"If You're Strong, You Have to Be Nice": How Hemnet Lost Sweden's Listings

In 2018, Hemnet's Erik Segerborg stood on stage at Property Portal Watch in Madrid and quoted Pippi Longstocking when describing his company's attitude to its responsibility as a market leader.

"If you're strong, you have to be nice. And I think that is very true for us because we don't want to fall into the situation as I think Rightmove is kind of approaching and as Trade Me in New Zealand, that you have an uprising among agents or that you create a very negative atmosphere around you."

Eight years on, the uprising and negative atmosphere around Hemnet are worse than anything going on at its international peers.

Hemnet's shares are down more than 60% this year, four directors have gone after an activist push, a SEK 600 million buyback is on hold, and last month the company said it would cut its workforce from 184 to about 115 and start giving listings away for free.

The World's Most Popular Property Portal

Not long ago, Hemnet was the portal others aspired to be. Its annual reports for 2019 and 2020 described it as "the world's most popular property portal". Its 2021 IPO prospectus repeated the claim and put brand recognition above 95%. As recently as April 2025, Mike DelPrete said: "every portal in the US should be paying attention to Hemnet".

Since then, the lead Hemnet claims over its nearest rival has kept shrinking.

Definitions have changed over time, with visits becoming sessions and listings becoming published listings, but the force behind the chest thumping has slackened noticeably.

SimilarWeb, the traffic yardstick the company used to claim its tenfold lead in 2021, now has Booli (an aggregator owned by state-owned bank SBAB) ahead of Hemnet. Hemnet's own traffic figures point the same way. It averaged 62.5 million visits a month in 2020, but its latest results talk about "nearly 40 million monthly sessions".

In fairness, SimilarWeb only measures websites, and Hemnet says between 70%-75% of its traffic arrives directly through its browser or app.  Nevertheless, it's not a good look for a portal that once called itself the most popular in the world.

Boiling the Frog Too Fast

Between 2015 and 2025, Hemnet's average revenue per listing (ARPL) went from SEK 487 to SEK 8,175, a 16.8-fold increase. For comparison, Rightmove's average revenue per advertiser (ARPA) went from £754 to £1,621 a month, a little over double, during the same period.

The gap can't be explained away by relative house price growth. The average Swedish sale price rose 47% between 2015 and 2025, according to Statistics Sweden, but UK prices rose 47% too, according to the UK House Price Index. While the two housing markets shifted by exactly the same amount, the two portals priced in extravagantly different ways.

Set against the home itself, Hemnet's average listing fee rose from about 0.02% of the average Swedish sale price in 2015 to 0.25% in 2025. Spread across every home sold, Hemnet's revenue now works out at roughly 0.3% of the average sale. For Rightmove's agency and new homes business, the equivalent figure is about 0.12%.

Hemnet never hid the ambition fuelling its price rises. "Our ARPL, which is average revenue per listing, doesn't have a ceiling," Hemnet's Francesca Cortesi told PPW Madrid in 2023. "We have a North Star, which is REA in Australia."

REA Group, also working in a vendor-paid market, has grown its 'Buy yield' by double digits every year since FY22, and there are reports of Australian agents pushing back the way Swedish ones have by withholding listings from the portal.

In fairness to Hemnet's management, the climb didn't start with the stock market. ARPL rose 69% in 2016, while Hemnet was still owned by the agent groups that founded it. General Atlantic agreed to buy a majority stake that December, and ARPL then grew by 14% to 31% a year up to 2020. Hemnet's 2021 IPO turned that pricing power into the equity story, and after that, slowing down was hard to sell.

Why No Rightmove Uprising?

Rightmove raised its prices too, but it did so slowly, and it was selling to a different customer. The British portal had 19,752 advertisers in 2015 and 19,272 in 2025. Average revenue per agent (ARPA) rose 115% over that decade, but the customer count fell only 2%.

The (relatively) slow pace of its price increases is part of the reason, but the market dynamics matter more. In the UK, agents pay Rightmove, and much of what they are paying for is their next instruction. A branch whose listings don't appear on Rightmove loses vendors to the rival down the road, which helps explain why the agents' revolt that created OnTheMarket barely dented Rightmove's dominance.

