My name is Magnus Svantegård (LinkedIn), live in Sweden, and is the Product Manager for Datscha and Partner in Stronghold Invest. I believe in smart use of Internet in the Real Estate industry.
The Swedish brokerage firm Skandiamäklarna will, according to an article in Dagens Media, shift the marketing to focus mainly on online for 2007.
A starting point is a new site, valkommenhem.se (Welcome home), aiming to inform and inspire home buyers.
For example, the site gives you the opportunity to see the effect of home styling.
The Swedish commercial real estate market has been very popular for many years to international investors. For example, some years up to 70% of the investments have been done by non-Swedish investors.
Today I went through the statistics, provided by Squarespace, for this blog regarding 'Search Engine Queries' (that is, phrases used by people that eventually end up at this site) and to my surprise I found that quite a few had been using "Swedish real estate 2007 outlook".
Of course, I tried it and to my surprise I made it to number one!
Shouldn't that place be 'owned' by some of the larger commercial consulting firms in Sweden? I guess they don't do to much of Search Engine Optimization...
The Swedish residential mortgage lender SBAB (www.sbab.se) launched a residential information service (named "Storstadsguiden") this Friday. It's a free service that shows medium price per square meter for apartments in Stockholm, Göteborg and Malmö.
Each town is divided in 15 - 30 sub markets. Each sub markets has a value based on actual transactions provided by Ljungqvist Information, which also runs the comparable sales service Ljungqvist (previously named treF).
The pressrelease is found here (in Swedish).
Hemnet, the leading residential listing service in Sweden, has upgraded their mapping service.
The new (highly) improved service is provided by Hitta.se, a national "yellow paper" service which has focused highly on the mapping functionality to attract visitors.
The pressrelease is found here (in Swedish).
I had the opportunity to sit down with the founders, Per Wigart and Rolf Andersson, of FastighetsSverige (a Swedish real estate magazine) the other day. Their lifestyle magazine, with a strong real estate focus, which was started 1½ year ago, has became a great success in Sweden.
Going online with style
It's common for newspapers to put some of their articles online. Some even provides a PDF version, but it could be done better, like they have down. Below is a screenshot from the latest issue of FastighetsSverige provided online through a service called E-magin.
(The service E-magin is provided by Leanback Sweden AB.)
The visual effect would be that off a flipping through a magazine, you're able to zoom and quickly jump between pages. Furthermore, it is possible to click on the ads (try Datscha's ad on page 53). If you are a subscriber you will receive the online version at the same time as the paper goes to the printshop.
Great product, brilliant online execution!
Magnus (The Believer)