Hemnet Still Owns the Launch. It Is Losing What Comes Before

Updated draft after feedback. This version expands the history of Sweden’s broker and listing incentives, adds the July 2026 operating and regulatory position, and makes the next tests explicit. Version 1 is available here.

The verdict

Hemnet is not yet a broken marketplace. It remains Sweden’s largest housing destination, reached a Sifo/ORVESTO-measured average of roughly 1.8 million people a week during 2025 and still appeared in 82% of completed home sales.

But its loss of supply is structural, not merely the residue of a weak housing cycle. Hemnet’s share of sold homes fell from 89% in 2024 to 82% in 2025, below its previous 86%-90% range. Sweden recorded 170,415 home sales during the year; Hemnet’s own matching connected 139,063 of them to one of its listings. About 31,000 completed sales could not be matched to the country’s dominant portal.

The tempting explanation is that Sweden’s post-2022 housing slowdown made sellers hesitant and pushed homes into a temporary pre-market. That is only part of the story. The slowdown accelerated a shift that Sweden’s marketplace structure had been encouraging for years.

Hemnet’s moat was built through broker alignment. The seller paid for the advertisement, but the broker controlled publication and received compensation from Hemnet. Over time, however, brokers gained more ways to profit from keeping the earliest inventory in their own systems. A pre-market home could attract buyer registrations, strengthen a broker’s database, help win the next selling mandate and support a broker-owned portal—all before the seller paid for Hemnet.

Hemnet has not lost the broad-market launch. It is fighting to regain the period before that launch.

The structure that created Hemnet’s dominance

Hemnet began in 1998 as an initiative of the Swedish real-estate industry. Broker organisations and two large broker companies helped consolidate a fragmented collection of listings into one digital destination. The arrangement was powerful: brokers supplied the inventory, buyers learned to begin their search in one place, and every additional listing made Hemnet more useful.

Commercialisation changed the relationship. In 2013, Hemnet began charging the home seller SEK 600 for a listing. Half of the fee, excluding VAT, went back to the real-estate agency as administration compensation. Tiered pricing based on the property’s asking price followed in 2015.

That created the structure that still matters today:

the seller contracts with and pays Hemnet;
the broker handles publication and advises the seller on marketing;
the buyer uses the portal for free;
Hemnet pays the broker office for administering the listing and can pay additional commission for selling upgrades.

Hemnet therefore looks like a seller-buyer marketplace but operates through a third-party gatekeeper. Only broker listings are accepted. The seller makes the formal advertising choice, but the broker controls the workflow, the timing and the presentation of the alternatives.

Sweden’s brokerage model makes that gatekeeper especially important. The broker is an intermediary between buyer and seller rather than a separate buyer agent representing the demand side. Buyer inquiries, valuation requests and prospect registrations flow through the same broker who is trying to win and execute selling mandates. A home is therefore not only inventory to be advertised. Before it is sold, it can be a customer-acquisition asset.

Monetisation strengthened one incentive and weakened another

New financial owners became Hemnet’s majority shareholders in 2017, although the broker industry did not disappear from the relationship: Mäklarsamfundet retained ownership and long-dated governance and commercial protections. Hemnet then expanded seller packages, boost products and broker services.

The broker compensation model evolved with that strategy. Until March 2021, agencies received 50% of Hemnet’s base-listing price and 20% of add-on sales. The revised model reduced base compensation to 30% and made the add-on commission depend on the agency’s rate of upgraded listings. Hemnet revised the model again in 2024; under the current disclosed structure, offices receive a fixed SEK 600 administration payment plus commission of up to 30% on upgraded products.

This was effective. Hemnet says its 2024 compensation redesign increased agent recommendations by more than 20 percentage points and lifted Premium conversion. Alongside product, packaging and pricing changes, average revenue per published listing rose 42% that year. In 2025, administration and commission expense paid to real-estate offices reached SEK 404 million, equivalent to about 31% of property-seller revenue.

The weakness was not that brokers lacked an incentive to recommend Hemnet. They had a strong incentive to recommend a larger package after a seller had decided to enter Hemnet. That is the intensive margin.

The extensive margin was different: should a tentative seller enter Hemnet yet at all?

Hemnet’s average revenue per published listing rose from SEK 2,467 in 2021 to SEK 8,175 in 2025. The increase includes package mix and optional exposure products, so it is not a pure price index. But a seller still faced a meaningful paid decision at the earliest and least certain stage of the sale. A broker could instead place the home on its own site or in its customer system, test it against known buyers and preserve a full Hemnet launch for later.

