemented. Yeah, so, as I mentioned, you know, we are engaged with government on two fronts at the moment. There was the Treasury Select Committee around property taxes and there's also this broader consultation around how to improve the home buying and selling experience. And, yep, so we have kind of good in roads, in kind of government there and we'll be, you know, progressing those conversations in terms of using, you know, valuable data around property valuations over the last 17 years that we can kind of help. I just think you've just got to get on with it though. Well, I mean, it just creates uncertainty and a consistent theme from all of our guests through the podcast has always just been, we just need to know what, what playing field we want and then we can get on with it. So it's just not, it's the uncertainty that kills people. And just, just maybe just having a bit of fun about the housing market and how you're seeing the market, the data that you've got. I guess a few questions if I can. What signals, what data do you see that really is kind of quite predictive versus just noise would be kind of quite interested in. And then just secondly, kind of in terms of where we are in the cycle, 1.11, 2 million housing transactions a year, it's sort of, we seem to have been in that range. I mean, there's obviously been a few peaks in troughs over the last few years co-voted, impacted things, the mini budget impacted things. But sort of where do you think we are from a sort of sicklec all perspective? Yeah, so maybe let's unpick a couple of those. So in terms of data kind of indicators that we look at, it look clearly we're seeing what we would call kind of top of fun or kind of probably assertion and kind of lead, lead scent. I would say that it's pretty resilient. You know, we've seen it in terms of properties listed this year. You know, one of the big data measures I always look at is number of people claiming their homes each week. You know, that is still kind of growing significantly. So it's definitely a desire there. So that I think that's kind of healthy in terms of economic indicators. It always used to be kind of interest rates. But I think, you know, the shift towards fixed rates and more tests by the banks on ability to pay that slightly softens kind of the leading indicator in terms of actual housing kind of transactions. So you know, more material changes its employment rates, probably, but you know, that takes slightly longer to kind of flow through. Then I think in terms of, you know, volumes themselves, you know, the long run trend is actually 1.2 million sales. You know, we're about that. As you mentioned during the pandemic, it spiked to 1.5 million and then hits a trough of 1 million. But we're back on that kind of long term trend now around 1.2 million. And you know, back to the point we made of around kind of stamp duty, affordability is definitely constraint, particularly in southern England now, where average buyers are paying somewhere between 2 and 3% on stamp duty. And are you seeing, I mean, do you get a lot of insights in terms of the lender behaviour in terms of affordability testing and some of their was capital, or is that, is that just sort of one step removed from insight? It's slightly one step removed. Other parts of the broader kind of group definitely see that, you know, home track has deep relationships with all of the banks, you know, one of the other businesses in the group is called Mojo Mortgageers, who we, you know, partner with, they're a digital first mortgage broker. They, you know, they, definitely kind of see that, where we try and focus on is the demand from consumers to send that to banks or kind of mortgage brokers for them to kind of convert. And again, that's where one of our growth areas is, about base of 5 million kind of homeowners, we're getting signals from them, they give us their mortgage data. So the right point they perhaps want to, or we think they could re-mortgage, for it to be kind of cost effective to do so, we can kind of put that in front of them. And that's one of the products you've got today. Yeah, yeah. Okay, interesting. I mean, maybe just a final question about the housing market more broadly. We talked to you on it earlier. I mean, the housing market is a pretty critical component of the UK economy. It's been a bit stuck recently, which has clearly had an impact. Getting a faster free moving market, more dynamic market is clearly going to be a good thing for the UK economy. Yeah, economy, economic growth. What would be some of those sort of two or three things that, if you had a wish list, we could see coming through over the next few years from a government policy perspective or from a sort of just reform perspective? Yeah, look, I think definitely that the buying and selling transaction and doing some moves to make that more certain for consumers through that kind of process, because that would give consumers more confidence to kind of list their properties. Yeah, actually, you know, think there's a slight kind of imbalance at the moment. And you see it in terms of, you know, we're an aging population sat on, you know, some larger kind of properties, perhaps willing to kind of downsize, but because of the taxes kind of involved, you could almost say, you know, should there be a truth for kind of the theory to around this thing? Well, it's a way to try and just rebalance things because there is kind of a lot of kind of pent up kind of, oh, the end of the deal. A lot of you release markets on its knees, right? Yeah, exactly. And I think some support, you know, for the home builders, there's this target of one and a half kind of million homes to be built by the end of the end of this parliament. They've got no chance in hell of kind of hitting that at the moment, unfortunately, because, you know, the cost of delivering homes has risen faster than sales values, you know, costs has risen for the last two years up about 20% where sales values are up 1%. Yep. So it's squeezing the viability of kind of development. So I'm not saying a return to kind of help to buy, but, you know, some kind of stimulus to unlock some of that demand would match. Yeah, I guess the problem for the house builders is that they've already bought the lamb bank with a certain assumed margin on the price. Is that right? Yeah. So they're a bit stuffed. Yeah, it's a difficult position to unlock. Yep. Okay. So for me, you know, Zubler's got an interesting company in that it's operating both public markets and now owned by private equity. And you know, how would you characterize the difference between the two because you've experienced both because I know private equity sometimes gets a bad rap and it has a kind of focus on short term, but what's been your experience? Yeah, it's interesting. I actually, the heart, I don't think it actually impacts the day-to-day running of the business, but certainly in my role of CEO and a privately owned business, it just probably means I can spend more of my time and energy on customers, product innovation and kind of the business in self. You know, I have shareholder management. There's certainly not to the same extent as you do in the public business. You know, my role when I was last to kind of Zubler was slightly different. So I spent a lot of my time with kind of analysts and shareholders trying to, you know, explain the strategy and