"We Are Not Dogmatic": Green Acres CEO Explains Business Model Switch-up

French second-home specialist Green Acres has waved au revoir to its traditional pay-per-contact system and changed up its business model to a new-look subscription model.

CEO Benoît Galy has bared all in an interview with real estate publication Immo Matin, in which he describes how Green Acres customers weren't as enamored as they once were with the platform, which hosts listings for nearly 300,000 second homes in 56 European countries.

The result is a new-look subscription model that costs users €99 per month. The product was launched in 2022, and over half (54%) of Green Acres customers have opted into the new deal, with prices adjusted according to traffic and then locked in for the rest of the year.

And Galy says the company is already working on a suite of new products and services including call-tracking and Whatsapp integration.

Galy also outlined how the new subcription model works, and its results since launch:

For 7 to 8 years, our business model was based on payment per contact delivered. But this system, which was initially a desire on our part to innovate, never convinced all of our customers.

Certainly about 2/3 of them appreciated it, but the other third did not find it practical, he told us, because they could hardly, with this model of payment on contact, re-invoice their commercial agents.

I do not hide, either, that with the old model, it became difficult to incentivize our sales forces. Today, they are recording better scores.

We are not dogmatic and have listened to our customers. So we moved to a paid subscription, which we started offering to our customers about a year ago. As a result, at the end of last October, 54% of them had chosen to migrate to this system.