Tell us a little about yourself. What’s your background? How did you start with this website?
The website used to be a property portal where it only listed properties. It was born by listing properties from Zoopla, but the bigger plan was always to have it as an estate agent directory because that’s where the money would be because there’s so many different opportunities to monetize from estate agents from advertising splits commissions, selling leads to estate agents and to mortgage brokers home movers removal companies removal companies and many more.
It’s taken approximately five years of hard development work and very hard SEO work to get it to the position it is currently at today.
Starting without any clients, how long would you expect it to take a new owner to ramp up this site to the current profit levels? Would revenue cease to exist until they build it back up?
There is money already there from the leads that are being generated every week, but they simply just need to find new clients from the thousands of clients available.
It takes me approximately one day to find a new client who wants to take these leads. They are like gold dust in the mortgage sector. But this is just for the small revenue because, as described in the advertisement on Flippa, there is a much clearer, bigger picture which has always been planned.
Is this service exclusive to the UK or could it expand to the US and elsewhere?
I would say it should be exclusive to the UK because the domain is also.uk and all the rankings are UK related
How much time does it take to run the business, who else is needed on the team, and what is automated?
All of the extremely hard work has already been done, so at this point there is not much work to do. However, I would advise that the new owner keeps adding more content to popular pages to get better and better rankings within Google. There are over 6,000 keywords ranking on the second page at the moment, so if you could build some more content on these pages, they rank to page 1 and traffic will be significantly higher.
How would the search rankings for this site change if you are keeping the clients for another one of your businesses?
The clients have nothing to do with the rankings. The rankings will have zero affect from the acquisition and continue to improve automatically.