Allegran Advertising Limited was spun out of Allegran Limited in February 2005. The new company was designed to explore non-core business and one of the first concepts to emerge from this development was HomeHunter, soon rechristened QpHomes. Adrian was always rather keep on the HomeHunter concept and created most of the database architecture and programming logic, allowing users to self-describe their property for sale, adding rooms, measurements and photographs as they went.
QpHomes amassed over 12,000 property listings between April 2004 and March 2006, when the operating company name was changed to Vivid Medianet Limited. However, despite interest from some major companies (including Tesco) in this space, the legal position of self-listed property advertisements was always somewhat unclear. Listings sites could have been treated as estate agents, necessitating the checking of all user-generated content for accuracy.
Clearly, this was not feasible and not until 2012 did government propose to allow private sale ads by amending the Estate Agents Act and repealing the Property Misdescriptions Act. All this, of course, came too late for QpHomes which closed its doors in 2006. Tesco abandoned its Property Market in 2008 and sold the business to Spicerhaart.
Vivid Medianet Limited was renamed GoCarbonFree Limited in March 2007 and focused on the new GoCarbonFree website, a B2C points collection site which aimed to buy and ‘retire’ carbon credits through commissions on user’s shopping interactions.
Unfortunately, like QpHomes, this concept would also eventually be filed under the What might have been category.