Hungarian Portal Ingatlan Invests for 25% Stake in Mortgage Broker Hitelnet

Leading Hungarian real estate portal Ingatlan has announced an investment in Hitelnet, one of the country's leading mortgage brokerage companies.

Although Ingatlan confirmed that the deal did not involve any cash flow between the two parties, a company statement did reveal that the stake taken in Hitelnet was 25% and that Hitelnet will become the exclusive brokerage of Ingatlan.com.

The Budapest-based online classifieds company runs the dominant real estate marketplace in Hungary and already owns and operates its own Money.hu mortgage brokerage business.

The brokerage team of 50 from Money.hu will now join Hitelnet with Ingatlan saying in a statement that the aim of the recent investment was to widen the services provided by Money.hu.

Szilárd Fitos, owner of Hitelnet said: “The two companies together helped to lend over 100 billion HUF (~250M Euro) in 2021 on the market of residential loans. As a result of the investment the brokerage network of Hitelnet reaches 500 agents.”

“Money.hu continues to support their users to find the best loans using the service called Loan Manager (Hitelintéző) which is available for anyone who is looking for real estates on ingatlan.com. Loan Manager calculates how each property can be financed by the searchers based on the profile they create and Hitelnet will help these people to actually get the loan," commented Levente Korponai, Manager of Money.hu.

Ingatlan is far from the only portal company to delve into the mortgage business with Online Marketplaces' Portal Agencies Report from earlier this year finding that leading portal companies move into the mortgage sector far more than any other when looking to diversify their revenues.

Some of the larger deals between portal companies and mortgage specialists from recent times include...

• Romanian portal company Imobiliare.ro acquired mortgage business DSA Advisor in July.
• Redfin acquired Bay Equity Home Loans for $135m in January.
• Zoopla acquired online mortgage broker Mojo in July 2021.
• REA Group continued its quest to dominate the Australian mortgage market with a huge deal to acquire Mortgage Choice in May 2021