As the year draws to its inevitable close and holiday spirit takes over, a slow news cycle means we are bringing you the industry's biggest and best news stories this week in one roundup.
We'll start with an acquisition in Germany...
German real estate marketplace leader Scout24 has continued its acquisition strategy with the capture of commercial real estate data and valuation provider Bulwiengesa AG for an undisclosed sum.
Scout24 said it will integrate Bulwiengesa’s products to offer its customers “increased market transparency, innovative data-driven products and more convenient decision-making tools.”
Bulwiengesa CEO Ralf Koschny will join a supervisory board and COO Sven Carstensen will replace Koschny as CEO.
Tobias Hartmann, CEO at Scout24, said:
"Bulwiengesa’s leading data services complement our product range and are fully in line with our strategy to become the leading provider of real estate information in Germany. Together, we will be able to enhance market transparency, advance real estate transaction digitization and offer our commercial customers unique services to navigate the increasingly complex property market more confidently."
The acquisition follows swiftly on the heels of the newbuild marketplace NeuBau Kompass AG, also announced in December 2024.
Scout24, which operates the leading real state portal Immobilienscout24.de, recorded annual revenue growth of 8.5% in its latest financial statement in October.
Meanwhile, Tobias Hartmann has announced he will leave Scout24 in 2025, with a replacement CEO already lined up.
French horizontal portal LeBonCoin has launched a suite of AI features including visual search, the auto-completion of listings and interface personalization.
LeBonCoin will now show a personalised homepage with suggested goods and ads based on their bookmarked items and browsing history.
The image search option, available on LeBonCoin's app, looks for products and listings that match a user’s photograph of a particular object and then generates recommendations from its consumer goods segment.
LeBonCoin will also use AI to auto-complete item descriptions using just a title and an image. The AI will then generate a full description of the item, suggest a suitable selling price, and even recommend the most suitable delivery option for the item.
Finally, LeBonCoin will fully integrate PayPal payments in 2025. Users will also have the option to make payments in installments.
SearchSmartly, a tech provider for portals in the UK, has launched Computer Vision API, which lets portals process property listing imagery to generate tags and image descriptions.
The tool can detect property attributes (such as furnished/unfurnished), objects (tables, fireplaces) and rooms (kitchen/garden).
SearchSmartly has reported that use cases from partners have been varied, from powering additional search filters for seekers (“wooden floors” or “swimming pools”) to reordering imagery around seekers’ specific preferences.
An emerging use case is portals building their own AI muscle internally, by looking to build internal datasets that can be used for model training and output generation.
Simon Mohacek, Chief Growth Officer at SearchSmartly, said:
"It’s really exciting to see our Computer Vision technology start to integrate into portals around the world. Portal adoption of AI is about so much more than just LLMs, and using CV processing to help power seeker property discovery is a perfect example of how so much of this AI revolution is happening behind the scenes."
SearchSmartly also has a UK portal that showcases their technology, allowing would-be buyers and tenants searching for homes in London to embark on a more comprehensive property search experience, including searching by lifestyle, travel times, the proximity of green spaces, particularly for 'hidden gem' properties that may not be as prominently advertised on portals like Rightmove and Zoopla.
SearchSmartly is backed by investors including Blue Lake VC, REACH UK, and Syndicate Room.
Turkish real estate portal Emlakjet says it listed 1.8 million property advertisements this year.
Other numbers revealed by the marketplace operator included listing more than 40,000 real estate consultants in 2024, and directing 2,500 investors to new development projects.
In a press release, Tolga İdikat, CEO at Emlakjet, commented:
"2024 was not only a year of growth and success for Emlakjet, but also a year in which strategic steps were taken to support the transformation of the sector. With technological innovations, customer-oriented services and innovative solutions we developed for the sector, we both achieved a rapid transformation in the real estate market and deepened our contributions to the sector.
"This year, the opportunities we provided for real estate agents and the two-fold growth we experienced in our mobile application gave great momentum to the digitalization movement in the sector. In addition, more than 40 thousand real estate consultants and 1.8 million advertisements were published on our platform, and we directed nearly 2500 investors to the right projects.
"We established stronger collaborations with the branded projects we offered to real estate agencies, and brought investors together with the right projects. We increased knowledge sharing and shaped expectations about the sector by coming together with professionals in the sector through training and panels. In addition, we switched to a performance-based real estate agent-friendly package structure, which is a first in the sector. With this innovative model, we increased our customer base by 50%.
"We have high expectations for 2025. As Emlakjet, we are determined to shape the real estate dynamics of not only today but also the future and to carry the sector further."
Dubizzle has revealed an 86% year-on-year increase to over 400,000 verified users signed up to its marketplace offering.
Dubizzle says it added verified accounts to create a trustable, secure environment for its users.
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