The stock market has been in the news quite a lot recently, and given that there is also a generally upbeat outlook on the futures of Proptech companies being expressed by a lot of the major financial news outlets as well, we thought we’d take a look at which of the world's property portals are directly and indirectly traded on the open market.
According to our research, there are property portals in 72 countries around the world which contribute either directly or indirectly to the bottom line of publicly traded companies. We may not see any of them be the new Game Stop, but there might be some interesting investments in there for Reddit Robinhood investors or anyone else for that matter...
Obviously I am not a financial advisor and neither is anyone at Online Marketplaces. The following is simply an exposition of the public companies that operate, own or jointly own property portals around the world.
The archetype of a publicly-traded property portal company, the British market leader has long been a darling of the London exchange and has delivered pretty consistently for shareholders over the years much to the chagrin of some of its agent customers.
The #3 UK property portal is 65% agent-owned, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t buy a piece of it. OnTheMarket is out to prove that the supposed dichotomy between regular shareholder and agent-customer interests is a fallacy.
Germany’s leading portal company directly runs the ImmoScout24 property portals in Germany and Austria but the Scout24 in Switzerland is run separately after being sold in 2014 prior to going public.
The majority shareholder in the company is none other than Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Apart from owning #1 Aussie portal Realestate.com.au, REA Group owns iProperty Malaysia, Thinkofliving and Prakard in Thailand, Squarefoot in Hong Kong and the ex-pat portal MyFun in China. REA Group is also a substantial shareholder in 99 Group which operates iProperty Singapore, 99.co and rumah123 in Indonesia. REA Group is also a significant shareholder in Realtor.com in The United States and the company recently increased its stake in Elara Technologies (59.65% as at 4th February) which operates three portals in India (Housing, Makaan and Proptiger).
The eternal rival of News Corp backed REA Group, Domain is backed by Nine Media and in addition to the eponymous property portal, also owns the Canberra based portal allhomes.
The Australian rental portal Rent.com.au turned to the public market in 2015 and recently secured a sizeable investment from notable tech investor Bevan Slattery to help in its quest to turn the business into a true end-to-end marketplace.
The US market leader in residential real estate marketing also owns the Trulia, StreetEasy, HotPads and Out East portals. The Seattle-based company is also among the early iBuying pioneers looking to turn a profit from buying and flipping houses.
The commercial and real estate data giant is moving in on Zillow’s territory with a new residential portal, and already owns a number of portal sites across the spectrum in the USA including Apartments.com and Auction.com.
Info Edge is the Indian media company behind both the leading jobs portal (Naukri.com) as well as one of India’s biggest property portals (99acres.com) which is locked in a battle for top spot with MagicBricks.
It’s not only Indian property portals traded on American markets, but the Chinese property portal Fang is also a publicly-traded company.
Better known as the Google of Russia, Yandex also owns and operates several classifieds sites through its Yandex.Verticals division. Realty.Yandex is the company’s property portal play and is one of the top property sites in Russia.
Africa’s largest public company owns and operates the Proeprty24 franchise of portals within Africa and The Philippines.
Prosus is the international division of Naspers’. Apart from being the largest shareholder of Tencent, it also owns OLX Group as well as property portals in Russia (Domofond), Portugal (Imovirtual), Poland (Otodom) and Latin America (Properati). The company is also one of two owners of the market-leading OLX / ZAP+ real estate behemoth in Brazil as well.
The company which was spun off from the Norwegian publishing giant Schibsted in 2019 owns Leboncoin and A Vendre A Louer in France, Vivanuncios in Mexico, Habitaclia and Fotocasa in Spain, Yapo in Chile, Willhaben in Austria, Kufar in Belarus and is also part of joint ventures in Daft Ireland and OLX / ZAP+ in Brazil.
Headquartered in Malaysia, as the name suggests, Frontier Digital Ventures specialises in running portals in emerging markets. Aside from an interest in leading Pakistani portal Zameen, the company’s portfolio includes the PropertyPro portals in Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda and Zimbabwe, InfoCasas in Uruguay, Bolivia, Colombia and Paraguay, iMyanmarHouse in Myanmar, LankaPropertyWeb in Sri Lanka, MeQasa in Ghana, Encuentra24 in Central America and Hoppler in The Philippines. The company also recently purchased Colombian portal Fincaraiz from Adevinta along with Avito in Morocco and Tayata in Tunisia.
Alongside its regular e-commerce and classifieds sites, the Latin American giant owns and operates several vertical property portals across the region, namely: Metros Cubicos in Mexico, PortalInmobiliario in Chile and TuInmueble in Venezuela.
The Japanese company started out as the operator of Homes.co.jp and on buying out aggregator company Mitula Group in 2018 inherited all of the RESEM and dotproperty Group portals which include the iCasas brand of portals in Latin America, the dotproperty and Hipflat portals in Southeast Asia, Persquare in South Africa and Globaliza in Spain.
Aside from printing one of Finland's most popular newspapers Iltalehti, Alma Media also owns and operates leading property portal Etuovi as well as apartment rental site Vuokraovi. The company also owns jobs classifieds sites in the Baltic countries, The Czech Republic, Bosnia and Croatia.
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