UK house prices: Zoopla sales jump by a third after uSwitch acquisition in April

Revenue has soared by more than a third at property website Zoopla. The FTSE-250 company saw an increase in income and confirmed it is confident it will make the 2016 financial targets as housing demand continues to soar.

The platform's sales soared by over 34% to £107.6m (€152.5m, $162.1m) while profit before tax jumped by 17% to £33.6m in the full year.

"We have made great progress towards our vision of becoming the consumer champion at the heart of the home with the acquisition of uSwitch, the leading home services comparison platform in the UK," Alex Chesterman, chief executive of Zoopla commented.

In April, the deal on uSwitch was signed and the price comparison brand was taken over by Zoopla for £190m. The company now says that uSwitch is worth around £48.8m.

Meanwhile, Zoopla has invested in marketing and generating traffic to its website through many of its channels, including the price comparison platform.

"Traffic to our property platform remained strong with high levels of user engagement and we recently passed the significant milestone of over seven million downloads of our property apps," Chesterman said.

The property website was forced to deal with rival Onthemarket.com, which allows its clients to only publish listings on RightMove or Zoopla. Investec analyst Steve Liechti said that the threat from Onthemarket.com is not as big as was feared when it launched in January 2015, but detects "a widening gap in Zoopla's portal proposition strength [against] Rightmove".

"Our view is that significant consensus change is unlikely pre the results meeting, with our forecasts roughly in line with Factset consensus," Liechti added. Zoopla is comfortable with FY16 market expectations and confident of further membership growth. uSwitch volumes have remained strong post the year-end, especially energy."