January 11th, 2023
OneDome the technology company behind the World’s first eHomebuying platform closed its first acquisition of a mortgage brokerage firm, acquiring CMME Mortgage and Protection Limited from CMME Group, owned by a private equity firm Livingbridge, for an undisclosed amount.
CMME Mortgage and Protection Limited is a well-established mortgage brokerage and financial services provider in the UK. It arranges around £800M worth of mortgages per year which represents roughly 0.35% of the entire mortgage market. OneDome also acquired CMME Group’s wealth management unit, Contractor Wealth Management Limited, a wealth management business with £130M of assets under management. CMME’s 65-strong team will join the OneDome Group as part of this transaction.
OneDome launched its property listing website in late 2019 as an alternative to rightmove.co.uk and zoopla.co.uk. It has recently launched a revolutionary eHomeBuying platform that offers an e-commerce like ‘one-stop shop’ digital home buying experience. Buyers can find a property, apply and get a mortgage and process the entire legal (conveyancing) process online in one place.
To make the process even easier for consumers, OneDome has created a simple product called HomeBuyer Service, an all-inclusive service that bundles everything one needs to purchase a property such as a mortgage and conveyancing into a straightforward service for just £999.
The platform and the service combined can cut the property purchase time by around 70% – down to 5-6 weeks from a national average of 16 weeks.
This acquisition will allow OneDome to significantly increase its mortgage brokerage capability and service its website clients. OneDome has also partnered with several estate agents and housebuilders to provide their clients with property transaction management services via its eHomeBuying platform.
This is the second acquisition by OneDome. In 2019, to launch its property search website, OneDome acquired a popular consumer website – nethouseprices.com, the UK’s first website to make land registry transaction data easily accessible to UK consumers.
Babek Ismayil, CEO of OneDome said: ‘The property market is one of the few areas which has experienced a limited impact from technology. The homebuying journey isn’t fit for purpose and has had little breakthrough innovation since the launch of classifieds like Rightmove in the early 2000s. Our goal is to make homebuying a faster, simpler and more enjoyable experience for everyone. We believe that our eHomebuying platform will change how we buy properties in the same way that e-commerce platforms changed how we shop forever. This is our first acquisition of a mortgage brokerage, and we are in discussion with several other target firms. Our 5-year goal is to service 10% of all property purchases and sales in the UK. ’
About OneDome
OneDome’s vision is to make homebuying as simple as buying an item online. This is why OneDome took the online property experience beyond just property search, into offering a user experience close to e-commerce. OneDome allows consumers to find a property, calculate affordability, speak to a mortgage adviser and get a lawyer, all in one place, all via the same platform. OneDome launched its HomeBuyer Service (HBS) specifically for property buyers. This service productises the entire property purchase by bundling together all the services needed to buy a property into one service at a fixed price of £999, significantly cheaper than buying these services separately.
Based on the latest transaction data, the HomeBuyer Service and the platform can cut the property transaction time down to 5 weeks from an average of 15.5 weeks via the conventional route.
OneDome Group was founded in 2016 by Babek Ismayil, a former Senior Vice President of Credit trading at J.P. Morgan. The Chairman of OneDome is Sir Nigel Knowles, former CEO and Chairman of DLA Piper and current CEO of DWF Plc.
In 2019, OneDome acquired Nethouseprices.com, one of the oldest property search websites in the UK.