Hemnet Note

Reviewing an interesting case in untapped pricing power

Earlier this year I wrote up two relatively short summaries of Hemnet, the dominant Property Portal in Sweden. I was surprised because the posts drew a decent amount of scepticism and in at least one case outright credulity.

I was not pitching the stock, as much as I was just struck by how straightforward the value creation path was:

“every geography that shares a Western system of property ownership has ended up with a dominant online listing website. In Sweden this is Hemnet. The casual nature of it’s development as a going concern illustrates how powerful these online properties can be. Despite not even having full time employees for the first decade of it’s existence it has gained a preeminent position in it’s homeland. It first began to commercialise itself in 2014, and it is only now (2023) beginning to add some of the advanced advertising features that it’s international peers introduced a decade ago.”

(If you’d like to read the entire article, have a look here).