HemOnline - A Swedish Redfin is (to be) launched

Today HemOnline, a Swedish version of Redfin, will be launched. (At 7 am it isn't....) 

Their offer is residential brokerage for a fix commission of 15 000 SEK (~2 100 USD). The average commission in the Stockholm area is 67 000 SEK. The aim is to have a 10% market share in the Stockholm area within one year. 

A 5 minutes interview at TV4.se. (In Swedish.)

The people behind HemOnline;
Lars Engelbert, CEO  -- formerly president of the The Swedish Association of Swedish Real Estate Agents (in Swedish Mäklarsamfundet) and, until june 2005, CEO of Bjurfors, one of the largest brokerage firms in Sweden.

Jan Carlzon, Chairman -- formerly President and CEO of Scandinavian Airlines System (SAS). Today the chairman of Ledstiernan, an venture capital company.

The investors behind HemOnline are Skandiabanken (25%), Bonnier (12,5%), Expressen (12,5%) and Lars Engelbert, Jan Carlzon, Michael Sohlberg and Thomas Rosén.

The US version
"Redfin is the world’s first online real estate brokerage. Customers can see listings, previously sold properties and neighborhood statistics on a map, and buy or sell homes online. Local Redfin agents handle the negotiations and paperwork, refunding two thirds of their commission to the consumer. Unlike other brokerages, we pay our agents only on customer satisfaction."

Started in the Seattle area earlier this year and is now also active in San Francisco. The blog "Future of Real Estate Marketing" has an excellent  The Real Estate 2.0 Market Leaders Interview  about their services. At Sellsius a video is found describing the Redfin service.

You can't excel using a spreadsheet

I strongly believe there is too much spreadsheets used in the real estate industry. (NO! Creating a DCF model in MS Excel isn't the perfect solution.) Don't get me wrong, you shouldn't stop using it everywhere, but if there are more than three people using the same spreadsheet based solution things will sooner or later be out of control.

Knowing this you could understand the smile on my face when Drew Meyers at Zillow told me that it was through the process of keeping track of comparable sales in spreadsheets that the founders of Zillow started to ask themselves if there wasn't a smarter way of doing this... Read more here.

"Is Real Estate Bust a Web Boost?"

Found an interesting post on The Real Estate Bloggers on how a downturn in the real estate market possibly could boost the real estate online services.

"And your present real estate agent is so mired in the toxic phrase “We have always done it this way” that you know how to better market your home than the “professional” does."

The post is based on an article in the Red Herring, talking about online brokers like Redfin and ZipRealty, and quoting Mr Inman; “Sellers never really migrated to the Internet, but now as they are disadvantaged they will use the Internet in ways that never happened before... demand for sites like these will increase as buyers become more powerful and need more analytical tools to assess the market.”

I strongly believe that Mr Inman is correct. Buyers are interested in doing more research themselves on the housing market. That's why the interest in Zillow is so great and why it is a brilliant solution (if you use it correctly).

Start-up review of rent.com

Interested in reading about a start-up in the area of real estate?
The site Startup-review.com has a case study about rent.com.

"Rent.com was acquired by eBay in February 2005 for $433M in cash. The company was founded in 1999 and became the most visited apartment listings site in the US."

Source: Henrik Torstenssons blog

Alma Media acquires Bovision.se

According to Dagens Industri (Swedens largest economical newspaper), the Finnish media corporation Alma Media has purchased the Swedish sites Bovision.se and Objektvision.se. (The news site What.se quotes unnamed sources that the price was between 20 to 30 million SEK.)

Bovision is a listing of residential houses with 130 000 visitors per week. The runner up on the Swedish market after Hemnet.se. Objektvision lists commercial properties for lease and has 8 000 visitors per week. The article states that the revenue was 17 million SEK (2,4 million USD).

The press release from Alma Media includes the statement "online internet sites for business and residential premises had a market size in Sweden of roughly EUR 150 million in 2005. Price levels of home-buying internet services are lower today in Sweden than in Finland and Norway".

Online listing for residential will be an interesting field to follow when Hemnet.se (owned by the brokers themselves through the brokerage organisations FMF and Mäklarsamfundet) surely will make the most of it to protect their position.