Success story: House.nl

HOUSE.NL

A NEW GENERATION OF REAL ESTATE AGENTS

Buying a home can lead you down some shady paths. From astronomical overbidding to double-dealing realtors and other agents angling for a bigger piece of the property pie. Time to create transparency in the housing market, decided Maurits Grosfeld. And hence House.nl was born. This Rotterdam start-up has an end-to-end platform tailored to bring clarity to the whole transaction process around home-buying and selling – from the moment you decide to put your house on the market to the handover at the notary – and thus making it fairer and way more efficient.

With the huge amount of information, files and steps buyers and sellers need to work through these days when buying or selling a house, it’s easy to lose sight of what matters. House. nl solves this by centralizing all the data and facilitating a platform that organizes bids, lets you arrange viewings and schedule meetings with appraisers and others involved in the property process. “We make sure everyone can see which public files are available and consult them, so no one has an informational advantage over anyone else”, Maurits says. “You can follow the entire process from beginning to end.” As the founder explains, that still tends to be a pinch point in the sector. “In the traditional real estate world, you have to put your faith in someone who has a big personal stake in the process outcome, and the buyer has to rely on the information they’re given. But it’s hard to know if it actually corresponds with what’s happening. We remove this role as a gatekeeper from the traditional real estate agent.”

FULL TRANSPARENCY

Maurits decided to break open the whole transaction process, with House.nl. “We compile and monitor everything, but can’t influence any of it. That means the information is there for everyone and you can see what’s happening at any given moment.” This thinking also underpins the platform’s option for an open bidding system. “While it could result in a higher price than you’d have in the closed biddings we also facilitate”, Maurits argues that “it isn’t necessarily a bad thing for buyers. They can see all the offers, and so that moderates the disparity between the highest and next highest bidders – creating a level playing field in real estate brokerage”.

INFORMED BID

In effect, it takes the guesswork out of out-bidding your opponents. “Because we centralize the data, buyers have up-todate documentation on the state of the house, so they can make their own informed decision about whether or not to continue the process. Where otherwise you might bid tens of thousands of euros above the asking price, now those increments are smaller. Our research shows that this moderating effect is more important to many buyers than the level of a bid itself.”

BIG PLANS

So, what’s next for House.nl? For now, they want to focus on the domestic market, where the platform is doing well: “We’ve built up a network of some forty member real estate agents, giving us nationwide coverage, so for every house we always have an agent available within a twenty-kilometre radius.” Having a flesh-and-blood estate agent to make arrangements such as optional viewings and be the go-between for both parties still matters a great deal, Maurits notes. “But we’ve digitized all the manual aspects that used to be done by email or phone.” All the same, cross-border plans to take their fairer market model abroad are already in the making. “In the future, we want to make our transparent system available to everyone who’s buying or selling a house.”