Veteran property website folds after purchase by Zoopla

The veteran local information website UpMyStreet has hit a dead end after its surprise purchase last week by Zoopla.

Zoopla, which bought UpMyStreet for an undisclosed sum believed to be under £1m, has simply folded it into its own website.

Visitors to UpMyStreet, founded in 1998, are re-routed to Zoopla, where there is no mention at all of UpMyStreet and no sign that it will be integrated. Instead, the site was apparently bought for its traffic.

According to one website monitoring firm, Neilsen, it had 600,000 unique visitors in March. However,  analysts Techcrunch said it had a tiny and declining traffic footprint.

Asked why Zoopla had made the purchase, a spokesman said: “UpMyStreet.com is no longer being operated as a standalone website/brand and has now been redirected to  Zoopla.

“Our website and hence our advertising members will now benefit from all the extra traffic (over a million visitors a month) which is redirected to Zoopla, along with access to almost half a million new registered users.”

UpMyStreet was one of the first property websites in the UK and had a high profile during the first wave of the dotcom boom.

Like many, it ran out of money in 2003 and was on the brink of closure before being sold to price comparison website uSwitch. It changed hands when uSwitch was sold to EW Scripps in 2006, and then again to Forward Internet in 2009.

UpMyStreet had been a commercial partner to Zoopla for some time, supplying local information – for example on schools and local crime rates – to property searchers.