Real Estate Firms Turned the Portal Business Upside Down
The real estate portal kinnisvara24.ee, created this April by Estonian real estate companies and Ekspress Group, has shown rapid growth, rising to second place among real estate portals ahead of City24 in December in terms of both visitors and real estate listings.
According to Paavo Heil, a member of Kinnisvara24's board, the portal has consistently grown both its visitor numbers and the number of real estate listings available during its first eight months of operation. "In December, we grew larger than City24 in both visitor numbers and listings, achieving the second position on the market. Our goal for the new year is to continue growing and offer competition to the market leader, the kv.ee portal," said Heil.
According to Gemius Estonia data, Kinnisvara24 portal was visited in the third week of December this year by 92,613 unique browsers, while City24 was visited by 72,902 unique browsers. During this period, Kinnisvara24 had 23,118 real estate listings open – 551 more than City24.
Kalev Roosiväli, a member of Kinnisvara24's board, noted that the goal of creating the new real estate portal was to offer competition to the monopoly that had previously existed in the real estate portal market and thus encourage fair market competition. "When businessman Margus Linnamäe's companies bought up two of Estonia's largest real estate listing portals, City24 and kv.ee, a virtual monopoly was created on the market. The goal of the real estate companies that created Kinnisvara24 was to bring competition back to the real estate portal market, and we have achieved that goal," said Roosiväli.
"Feedback from clients so far shows that both real estate buyers and sellers rate Kinnisvara24's user experience and pricing policy as better than competitors. The advantage of our portal for sellers is user-friendly options for presenting their property and lower prices for listings – for individuals, selling property on the Kinnisvara24 portal is approximately ten times cheaper, and for companies three times cheaper than on competing portals," explained Roosiväli. For buyers and renters, the advantage is that many listings are published on Kinnisvara24 two days earlier than on other portals. "This is a strong argument, because the best real estate offers sell within the first couple of days," added Roosiväli.
Kinnisvara24, which began operations this April, is a real estate portal founded by Ekspress Group and six real estate agencies. The portal is managed by Kinnisvarakeskkond OÜ, which is 49% owned by Ekspress Group and 51% by six Estonian real estate agencies.