look not least if you want to change the focus of your strategy. You know, that was particularly acute my, you know, my last time around because we were building the business through kind of M&A going into adjacent, is a price comparison into data and kind of software. So a lot of heavy lifting to do that kind of a public market. You know, much easier to kind of do in a private business and, you know, we saw with right moves recent capital markets day trying to explain a slight change in strategy. We can argue whether that's right or wrong. But the challenge that that then had on kind of the share price immediately after, you know, we'd made the decision to invest in the platform on A and investments 18 kind of months ago, you know, our board and investors were highly supportive and we just got on with it. Yeah. Yeah, like public company is like trying to, you do want to do something strategic. So I try to change the tires on a moving car. Exactly. It's very difficult. And also there's definitely a difference there, I think, between the UK and the US in that where lots of stereo type US very kind of growth focus will kind of absorb some of those changes much better than a UK focus, which is, you know, more dividend, you know, margin focus type mentality. Yeah, absolutely. Great. Well, it's been a fantastic discussion. Paul, we've kind of come towards the end of our time here and I really appreciate your time. I'm just going to bring you on just a couple of things just to wrap us up just for a little bit of fun to finish off. A couple of quick fire questions if we can. What's the one thing you wish every home buyer understood and they currently don't? A proper appreciation of the value of their home and the cost involved in kind of moving. Have I go back to that point, you know, how do you drive kind of more productivity for kind of the UK? Let's try and get it that, you know, let's kind of reduce down that third of all transactions that day going through. I think that would be, you know, a data point that I'd love consumers to kind of understand better. I wish I'd asked you this earlier, but what is it that means that a third of transactions, you know, don't complete? Is there a, like, what are the two or three things that could be that they've gone through the mortgage process and the affordability checks that have happened, you know, haven't gone through. And they've not lined things up. It could be the price they're asking for people then hope to kind of chip on the price kind of later. Right. But kind of probably had to do that. There could be not having realized you've got a restricted covenant on one part of the land. So it's just going in with that kind of eyes open. Right. Good. Secondly, what's the, what's the one number that you check every morning and why, why do you check that? Yes. It's, I mean, we're not a day-to-day transactional business, you know, 80% of our revenues are monthly kind of subscriptions. But look, I definitely check. It's a very fast evolving market, you know, new agents, there's no real kind of barriers to entry or kind of exit. So new agents are arriving every day. So I definitely check new business sales. And the other one is how many homeowners did we add? Yes, yesterday. Yeah. Because I know that's kind of the future of our business and where our successful comfort. I mean, you said 5 million is where you are today. Yeah. It's quite a good penetration rate. There's obviously quite a lot. Yeah. Last 12 months, I clearly, clearly doing a good thing for your customers. And then final question just is, what does the business look like in 2030 and what do you think will be the biggest surprise to the market as we sit here today? I think, you know, we're definitely seeing some really good momentum at the moment. Not only in kind of the core business, but in that kind of homeowner growth. We want to be playing a role in the majority of moves in the UK. So whether that's someone sending a rental lead, a vendor lead, because they're interesting, selling their property or looking to buy or a remorgage kind of lead. And, you know, we believe the trust and the transparency in this brilliant brand that we have puts us in a great position. Great. Well, Paul, thank you very much. Thank you very much indeed. I enjoyed it. Okay. Well, Mark, Paul Whitehead from Zoupler kicking us off. Here we are. We're back for season two. What did you think of Paul in the discussion? Yeah, really interesting. You know, Zoupler is a fascinating business just operating in an industry where there's just so much digital change taking place. But you know, couple of observations that really struck me. The first was, you know, how much pent up demand there is in the UK housing market. And, you know, this whole torturous budget process and kind of, you know, you know, the government being quite gummed up is just created this pipeline of houses that need to be sold. And you're talking about 200,000 homes going to come to the market, the largest sales pipeline they've had for four years. So I thought that was a really interesting insight. I guess the second one was just, we're still at the early stages of digital in this market. Yes. The wider food chain of convincing and planning and searches is incredibly analog paper based, very clunky. And there's an almost opportunity there for companies like Zoupler as those processes, you know, start to go digital. And what did you think? No, I mean, I agree with you. And I think the stat that Paul gave us in terms of, you know, from exchange to completion is longer today than when he was in the business seven years ago, despite all of the tech innovation that there's been in the market was kind of slightly depressing, you know, for somebody that wants to see UK PLC or UK economy be successful. That I felt Paul was maybe keeping his cards close to his chest because with the amount of insights they have as a business, with the data they have, with the traffic they have, you know, the fact that they've got five million homeowners paying them a monthly subscription or annual subscription, it felt to me that there must be so many other pockets of business opportunity. And, you know, I. I completely understand why he wouldn't want to reveal it all, but it does make me think that there's a lot of opportunity for Zootler and other businesses like this to really get more fingers in more pies because you're right, that there's so many layers and components in the housing transaction process that there is so much opportunity for consolidation. I think taking a step back about Paul as CEO, I thought he was very, very, very, very, engaging. I really liked how he kept coming back to ROI. I don't think we hear enough from CEOs about fundamentally driving return on investment. So I kind of liked that as a characteristic. And I think it's always good when you're in any kind of consumer facing business, always to be reminded that you've got to put the consumer first. And I definitely felt from the conversation we had with Paul today that that is certainly how Zootler thinks about their business, their operating model. Any other key takeaways Mark? No, no, I think they were the main ones. So I hope you enjoyed the conversation with Paul Whitehead from Zootler. On the business case, we've got lots more interesting, chief executive guests coming up over the next few weeks and I hope you all join us.