A Bumper Year for Hemnet as Q4 Results Buoyed By Huge ARPL Jump

The Swedish real estate portal Hemnet has released a report on its activities for the fourth quarter of 2023. Highlights from the Stockholm-based company's missive to the market include:

• Net sales increased 36.8% to SEK 275 million for Q4. Revenue for the year was up 13% at SEK 1,005 million.
• EBITDA increased 59.5% to SEK 142 million for the quarter and was up 17.3% for the full year to SEK 525.5 million.
• Average revenue per listing (ARPL) increased 46% to SEK 5,911 for the quarter. For the full year, ARPL increased 37% to SEK 4,490 (3,275).

Founded in 1998 by some of the country's leading brokerages, Hemnet is the dominant real estate marketplace in the vendor-paid Swedish market. Today's numbers represent a huge success for the firm that floated on the Stockholm Nasdaq back in 2021.

Commenting on the results, Hemnet CEO, Cecilia Beck-Friis said:

"Hemnet’s full year results demonstrate our growth capabilities also in challenging market conditions with fewer listings compared to 2022. The main driver behind our growth is an increased demand for our value-added services along with product development and work around packaging and pricing.

In the quarter, revenue from property sellers increased by 55.2 percent, and the average revenue per published listing (ARPL) increased by 46.2 percent. ARPL from our value-added services notably nearly doubled for the fourth quarter compared to last year. Looking at the full year, revenue from property sellers grew 22.2 percent and ARPL with 37.1 percent.

A large part of the growth can be attributed to the increasing demand for Hemnet Premium, as more agents and property sellers want to tap into the increased audience engagement that comes with our value-added services. The recovery of property market activity that we began to see in the third quarter has continued, and during the fourth quarter, the number of listings exceeded last year’s volumes for the first time in 2023, with a 5.3 percent YoY increase."

Hemnet's success has been driven by its Average Revenue Per Listing (ARPL) growth. Before going public, the big bet in the company's prospectus was that vendors would be willing to pay more for premium placement to sell their homes. As is the case in other vendor-paid markets such as Australia, the theory has been proven correct.

Seemingly the only potential cloud on the horizon for Hemnet are the listings that brokers choose to keep as 'pre-market'. Last year saw an increase in the average time taken to sell a property in the Swedish market as a lot of buyers sat on the sidelines. Consequently, many agents took to testing the water with pre-market listings only shown on their own site and not distributed to Hemnet.