Director dealings: Zoopla founder pockets £14m from share sale

Zoopla chief executive Alex Chesterman has sold a third of his shares in the property group to pocket a tasty £13.8m.

The FTSE 250 company reported on Tuesday afternoon that Chesterman, who founded the company in 2007, had offloaded 4.25m stock at a price of 325p the day before.

After the sale, which represented roughly 1% of all the group's issued shares, Chesterman still holds 8.5m shares, which is more than 2% of the total share capital, and he agreed to a further lock-up until 23 June 2017.

Zoopla added: "Last year, the Board announced that it secured the long term commitment of Alex to continue to lead the business and deliver its ongoing strategy."

On Monday, Chesterman, who made £32m from selling 3.5% of his holding in the company's 2014 flotation to add to a fortune that was bulked up by the 2011 sale to Amazon of his Lovefilm video streaming company for £200m, was reported to have contributed to a £6.3m fundraising for DueCourse, a cloud-based invoice financing service for SMEs.

On 8 September Zoopla released a trading update that confirmed trading for 2016 would be at the top of estimates, while its capital markets day last week, management cited evidence of the latent potential within the UK digital property market, suggesting a £650m-plus opportunity across property marketing, software and other services.

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