Ten Questions with Mihai Gavriloiu, Co-founder of GoFlint

Relatively few true startup challenger portals are launched in mature markets these days. The challenge for them in taking on incumbents is immense.

One real estate marketplace looking to defy the odds is French challenger GoFlint. Founded in 2020, the Paris-based portal recently raised €2.8 million to go after the likes of SeLoger and Leboncoin in a market where agents are coming under increasing pressure.

We spoke to co-founder Mihai Gavriloiu (pictured below) to find out about GoFlint's mission...

What is the problem that GoFlint solves?

GoFlint set out to bring to heel the agents’ property listing costs that represent on average €15-18k per year according to a study we carried out last year that polled 1,400 agents. Even independents are forking out €2-3k per year. 

These costs have been spiralling since 2019-2020, going up more than 10% each year without a corresponding increase in perceived value.

What is GoFlint’s USP? What separates you from other portals like SeLoger or Bien’Ici?

We serve only professionals - only Bien’Ici is left in this category since SeLoger opened up free FSBO listings last year. We differentiate ourselves from all historical portals by a basic offering of free listing with no strings attached and no stranglehold on leads. Through this we aim to have by mid-2026 the listings of all the real estate professionals in France and offer the most comprehensive listings to our audience.

For our visitors, we are the only portal aiming to offer a selected 3rd party to help deal with all the frictions of a real estate transaction (credit, house removal, decoration, renovation) and assisting agents with professionals (EPC diagnostics, market data) to help them focus on their core business of sourcing mandates and selling properties.

GoFlint is one of only 3% of portals around the world to have a search by travel time option. What made you implement that functionality and how has the adoption been among users?

As the team is scattered throughout the world and not everyone lives in concentrated cities like Paris or London, we polled them on how they go about searching for a property. We introduced this feature way back in the second half of 2021. We also introduced the search by EPC rating for green homes back in the first half of 2022 when our historical competitors did it a year or so later.

In 2023, more than 60% of visitors used the travel time search, up from around 50% in 2022. 

GoFlint is free to list for agents. How do you make money?

We consider that standard listing is a commodity with an added value close to nil. We are currently monetising two segments:

1. Enhanced property listing visibility for €15 per month (i.e for the price of a Netflix subscription the agent gets on average 5x more visibility for their promoted listings).
2. Through 3rd party companies active on our marketplace (visibility subscriptions, leads- or commission-based remuneration). This model is still being trialled as we need to adapt to the business models of our partners.

If you’re free to list, why not allow FSBO listings?

There are a handful of reasons here. Business-wise it’s easier to have a sole focus and business rationale. Agents account for around 70% of property sales in France, so a B2B approach offers the advantage of giving our audience property listings set to a professional standard and a 99% automated and streamlined daily feed of listings.

There's also the GDPRelement to consider. We feel better knowing that the leads we generate are solely directed at professionals who must adhere to regulations in dealing with data from our audience.

You just raised €2.8 million. What will the funds be used for?

People mainly! 55% of the money is earmarked for hiring and training in the fields of development, marketing, sales and data analysis. Another 20% will go to the expansion of our infrastructure and ensuring that GoFlint can smoothly handle more than 750k listings coming by 2025.

GoFlint recently launched an AI-powered free text search assistant for users. Why do that instead of, for instance, concentrating on expanding listing coverage?

We’re doing both without neglecting listing coverage. We're actually about a year ahead of our business plan when it comes to listings volumes.

We view this tool, “Flint.E”, as the next step in providing more immediate and relevant property search results to our audience with features that a traditional engine cannot retrieve. Think of a property overlooking the sea or a flat without an opposite building blocking the view for example. Generating faster and more relevant searches should also mean more qualified leads for our agents.

What is GoFlint currently working on?

Doing away with the property portals! More seriously, we are trialling a France-wide Flint.E with faster response times and more proprietary tuning of the tool. We are also looking at how Flint.E can take advantage of our AVM tool, La Vigie (“The Watch” in English), which we believe to be the sole tool offering free property price estimates depending on the EPC grade of the property and its location.

We have big ambitions to steadily expand La Vigie in terms of data breadth and outputs evolving from data output to decision-making assistance. 

What is the most common request from clients?

Agents want more leads and a lower cost per lead. We estimate that our clients would have saved around €195 million in listing costs had they only used GoFlint in 2023. We hope to increase this to over €300 million this year.

Our visitors want to do good deals in a market where credit is more expensive and disposable income tighter. We see them hunting around for data on how to price low-grade EPC properties and less noise in property search results - we hope to deliver on both.

What should real estate portals be focussing on that they aren’t currently paying enough attention to?

On the agent side portals should revert to being a provider of services as opposed to more or less extracting higher ARPA through additional functionalities that agents seem to have limited use for. We see this trend beyond France too.

However, having built up significant cost bases this shift is difficult for most portals and we see this as one of the reasons for our faster-than-planned adoption of GoFlint across France.

For our audience, we believe that the prevalent search engine model is getting long in the tooth and leads to too much time wasted by visitors in active property search which means fewer leads for agents and less perceived value from portals.