Hemnet was paying brokers to monetise captured listings. The broker’s own economics increasingly rewarded control of the inventory before it was captured.

Boneo turned the conflict into an explicit strategy

The clearest evidence arrived in 2019, before the housing downturn, when seven broker chains launched Boneo as an alternative to Hemnet.

A cooperation agreement between the chains and Boneo committed them to ensure that brokers associated with them published at least 90% of their Swedish inventory on Boneo. Publication of a “coming” home was free on Boneo, while Hemnet charged the seller for a package covering both the coming and full-sale stages.

The distinction mattered. A home shown first on a broker’s own site and Boneo could generate inquiries and strengthen the broker’s proprietary customer relationships. If it later needed maximum exposure, it could still go to Hemnet. If one acceptable buyer appeared early, it might never need to.

A 2022-24 Swedish Competition Authority investigation documented indications that the Boneo-owning chains developed a phased strategy to make the portal the service with the most unique “coming” inventory. The Authority found indications that affiliated brokers were encouraged to publish those homes on Boneo and their own sites rather than Hemnet or Booli. Its investigation also indicated that the parties jointly decided to block competing “coming” publication choices in broker software, and that they tried to stop Booli from indexing their websites because aggregation destroyed Boneo’s exclusivity.

Six chains ultimately committed not to coordinate how their affiliated firms published outside Boneo. Accepting those commitments was not a final finding of infringement, and the record documents resistance among individual brokers and limits on the chains’ control. But it establishes the economic motive directly: early inventory had become valuable enough to steer.

Why Sweden’s pre-market kept growing

The pre-market did not begin with the 2022 housing slowdown. Booli’s data show that homes marketed as “soon for sale” increased from just over 20,000 in 2015 to more than 173,000 in 2025. A home can appear first in the pre-market and later in the ordinary for-sale count, so 173,000 is not a separate transaction total. It shows how much of the sales process migrated ahead of the traditional launch.

The incentives reinforce one another:

The seller preserves optionality. A homeowner can test an aspirational price, wait to buy the next home or avoid paying for broad exposure before being committed to sell.
The broker captures demand. An early listing brings prospective buyers into the broker’s database and may generate a future selling mandate.
The chain differentiates its channel. Unique inventory gives buyers a reason to register with the broker or use a broker-owned portal.
Alternative discovery is free to the seller. Boneo offers free coming publication, while Booli indexes broker sites without requiring a separate seller purchase.
Only one buyer is necessary. A broker database does not need to reproduce Hemnet’s entire audience if one prospect will meet the seller’s threshold.

The housing slowdown enlarged the opportunity. More owners became tentative, sales processes lengthened, and “sell before buying” became more common. A 2024 Mäklarsamfundet survey found that 52% of respondents marketed homes differently, including using their own websites or a coming status before broader exposure. Some 51% spent more time matching buyers and homes by phone, while 41% collaborated more inside their office. The response rate was only 14.6%, so the precise percentages are directional, but the operating pattern is coherent.

Fastighetsbyrån made the model explicit when it launched Förtur in June 2026. Selected registered prospects can see a home before broad marketing, allowing the seller to test interest and price without extra advertising cost or sacrificing the home’s later news value. The company cited rising housing-ad prices, scraping and buyers seeking to pre-empt bidding as reasons the market had changed.

Förtur postdates the 2025 share loss and does not explain it by itself. It confirms that Sweden’s largest broker company now regards the pre-market as a durable product.

The 2025 break was real

The pre-market’s growth did not automatically imply that Hemnet was losing completed transactions; many coming homes eventually moved to the platform. The 2025 data changed that assessment.

2025 measure	Result	Change
Swedish home sales	170,415	About +3.5% (derived from SCB tables)
Sold homes matched to Hemnet listings	139,063	-5%
Hemnet share of sold homes	82%	-7 percentage points
Hemnet published listings	160,700	-13%

Roughly three points of the seven-point coverage decline came from market growth that Hemnet failed to capture. The remaining four points came from the fall in Hemnet-matched completed sales themselves. This was not simply a shrinking denominator.

The exact route remains undisclosed. Hemnet does not report unmatched sales by property type, geography, broker chain or channel, and its 139,063 numerator comes from the company’s own listing match against official Statistics Sweden sales. The evidence supports the mechanism and its direction, not a claim that every missing sale occurred through the pre-market.

