Zoopla has announced two new features, designed to increase the number of high-intent buyers on its site.
‘Homes for You’, its first feature powered by AI and a new personalised homepage, will provide what Zoopla hopes will be a better search experience for buyers and sellers on its website.
‘Homes for You’ uses AI and a user’s browsing activity on Zoopla.co.uk to power listing recommendations for individual users.
It uses recent activity on site such as property saves and views to surface the properties a Zoopla user is likely interested in. This is enriched by ‘smart tags’ which are additional property attributes including balcony, en-suite, period property and garden. These are extracted using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and image detection.
This is complemented by a new personalised homepage which is updated every time a user signs in to Zoopla.co.uk. The personalised homepage highlights homes to users which match their preferences as soon as they reach the site, enabling them to find properties that suit their needs faster. As a result, users could be suggested an ideal property just 0.1 miles outside their normal search area, or slightly below their minimum spend.
Since launching the personalised homepage, Zoopla says there has been a 13% increase in logged-in users on its website.
Zoopla argues that the new features create more engaged, high-intent buyers for agents and housebuilders using its platform.
The property portal aims to substantiate this claim by stating that since roll-out, there’s been a 2.5X uplift in leads to agents and an increase in actions on the Zoopla site e.g. saving a listing or submitting a lead.
Rich Hayes, chief operating officer at Zoopla, commented: “The macroeconomic environment means there’s still uncertainty in the market for buyers and sellers. At Zoopla I believe we have a crucial role to play when it comes to boosting buyer confidence.
“These new product developments are all about supporting Zoopla users in making the next decision on their property journey, be it finding a suitable property for them, submitting a lead, or having an initial conversation with an agent.”