At first glance, the Central and Eastern European property portal landscape is characterised by a relative lack of big-name brands. It's a region with a lot of different cultures, languages and nuances between markets and many of the market leaders won't have been heard of outside of their countries.
Look closer though and an increasing number of the leading property websites in these countries are run by large multi-national players.
Part of Real Web SA which also controls leading Italian portal Immobiliare.it and leading Slovenian portal Nepremicnine, Spitogatos is the clear market leader in Greece and its sister site Spitogatos.com.cy is strong in Cyprus as well.
Bulgaria’s top specialist property portal pulls in over 2.5 million visits per month according to Similarweb. Interestingly, no big multinational has yet bought into the Bulgarian real estate classifieds industry.
The market leader in terms of Similarweb traffic here is 4zida which is run by local classifieds player Infostud which counts Finnish media firm Alma Media as a minority shareholder.
The leading portal in Romania is owned and operated by the Dutch firm OLX Group which in turn is part of Prosus, the international Internet assets division of South African multinational Naspers. Complicated, right?!
In Romania Storia competes with Imobiliare.ro which is owned and operated by the Swiss headquartered media group Ringier.
As far as we can tell from patchy Similarweb data, the Croatian run portal Realitica.com is the number one place to find property over the border in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Although horizontal player Njuskalo is strong here, it is not a property specialist. Local player Oglasnik wins when it comes to traffic among specialist real estate websites.
The portal competes with Axel Springer-owned Crozilla and locally owned portal firm GoHome based in Zagreb.
Nepremicnine was founded by Primož Jazbec and Aleš Ravnikar in 1999 and has become the leading real estate portal, as well as one of the most visited sites, in Slovenia. With about 32,000 ads published by more than 500 agencies and builders.
In 2020, Real Web S.A. (which runs market leader Immobiliare in Italy and Spitogatos in Greece) bought 60% of the company.
One of the oldest Hungarian websites having been set up by architect Dávid Mészáros all the way back in 1997 and proud to be Hungarian owned ever since.
Ingatlan has a big traffic lead over its rivals and is one of the most dominant property portals in any market in the world.
The German giant run by Scout24 dominates across the border in Austria ahead of Axel Springer owned Immowelt.at.
Perhaps nowhere in the world can one company claim to own and operate 6 of the leading property websites in the country.
United Classifieds (which is owned by a joint venture between Ringier and Axel Springer) owns no fewer than 6 of the leading portals in Slovakia: Nehnutelnosti, Top Reality, Realitysk, Novostavby, Byty and Chaty.
The leading Ukrainian property portal Dom.Ria is owned by Estonian based RIA.com Marketplaces OÜ. Dom.Ria competes with Lun.ua which is made by the company behind the global portal Flatfy.
Leading Czech portal Sreality is owned and operated by Seznam - a company that runs over 20 online vertical businesses and that was, according to Wikipedia, a more popular search engine than Google in the country until 2011.
Owned by OLX Group, Otodom is a big hitter in Poland. The portal competes with Morizon which was acquired by Axel Springer in 2020.
The market leader in Russia is already so dominant that local anti-monopoly authorities recently denied the company a mooted merger with Adevinta-owned general classifieds site Avito. Cian's competitors in the market include Prosus-owned Domofond as well as local players DomClick and Yandex.Realty (the real estate division of Russia's most popular search engine).
Created in 2005 and, according to its website, very proud to be a data-driven portal, Realt.by leads the way among specialist property vertical sites in Belarus. Also popular in the country is the Adevinta-owned general classifieds site Kufar.
Aruodas is part of the Baltic Classifieds Group which dominates in the region. BCG is majority-owned by APAX Partners who also own a majority stake in leading Spanish and Portuguese portal operator idealista.
City24 is another portal from the Baltic Classifieds Group. The parent company recently went public on the London Stock Exchange.
The first-ever Estonian property portal, kv.ee was started way back in 1999. The portal claims to have around 40,000 properties and receive 600,000 visits. Baltic Classifieds Group owns both kv.ee and its nearest competitor for traffic city24.ee
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