Real Estate: What Strategy for Targeting Private Sellers?

A few months ago, SeLoger, the flagship of the Aviv Group, announced its entry into the realm of individual property listings. This move illustrates the recent efforts of major real estate platforms to focus on a market segment that has long been neglected. A closer look reveals three emerging business models, each showing varied results depending on the type of player involved.

Private Listings: A Long-Neglected Market

The market for individual property listings has long been an overlooked segment for real estate websites. In countries like the United States and the United Kingdom, market structuring limits owner-led transactions to rentals only. In contrast, countries like Germany, France, and Italy have faced challenges in monetizing these listings, leading markets to adopt freemium models for both sales and rentals.

Despite these challenges, individual listings often feature attractive prices and unique properties in diverse locations, drawing significant traffic. This has spurred numerous initiatives in recent years.

Free Listings for Private Sellers to Assert Market Dominance

A recent example is SeLoger, which historically catered exclusively to professional listings to avoid competing with its client agencies. Since July 2023, the French market co-leader has expanded its offering to include free listings for individuals.

Aviv’s subsidiary draws inspiration from other specialized sites that have outpaced direct competitors in terms of individual listings. Dominance in the individual listings market is a clear indicator of a site's strong brand image. The more individual listings a site has, the more traffic it attracts, creating a self-reinforcing cycle that is hard to break once established.

Idealista exemplifies this strategy. Despite facing strong specialized competitors like Fotocasa (Adevinta) and the dynamic generalist Wallapop, Idealista has strengthened its lead in the individual listings market over the past five years. This trend is evident in market share statistics from May 2024 compared to May 2019.

Similarly, the Italian giant Immobiliare has followed this path with comparable success, until recently when Idealista began to catch up, indicating a convergence in their local brand images.

SeLoger’s strategy appears more complex and will likely take longer to yield results. Competing against the powerful Leboncoin (Adevinta), which dominates both the professional and individual markets, SeLoger has struggled to establish a presence in this segment a year after its launch.

Monetizing Individual Listings Through Professional Leads Another approach is to monetize traffic from individual listings by generating leads for professionals. Zoopla, launched quietly in 2007, gradually secured the number two spot in the UK market by offering free listings to agencies but charging for leads from individual sellers who used the site’s valuation tool.

Meilleurs Agents in France followed a similar path, rapidly increasing market share before being acquired by larger players (Silver Lake for Zoopla, Aviv for Meilleurs Agents), who then repositioned them towards more traditional business models.

Charging Privates at Professional Rates

ImmoScout24 also charges individual sellers for its services. This service accounted for 38% of its revenue in the first quarter of 2024, up from 5% in 2015.

This significant growth, from €11.5 million in 2015 to €144.4 million in 2023 according to Scout24's annual reports, is the result of a strategic focus built on two key pillars:

1. Long-standing dominance in the individual advertisement market.

2. A comprehensive offering for individuals, based on intensive lead qualification, management software, and seller contacts.

Alongside its impressive growth in charging individual clients, ImmoScout24 has strengthened its position against local competitors from Aviv, such as Immowelt and Immonet, with market share statistics for new individual listings in Germany from April 2024 to April 2019.