Who is who among the kings of online real estate in Spain

This article was written and published in Spanish and has been translated into English via Google Translate. Click here to read the original article.

House search portals and tourist rentals dominate the sector in Spain

In purchase or rent, to live or to go on vacation, a large part of the real estate activity has been moving through the Internet for years. The National Commission of the Markets and the Competition (CNMC) calculates that the businesses move more than 37 million euros each quarter in Spain. And that without counting the short-stay leases, which compute in that statistic along with tourist activities. In this context, proptech companies are developed every year (an acronym for the English words property and technology), as is known to the sector that provides any type of real estate service online.

The latest PropTech report in Spain from the real estate consultancy Savills Aguirre Newman, published last March, highlighted that the sector has already entered "in the consolidation phase". This is supported by figures such as the 5,500 direct jobs it generates or the 238 emerging companies it has created. Among this swarm of new applications that seek to exploit the latest niche and market trends, some companies stand out with business models consolidated for years.

Five of the companies considered proptech annually invoice more than 10 million euros in Spain. Your situation is varied. The one in fifth position surpasses that figure by little and the first multiplies it by more than 10. There are local companies and others are subsidiaries of foreign giants. These are the kings of the real estate sector on the Internet:

Adevinta
The name may tell you little, but you've probably heard about the Fotocasa portal. It is one of those that Schibsted has, a group of Norwegian origin. Last February its shareholders voted in favor of dividing the company in two, so since then all the classified websites in countries other than Norway are part of Adevinta. In addition to Fotocasa, they also operate with the brands Habitaclia, Infojobs, Coches.net, Motos.net, Milanuncios and Vibbo. The group's subsidiary in Spain billed more than 126 million euros in 2017, the last full year on which they have published results.

Román Campa, Director of Finance, Strategy and Growth of Adevinta Spain, says that the multinational "aims to grow between 15 and 20% in revenue in the coming years" and that Spain is "one of the group's main markets". In fact, in the fourth quarter of 2018 revenues amounted to 43.8 million, 16% more than in the previous year. In Spain they employ around 800 people.

Room Mate Group
After this brand, known above all for its hotels, appear the first born of two entrepreneurs with illustrious names. The majority (70%) corresponds to Kike Sarasola, Founder of the group, son of Enrique Sarasola Lerchundi and remembered for his three Olympic participations as a rider. The remaining 30% belongs to Sandra Ortega, daughter of the Founder of Zara and Rosalía Mera.

Last year it invoiced 83 million euros, 3.75% more than in 2017, according to figures from the company. Good part comes from the hotel activity, the embryo of the company. However, for five years it has also been dedicated to tourist apartments under the BeMate brand. It operates in Barcelona, ​​Malaga and, above all, in Madrid, where it manages three entire buildings dedicated to tourist rental. His plans are to open another ten in the coming years. "We will grow in Madrid, Barcelona and Mexico City," sources from the group say, which exceeds 1,000 employees.

Idealista
Its website, a pioneer in the search for real estate on the Internet in Spain, dates back to the year 2000. Its Founder, Jesús Encinar, continues as the top executive of the Spanish company, which was acquired by the British fund Apax Partners in 2015 for a figure that it did not come out. Three of the five people who were part of the original team are still in the company: Encinar himself, his brother Fernando and César Oteiza, who reinvested part of the money obtained from the Apax offer and are also shareholders.

In 2017, the group invoiced 51 million euros. But not everything corresponds to its website in Spain since in its almost two decades of history it has expanded to Italy and Portugal and has incorporated other divisions and businesses such as IdealistaNews (an informative website), IdealistaData (which deals with the data obtained from its portals ) or Rentalia (dedicated to vacation rentals). One of its latest acquisitions is AvaiBook, a company that provides a computer software widely used by holiday rental websites, such as Rentalia itself, and of which they own 75% since last February. The group employs 600 people, mostly in Spain, although a part is also distributed in its offices in Milan (Italy) and Lisbon (Portugal).

HomeAway
The holiday rentals website belongs to the Expedia group. The US giant of online tourism services was born in 1996 as a division of Microsoft and came to the Nasdaq since 1999, in the middle of the dotcom bubble. The latest results presented by its subsidiary HomeAway Spain are from 2017 and detail a turnover of 26.3 million. The company has more than 100 employees in Spain, where other websites of the group are also present, such as the Trivago hotel comparison platform, or the Hoteles.com hotel reservations website.

Lifull Connect
Gonzalo del Pozo, Gonzalo Ortiz and Marcelo Badimón founded the Mitula website in 2009, an aggregator of classified ads on the Internet that covers the real estate sector, among others (such as job ads or second hand cars). The Spanish company started trading on the Australian stock exchange in 2015 and in 2017, the last year in which it presented accounts separately, it invoiced 12.9 million euros for all the markets in which it operated. Last year Trovit, its main competitor and also of Spanish origin although already in Japanese hands, paid about 120 million to take it and from that integration emerged Lifull Connect.

The resulting group expects to approach the 35 million worldwide turnover this year and employs more than 200 people with offices in Madrid, Barcelona, ​​Amsterdam (Netherlands), Singapore, Bangkok (Thailand) and Manila (Philippines).

This article was written and published in Spanish and has been translated into English via Google Translate. Click here to read the original article.

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