Court Rules In Favour Of Aggregator In Case Versus Ingatlan

The Hungarian aggregator Reálmonitor has won a lawsuit against the country's leading real estate vertical, Ingatlan.com.

A court ruling concluded that aggregators, including Árminimum.hu and the mobile application Ingatlanhiredes Figyelő—both owned by Reálmonitor—are legal in line with EU legislation.

The aggregators say they collect and organise listings from all real estate sites, making all images and information about the property available to the searcher on one interface and showing the lowest quoted price for each property.

The court examined European Union case law in detail and found that Reálmonitor's operation is in line with the EU's database protection directive, and that these innovations are important and useful for home seekers.

Péter Faragó, executive director of Reálmonitor, told local publication HVG:

"This is important because the Hungarian real estate market is chaotic. A given property can appear on more than 26 real estate sites, Facebook Marketplace and hundreds of Facebook groups, often at different prices and with different information.

"The essence of the housing ecosystem is that those looking for housing, renovators and sellers should receive all related services (housing search, valuation, financing, renovation, finding a specialist) in one central place.

"During the lawsuit, we also restrained the foreign expansion of Árminimum, but the ruling paves the way for us to launch Árminimum in several other European countries, as the service is already successfully operating in Poland as a test run."

On the other side of the legal argument, Ingatlan continues to claim that Reálmonitor is accessing and using its database without permission. In its lawsuit, Ingatlan.com claimed that with the Price Minimum and the Real Estate Listing Monitoring service, Reálmonitor was violating its rights to its database.

In an emailed statement, Ingatlan boss József Keleti said that his business “continues to stand firm for the protection of advertisers' personal data" and will seek to ensure that listings entrusted to the portal by agents "do not fall into third-party hands without the property owners' prior consent."

The Hungarian court's decision to favour a real estate listing aggregator against a portal is interesting because it is the opposite outcome of a very similar case in France earlier this month, which saw portal operator Digital Classifieds France (SeLoger and Logic-Immo parent) prevail over aggregator, Jinka.