Is Hemnet going for commercial listings?
Magnus (The Believer)Yesterday I stumbled upon an interesting article in the magazine FastighetsMäklaren (Issue 1, 2009, just in print). It was an article about Hemnet (the leading residential listing service in Sweden) where it was mentioned in one sentence that Hemnet is creating a listing service for commercial properties.
That's quite a development.
What is known?
There hasn't been any press releases regarding this, but according to this page (Hemnets Extranet?), Svensk FastighetsData (a software company for brokers, owned by Vitec) has "transferred" their commercial listing service kommersiella.se to Hemnet AB.
According to the page above it is supposed to be released in the autumn using this logo.
This could also explain why there currently is a navigation at Hemnet which only has one choice; 'Residential'. I guess they will be adding 'commercial' in the near future.
To be released in September?
According to the agenda for the 'Storhusseminaret', arranged by Mäklarsamfundet (The Association of Swedish Real Estate Agen) in late September, there will be a presentation by Eva Sjögren and Andreas Löwgren from Hemnet on the topic "Launch of Hemnets kommersiella.se".
Interesting development
It will be interesting indeed to follow how Hemnet will be approaching the market of investment properties. Which, according to me, differs greatly from residential listings. The main difference is that (as of today) it is not too common to use any of the listing services around. Especially not for larger investment portfolios.
In Sweden there are two listing services for commercial properties. The mentioned service Kommersiella.se has been around since 2001 and Objektvision was released in 1998. The latter is the biggest and owned by Alma Media which also runs the site Bovision which is competitor to Hemnet in the area of residential listings.
Update
Carl-Henric Borg, CEO at Hemnet, confirms (over Twitter @HemnetVD) that they will release a commercial listing site later this autumn.
Interesting, very interesting.
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