Trinity Mirror has stepped up its push into the online property classified advertising market by buying the owner of the smartnewhomes.com website for £16.6m.
The publisher of the Daily Mirror announced yesterday it would pay an initial £11.3m for Smart Media Services, with a further £5.3m being contingent on the site meeting earnings targets.
It said smartnewhomes.com was the "leading site" for customers wanting to buy new-build homes, with more than 400,000 visits a month and 85% of UK developers advertising on its site. Brand new homes account for between 10% and 20% of all home purchases. The largest newspaper publisher in the UK, with five national and 240 regional titles, Trinity Mirror is boosting its online presence in an attempt to stop its print classified revenues leeching away to the net.
Local classifieds are "rapidly" migrating to the internet, the Newspaper Society said on Monday in its submission to the green paper review of the BBC's charter.
Analysts said Smart Media Services was a relatively small acquisition but one which fitted in with Trinity Mirror's strategy of expanding its online classifieds business.
"I'm a bit surprised they did not focus on buying these type of assets four or five years ago," SG Securities analyst Anthony de Larrinaga said. "They certainly need to build national brands vertically to support the horizontal brands they've got in localities."
Analysts suggested a more significant purchase for Trinity Mirror would be the Exchange & Mart and Auto Exchange titles United Business Media has put up for sale.
Exchange & Mart's website is Britain's third most popular classified site.
Trinity Mirror, Daily Mail & General Trust and Johnston Press are all expected to be interested in UBM's two motor titles, which could fetch as much as £100m.
Trinity Mirror is also one of three regional newspaper groups that are competing to buy the Hotjobs online recruitment business. It already has a stake in the largest recruitment site in the country, Fish4jobs, which it owns jointly with DMGT, Guardian Media Group - the publisher of the Guardian - and Gannett. Regional newspaper websites account for 30% of the online UK recruitment market.
Trinity Mirror has also created a single portal for the websites of its regional titles in order to better exploit their advertising potential.
In a trading update released at the end of last month, Trinity Mirror revealed advertising revenues at its national titles would be 7% lower for this half-year, but its regional newspapers are expected to increase ad revenue by 1.3%.
