ImmoScout24 Extends Data Cooperation Agreement with Sprengnetter for More Accurate AVM Modelling

Leading German real estate portal company Scout24 has extended its data-sharing agreement with appraisals and market data specialist Sprengnetter to improve the accuracy of the property valuations given by its AVM.

Through the portal ImmobilienScout24, users in Germany will now benefit from price estimations based on 15 million asking rents, 9 million asking prices, 1 million property listing photos and 300,000 new build purchase prices. Registered ImmobilienScout24 users will now be able to see the price forecasts for their neighbourhood compared to the development of the region over the next four quarters.

Sprengnetter was founded in 1978 and mainly serves the credit industry with software solutions around valuations. Scout24 began working with Sprengnetter back in 2018 with the two companies sharing data to improve the accuracy of each others' services. Now, after a test phase, more of Sprengnetter's valuation data is being added to Scout24's customer-facing automated valuation model (AVM).

“Sprengnetter is an ideal partner for us with its many years of experience in collecting and displaying valid market data. The new price forecast in our price atlas and the real estate valuation based on artificial intelligence and the quality of the Sprengnetter data enable realtors, owners and searchers to make the best decisions based on data, ”said Ralf Weitz, Managing Director of ImmoScout24.

House price data is becoming increasingly valuable to online classifieds companies. Having hit or come close to ceilings in their buyer lead generation businesses, many large portal companies are now focussing their efforts on generating sales mandate leads for their agent clients, a big part of which is consumer curiosity around their house's price which leads them to portal AVMs.

Although Zillow's recent travails in iBuying may be a cautionary tale about the limitations of portal AVMs, their accuracy remains pivotal to many portal businesses and is dictated by the volume and quality of data that feeds the algorithms behind them. Scout24's data agreement with Sprengnetter is thus an important one for the portal company as it continues to look to monetise its user areas.