In Sweden, the seller pays Hemnet and sees the bill as its own line, which flips the incentive. An agent who offers to sell your home quietly, without a Hemnet fee, suddenly has something to pitch.

Fredrik Engdahl, of agent-backed Hemnet rival Boneo, told the PPW Pod last December that Hemnet's "pricing velocity has been so intense and aggressive" that sellers were asking agents to cover the Hemnet fee out of their own commission.

When the Frog Jumped

Hemnet's published listings tracked Swedish home sales closely from 2018 to 2024, through the boom and the 2023 slump—even as ARPL grew by more than 30% a year between 2021 and 2024.

But in 2025, the two lines split as Swedish home sales rose 3% while Hemnet's listings fell 13%. Meanwhile, the portal's share of homes sold in Sweden fell from 89% in 2024 to 82% in 2025.

According to the company, about 4 percentage points of its 2025 listings volume drop can be attributed to a policy change enacted in February 2025 whereby a seller who switched agents no longer had to buy a new listing.

But not all of the drop can be explained away by selective use of the Longstocking "be nice" doctrine. On a like-for-like basis, listings still fell around 9% in a year when the number of sales rose 3%.

Hemnet's missing listings were not disappearing from the market; they were appearing elsewhere. Most of them were being uploaded to Hemnet's rival Booli.se, which had spent years building up "coming soon" stock, the pre-market listings Swedish sellers increasingly preferred in a slow market.

In February 2026, one of the country's top agency groups and former Hemnet shareholder, Fastighetsbyrån, actually agreed to manage its own listings on Booli. According to SVT, the share of Fastighetsbyrån's sales advertised on Hemnet fell from 75% in January 2026 to 60% in September.

A Year of Firefighting

"We say 'no' to a lot of things to focus on the basics and getting those right," Segerborg said back in 2018, but this year Hemnet has had to say yes quite a lot...

To win back listings, in March Hemnet rolled out its "Sell first, pay later" initiative whereby sellers pay only when the home sells and revenue realisation is deferred. According to the company, around 40%-45% of sellers now choose to list this way.

In July, the Swedish Competition Authority closed an inquiry into Hemnet's partnerships and payment model after Hemnet agreed not to bring back a rule forcing listings onto the portal within two days of appearing on an agent's site.

The headlines continued in early September as Vor Capital and Sprints Capital, which own 14.1% of Hemnet between them, forced an extraordinary general meeting at which four directors were replaced: chairman Anders Nilsson, Maria Hedengren, former REA Group chief executive Tracey Fellows and former Rightmove boss Nick McKittrick. Kivra chief executive Henrik Lönnevi took the chair.

A week later, the board paused the SEK 600 million buyback to "provide Hemnet with full financial flexibility during a transformative phase", and the shares fell 8%.

At the end of the month came a bombshell and the biggest change in the company's history. Framed as a "decisive step" and a move to "strengthen the company's leadership position", Hemnet said that it would not only allow agents to post free listings but would scrape some listings automatically from agent sites.

The company also announced plans to simplify its listing packages and agent compensation model and told the market it would be cutting around 50 jobs.

Can Hemnet Attract Frogs to Cold Water?

It remains notoriously hard to fumble a market-leading position in an industry so dominated by network effects. To be clear, Hemnet still has excellent brand recognition and makes good money from it (revenue of USD 156 million in FY2025).

Hemnet generated SEK 621 million of free cash flow in the 12 months to June, its EBITDA margin was 46% in the second quarter, and Swedish transactions rose 11% over that period. Part of this year's revenue fall is timing, as unsold "pay later" listings convert, and its cost-cutting measures are expected to save SEK 80–85 million compared to the Q2 2026 expense run-rate.

The free listings will likely bring the inventory back on the site, but the metric to watch now is the number of paid listings. Agents have been drifting away from Hemnet, and its new free listings offer needs to convert to make sense.

This raises several big questions.

Under what circumstances will a boiled frog climb into a pot of water of its own volition? Is off-market home selling, popularised during the pandemic and now a viable alternative for prospective sellers, now the default? And if so, can Hemnet turn the tide?

Investors (and perhaps some potential acquirers) will be keeping a keen eye on Hemnet's third-quarter numbers, which are due to be released on the 22nd of October.