Despite Swedish housing rout, real estate website Hemnet continued to raise prices

Hemnet—translated as “the home”—is an online residential property portal in Sweden, bringing together sellers, buyers, agents, and developers on a single platform. At the beginning of 2023, home values in Sweden have declined ~15% from the peak.

Hemnet offers 3 listing tiers with additive listing features (i.e., better visibility and placement within the site): Basic, Plus, and Premium.

According to analysis of Hemnet’s listing data from March 2022 to Jan 2023, prices for plus and premium listing tiers increased 50% to 100% depending on the home’s asking price. 

As a percent of the home’s asking price, Hemnet’s take rate on Plus and Premium listings increased at least 50%.

Despite the increases in listing prices, home sellers increasingly paid for higher listing tiers (Plus and Premium). Plus and Premium listing adoption increased from 42% to 47% over the same period.

Sellers pay Hemnet directly to list their property, while agents receive a commission for the listing and associated add-on services. Hemnet offers agents and developers B2B products and services to enhance their brands and listings. 

In 2021, Hemnet's revenue mix was 67% from property listing services and 33% from other B2B and advertising services.

Sweden is an agent-mandated country, where real estate agents conducted ~96% of all residential sales. There were ~7.5k registered agents at the end of 2021, and ~7k are active users of Hemnet.

Hemnet facilitates ~90% of all Swedish residential sales, enjoys a relative market share of 12.2x (in revenues) and 10.7x monthly traffic than its #2 competitor. In Sept 2021, Hemnet is one of Sweden's top 5 media brands, only behind media giants such as Spotify, Netflix, Google, and YouTube.

Github source: https://github.com/leecjohnny/scrapy_hem