The other Findproperly, and the UK market that swallowed it

Before this findproperly existed there was another one. Find Properly was a London property-search startup, founded around 2013, best remembered for a map that laid out the city's house prices by Tube line. It lasted a little over a year on its own before a bigger rival bought it in November 2014, and the buyer itself got swallowed twice over in the years after that. One thing up front: there's no corporate link between that company and this one. We share a name by coincidence, not lineage, and findproperly.co.za has no relationship to the UK business beyond a word we both happened to pick. We're telling the story because it shows, in miniature, how UK property portals behave. Sooner or later almost everyone gets bought.

What's actually on the record

Find Properly was founded by Peter Thum-Bonanno and had been operating for "only a little over a year" by November 2014, according to the technology outlet Tech.eu, which puts its founding around 2013. What got it noticed was the way it visualised property data: above all a tool listing London property prices by Underground line, alongside other search tools built around the city's commutes. On 18 November 2014, Lokku, the London company behind the rival search engine Nestoria, bought Find Properly for an undisclosed sum. Lokku co-founder Ed Freyfogle said at the time that the plan was to fold Find Properly's "ideas and technologies" into Lokku's other markets.

That's the verifiable core. Here's what sits outside it. No acquisition price was ever disclosed. There are no public figures for Find Properly's funding, team size or user numbers, and no detailed account of what became of the founder or the product once it was absorbed. The trail goes thin almost immediately after the sale. As far as we can tell, that's the entire public record of a small startup quietly folded into a bigger one. In a market this consolidated, the silence is a lesson on its own.

The market that swallowed it, twice more

Lokku didn't stay independent for long either. In May 2015 the Spanish classifieds company Mitula Group bought Lokku, folding Nestoria, and with it whatever remained of Find Properly's technology, into a stable of roughly 50 international property and classifieds websites. Then Mitula's own turn came. Japan's LIFULL completed its acquisition of Mitula for €118 million in December 2018, and in January 2019 merged it with fellow portal group Trovit to form LIFULL Connect, which still lists Nestoria among its brands today.

Read the timeline back. A London startup with a clever Tube map, bought by a slightly bigger search engine, bought by a Spanish classifieds group, bought by a Japanese property conglomerate, all inside five years. Three changes of ownership, two changes of country, and the original product's name barely survives any of it. Property-search markets do this once they mature. They consolidate until a handful of owners hold the listing traffic, and everyone smaller sells or fades.

Rightmove's grip, and the rebellion that tried to break it

Rightmove is where UK consolidation ended up. By its own account, citing ComScore data from June 2025, it takes over 80% of all the time UK users spend on property portals, more than Zoopla and every other competitor combined.

Agents have resented it for years. In January 2013 six major agencies, Savills, Knight Frank, Chestertons and Strutt & Parker among them, set up Agents' Mutual, a portal built and owned by agents rather than outside investors. It took the public name OnTheMarket and launched on 26 January 2015. Member agencies had to accept a "one other portal" rule: drop either Rightmove or Zoopla, so that a real three-way market could form instead of two incumbents plus a token challenger. Zoopla-linked interests sued over the rule in 2016, calling it anti-competitive. OnTheMarket won at the Competition Appeal Tribunal in July 2017, and the Court of Appeal upheld that ruling in January 2019. The years in court still cost it the momentum a young challenger needs most.

OnTheMarket floated on London's AIM market in February 2018 and later dropped the one-other-portal rule as its position settled. In October 2023 the American commercial property data giant CoStar Group offered to buy it outright. The deal completed on 12 December 2023, with 97% shareholder support, at a price of about £99 million. The portal agents built specifically to stop paying rent to a dominant incumbent ended up, a decade after its founding, as the wholly owned subsidiary of an American data conglomerate. Rightmove remains close to mandatory for UK agents today. Zoopla is the settled number two, and OnTheMarket carries on as the third option under entirely new ownership.

Same fight, different accents

Spain's Idealista is generally regarded as the market leader by traffic, and it has exported that lead to Portugal, where it's also the clear number one. In Italy it fights Immobiliare.it for the top spot, a rivalry contested hard enough to have ended up in court over who may claim leadership. In Germany, Scout24's ImmoScout24 describes itself outright as "the market leader for digital real estate listing and search" and reaches around 19 million users a month. Mature property markets keep settling into the same shape. One dominant portal and a much smaller permanent challenger, with agents in every accent arguing over who is extracting rent from listings the agents themselves generated.

What this means for South Africa

South Africa is already running its own version of this fight. In 2023 the Competition Commission found that Property24 and Private Property were charging agencies rate-card prices with non-cost-justified gaps of more than 300% between comparable tiers, and ordered an end to multi-year lock-in contracts along with mandated capped, cost-anchored pricing for small agencies. A widely repeated industry figure puts the share of SA agents who consider portal pricing unfair as high as 88%. That number is sourced to an interested party rather than to independent survey work, so treat it as directional at best. The direction does line up with what the Commission found.

What South Africa doesn't have yet is its own OnTheMarket. No agent-owned portal has emerged here to run the Agents' Mutual play. The grievance that built Agents' Mutual in January 2013, paying rent on data agents themselves generated, is exactly the one SA agents air today. Anyone tempted to build a local version should first sit with how the original ended, bought outright by an American conglomerate a decade in. Suppose agents here built a portal and it worked. The harder question is who eventually buys it.

The findproperly angle

findproperly has no portal ambitions, agent-owned or otherwise, which also means there's no listing traffic here for anyone to buy one day. What we hold is the layer underneath every portal in this story: the sale prices on record at the deeds office, the data every one of these markets has fought to control. We hand that record straight to the agent who needs it for the next client conversation, instead of sitting between the agent and the data as one more gatekeeper charging for access.