Knight Frank, one of the agencies that founded OnTheMarket, has signed a three-year deal with Zoopla.

Back in 2014 Knight Frank stopped listing on Zoopla, shortly after becoming one of the founding partners in Agents Mutual, the body that ran OnTheMarket. Knight Frank dropped Zoopla in December 2014 and in January 2015, OnTheMarket launched.

At the time a Knight Frank spokesperson said OTM, then to be run by agents themselves, “can only benefit sellers and landlords while also offering the best entry point to the market for buyers.”

Knight Frank returned to Zoopla in 2019 “on a trial basis” and has remained there ever since. 

Today, a new statement from Zoopla says: “Zoopla will support Knight Frank with its far-reaching ambitions for 2025, which include driving high-quality leads and supporting them in growing market share across the sectors they operate.

“Knight Frank will continue to benefit from the property website’s suite of products, including Valuation Booster, which has driven valuation leads for Knight Frank in Q1 for properties with an average estimated value of over £800,0000, and In-Search Ads, which are set to deliver over 1.5m impressions per month.

“Zoopla will also be supporting Knight Frank with leveraging its MyHome audience of over 4m subscribers, with 1.6m subscribers returning to Zoopla every month to track the value of their home.”

Knight Frank is no less fulsome in its praise for Zoopla. The agency’s head of residential, Tim Hyatt, says: “Ensuring our clients’ properties and the Knight Frank brand are presented to the widest possible audience is key. Our partnership with Zoopla plays an important role in doing just that, and we look forward to continuing to work with the portal to drive potential buyers and tenants to the diverse portfolio of homes we are marketing.”

Knight Frank has a footprint in over 50 territories and 740 offices worldwide. In the UK, this translates to 62 residential offices in prime locations across England and Scotland. All of these offices will list their properties for rent and sale on Zoopla.

The news comes at the end of a challenging week for OnTheMarket, which is no longer agent-owned and is instead one brand of the US-owned CoStar empire.

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), warned the number three portal that its advertised claim stating “we’ve overtaken Zoopla’s website traffic” was misleading because this referred only to a single month.

The controversial claim originally appeared in a number of different adverts and marketing communications originated by OTM, but after being contacted by the ASA, the portal confirmed it had withdrawn all the communication and assured the regulator that future ads with similar claims would “prominently state the specific period for which the claim applies”.