But the direction is difficult to dismiss. In Q1 2026, Hemnet publications fell about 31% while Swedish apartment and villa transactions declined only 2%. Transactions then rose 7% during the first half, while Hemnet’s January-May publications remained down about 24%. The periods and property mixes are not perfectly aligned, but the divergence is too large to describe the problem as purely cyclical.

Where Hemnet stands in July 2026

Hemnet still owns the broad-reach moment. Its Sifo/ORVESTO-measured average weekly reach declined only 2.4% in 2025 and remained above 2023. When sellers choose a full launch, they continue paying for differentiated exposure: paid-listing ARPL grew 12% through May 2026.

The income statement currently looks worse than the underlying participation data because Hemnet’s “Sell first, pay later” option recognises revenue only when and if the property sells. Through May, 60,400 listings had been published but 48,900 had become paid listings. The 11,500 gap represents about SEK 105 million of gross sales potential at current ARPL if every pending property converts. It is an optimistic ceiling, not deferred revenue.

Even under full conversion, published listings multiplied by current ARPL imply gross listing-sales capacity about 14% below the comparable 2025 base. Payment timing explains part of the reported revenue decline; missing inventory explains the rest.

Hemnet’s repairs now address the incentive structure directly:

Sell first, pay later removes the seller’s risk of paying for an unsuccessful sale.
Strategic chain partnerships add performance compensation when collaboration increases Hemnet’s share of pre-market listings.
Underhand, called Under-the-radar in English, gives selected early-stage homes logged-in exposure while preserving some discretion. Svensk Fastighetsförmedling generated roughly 500 Underhand listings during the first full rollout week.

The design of “Sell first, pay later” also shows how forcefully Hemnet initially tried to reclaim supply. Eligibility was conditioned on the home reaching Hemnet within two days of first appearing on the broker’s website. The Swedish Competition Authority investigated whether that condition, together with the partnerships, could exclude competitors. Hemnet suspended it and informed the Authority on July 1 that it would not be restored. The case was then closed because the partnerships alone did not provide sufficient indications of harm to continue. That was not a finding that the original condition complied with competition law.

Hemnet must therefore win the early market through product value and broker economics rather than tying contingent payment to immediate publication.

What comes next

The first test arrives with Hemnet’s Q2 report and strategic update on July 17. Management has promised detailed reviews of Sell first, pay later, the broker partnerships and Hemnet’s market position.

Reported revenue should improve as some contingent listings sell and become payable. That rebound will not by itself show that the moat is repairing. Four measures matter more:

Published listings relative to market transactions. Hemnet must stop underperforming a recovering housing market.
Conversion and ageing of contingent listings. A large published-paid gap is benign only if homes convert at acceptable rates and within reasonable periods.
Early-stage participation. Partnerships and Underhand must bring homes onto Hemnet before they are sold elsewhere, not simply move existing Hemnet listings between products.
Buyer reach. Stable traffic is currently the strongest counter-case. If supply remains incomplete long enough, buyer multi-homing may eventually become buyer migration.

Completed-sale coverage remains the cleanest eventual verdict, but it is annual and lagged. A recovery toward the historical 86%-90% range would show that Hemnet is regaining market entry. Coverage remaining around 82%, or falling below 80% while buyer reach weakens, would indicate that the seller-side leak is becoming a broken flywheel.

The decision

Hemnet is still a powerful marketplace. It retains the audience, strong monetisation and the best broad-market exposure product in Sweden.

What changed is the assumption that those advantages automatically deliver every home at the beginning of the sales process. Sweden’s system separates the payer from the gatekeeper, gives the gatekeeper economic value in proprietary buyer relationships, permits free early publication elsewhere and requires only one buyer for a pre-market sale. The housing downturn exposed those incentives; it did not create them.

The moat has not disappeared. Hemnet still owns the full launch. The question is whether it can economically earn back the option period that now precedes it.

Evidence base: Hemnet’s IPO prospectus, annual and interim reports, monthly disclosures and product announcements; Statistics Sweden; Swedish Competition Authority decisions 602/2022 and 216/2026; the Swedish Estate Agents Inspectorate; Mäklarsamfundet; Svensk Mäklarstatistik; Fastighetsbyrån; and Booli. Hemnet’s 82% figure combines an official sales denominator with Hemnet’s own listing match. No public dataset identifies the channel used by every unmatched sale.