Archive for July, 2009
Five £1m+ Nottinghamshire properties fit for Sven Goran Eriksson
With former England manager Sven Goran Eriksson confirming today that he will be making Nottingham his home, we have come up with five £1million+ properties listed on Zoopla.co.uk that we think Sven may want to consider.
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1. £1.65m
Clumber Road East, Nottingham NG7 This is a magnificent rare visitor to the open market. It’s a substantial and impressive Victorian residence boasting over 7500sq ft of living space with a wealth of features and characteristics including a gym, swimming pool, double garage and gated driveway. Sven factor: 8/10 |
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2. £1.65m
A substantial and impressive, 3 storey, 6 bedroom recently built detached house. The property benefits from a high specification and versatile, yet contemporary, interior whilst offering practical and modern living. The property also benefits from a large front garden with paved drive leading to a detached double garage. There are also 3 reception rooms and an entertainment room ideal for a snooker table or home cinema. Sven factor: 6/10 (no swimming pool) |
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3. £1.65m
Neighbouring the historic Nottingham Castle this is undoubtedly one of the finest examples of early Victorian property within the prestigious Park Estate. Dating from the 1850′s this T C Hine architecturally designed home not only has a turret (!), but also title to the original Western Passage cave. Sven factor: 6/10 (no swimming pool, but the turret helps!) |
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4. £1.19m
Keyworth Road, Widmerpool, Widmerpool, Nottinghamshire NG12 Set within 20 acres of secure, private grounds to which residents have unrestricted access, Widmerpool Hall’s twenty-four luxury Mews homes and apartments provide an elegant and sophisticated lifestyle in the midst of unspoilt Nottinghamshire countryside. Sven factor: 5/10 (lacks a turret, swimming pool or entertainment room) |
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5. £1.1m
The Ropewalk, Nottingham, Nottinghamshire NG1 A substantial and impressive grade II listed period residence which has been creatively arranged over four floors, displaying a wealth of features and characteristics and affording the sort of comfort and convenience that one would associate with a house of this calibre. Sven factor: 5/10 (we’re not sure he’d like the name though) |
Zoopla.co.uk acquires Thinkproperty.com
Consolidation underway in UK property portal market
Today Zoopla.co.uk, the UK’s fastest growing property website, announces today that it has acquired Thinkproperty.com from Guardian Media Group (GMG) for an undisclosed sum.
Thinkproperty.com is a well-established UK property portal, launched by GMG in 2006 and focuses primarily on delivering leads to UK estate agents. Under the deal, Zoopla.co.uk will take over and integrate the Thinkproperty.com brand and website, benefiting from its current traffic of over 200,000 unique users per month, along with becoming the exclusive property search partner on the Guardian.co.uk website.
The deal stands to be a win for agents currently listing their properties on Zoopla.co.uk, who will now gain more exposure and receive more leads as a result of the acquisition.
Alex Chesterman, Founder and CEO of Zoopla.co.uk commented: “We are delighted to be leading the latest round of consolidation in this market as it reinforces our mission of delivering the best possible value to estate agents by increasing their exposure to a wider audience and offering them a broader range of services. We plan to continue to grow our traffic organically and look at possible further acquisitions as part of our commitment to become the most efficient marketing partner for UK estate agents.”
Mark Goddard of GMG Property Services commented: “Zoopla.co.uk has made impressive progress in a crowded marketplace and their success in engaging with the UK property consumer via a differentiated experience reinforces the belief that the UK portal market is still able to be disrupted. The acquisition of Thinkproperty.com by Zoopla.co.uk continues to build on what is becoming a very compelling proposition for the UK estate agent and I wish Alex and his team well”.
Since its launch last year, Zoopla.co.uk has already made a significant mark on the UK portal market, achieving record traffic growth despite property market conditions, bucking the fundraising climate by raising almost £4m at the start of this year and having become the 5th most-visited property website in the UK in its first year of operation.
Tennis: it’s a numbers game
Whilst department store John Lewis is blaming Wimbledon for a dip in sales, we at Zoopla! have been busy looking at tennis courts. We wondered where they were in the UK and who had them.
The trend is somewhat as you’d expect – homes in expensive areas are more likely to have tennis courts than homes in more affordable areas. More than 1 in 100 homes in Surrey (where Andy Murray recently bought a home) have tennis courts, which is no great surprise, while only 1 in 1700 have tennis courts in North Lanarkshire. One can own three North Lanarkshire homes for the price of one in Surrey.
What interested us most was not so much this rule but the exceptions – the areas that have such high property values, yet buck the tennis trend?
It turns out they’re the exceptions that prove the rule: the leftmost orange dot on the graph above is Greater London. Home values are high in the city and we expect Londoners would certainly love to have ready access to tennis facilities. It’s just that most find putting a regulation tennis court in the rear garden of their terraced home impossible without violating certain universal laws of space and time. N16: Not the place to buy if you want a tennis court.
The rightmost orange dot is Windsor & Maidenhead. Having a bit more land about, they do better than London at meeting their tennis-courts-per-pound quota, but still fall short. Even though they’re the 6th most tennis-intensive county, they’d need one court for every 66 homes to be on trend, which is 2.5 times more than they currently have.
Based on a quick look at the satellite map, this would require absurd levels of tennis court installation. Where would we put the two tennis courts that Green Lane needs to get Windsor back on trend?
Ten most and least tennis-intensive areas below:
| County | 1 tennis court for this many homes |
|---|---|
| Surrey | 99 |
| West Berkshire | 132 |
| West Sussex | 139 |
| Antrim | 148 |
| Gloucestershire | 162 |
| Windsor & Maidenhead | 162 |
| Oxfordshire | 171 |
| Somerset | 177 |
| Perth & Kinross | 179 |
| Buckinghamshire | 180 |
| County | 1 tennis court for this many homes |
|---|---|
| Cardiff | 2616 |
| North Somerset | 2437 |
| North Lanarkshire | 1741 |
| Neath Port Talbot | 1581 |
| West Lothian | 1480 |
| Belfast | 1453 |
| Falkirk | 1385 |
| Swansea | 1351 |
| Torfaen | 1271 |
| Hartlepool | 1268 |
