Ten Questions with Joe Ellul-Turner, Founder of Darscover

The Mediterranean island of Malta is known for its rich history and architecture, not for its tech businesses or property portals. In fact, according to the market's newest real estate marketplace website, the nation of Malta lacked a true real estate portal until March this year.

We caught up with Joe Ellul-Turner (pictured below), founder of Darscover, a new property portal looking to make its mark in Malta's fragmented and antiquated real estate market...

What does Darscover do?

Darscover is a next-generation proptech platform and AI-driven property portal built for Malta’s fragmented real estate market. It provides agencies with powerful SaaS tools to manage listings, leads, and branches, while delivering seekers a seamless search experience.

By eliminating duplicate listings, enhancing image quality, and introducing rich filters and details, Darscover reduces friction for both agencies and property hunters, creating a more transparent and efficient marketplace.

What’s the story so far?

I began developing Darscover in August 2024, after struggling to find somewhere to live when I first moved to Malta. Coming from the UK, I was used to platforms like Rightmove and Zoopla, and through time in Lisbon, I became familiar with Idealista - both markets where property search felt structured and user-friendly. In Malta, by contrast, the market was highly fragmented, with duplicate listings, poor images, and weak filters, making the process far more difficult than it needed to be. Darscover was formally founded in March 2025 and is currently built and run solely by me, fully bootstrapped without outside funding.

What’s the business model? Is it pay-per-lead, pay-per-listing, subscription or something else?

Darscover runs on a hybrid model. Agencies pay a small flat subscription (€100 for 20 listings or €200 for unlimited, plus €100 per branch) to keep access simple and inclusive. The real value comes from a pay-per-quality-lead system, where agencies only pay for verified, enriched inquiries with clear buyer or tenant intent.

Pricing is fixed by category: €7 for rooms, €15–35 for rentals, and €30–65 for sales, and agencies set monthly caps to control their spend. If they hit their cap, they still see inquiries but with limited details, while full leads are rerouted to competitors with budget left. This keeps the seeker experience smooth, rewards active agencies, and matches Malta’s market dynamics, where a few large networks dominate alongside many small boutiques.

Tell us about the Maltese real estate market. Are listings exclusive? Is there a lot of FSBO? What’s the TAM for portals?

In Malta, the real estate market is highly fragmented and dominated by agencies, but listings are rarely exclusive. The same property is often advertised by multiple agencies, which clutters the market with duplicates and creates a poor user experience. To align pricing with how agencies actually operate, Darscover’s subscription model is based on branches: an agency with several outlets pays per branch, while a single-branch agency effectively counts as one. With average subscription pricing in the €600–1,000 per month range, the total annual opportunity from agency branches across Malta is in the region of €1.3–1.8 million.

While agencies drive the majority of the market today, FSBO listings represent a major growth opportunity. Malta has some of the highest real estate commission rates in Europe, often 5% or more, which motivates many owners to look for lower-cost direct channels. At present, FSBO is underserved. A dedicated property portal could capture a meaningful share.

Taken together, the TAM for property portals in Malta is in the low millions annually, with the immediate revenue opportunity coming from agency branches, and a longer-term growth path through FSBO as owners increasingly seek alternatives to high commission fees.

What makes Darscover different from other portals and why do you think you can overtake the incumbent market leader?

The Maltese property portal space is effectively stagnant. The main alternatives today are either an aggregated WordPress site, PropertyMarket.com.mt, or Maltapark, which functions more like an early-2000s classifieds platform and is badly outdated for property search.

Unlike the rest of Europe, Malta has lacked a true, modern portal. Darscover fills that gap by bringing the rich filters, AI-driven tools, and user experience that buyers, renters, and agencies already expect from platforms like Rightmove, Zoopla, or Idealista.

Because of this, Darscover isn’t just another listing site - it’s the first real property portal in Malta. The market has been waiting for this level of functionality, and by solving the long-standing pain points of duplicates, poor images, and lack of details, Darscover is positioned to quickly overtake the incumbents and set a new standard for how property search works on the island.

Darscover has AI search. What convinced you to build it and how do you tag the listings with enough taxonomies to make it useful?

One of the big advantages of building Darscover on a modern architecture is that adding advanced features like AI search was straightforward and low-risk, so the reward made it worthwhile from the start. Beyond the technology itself, I was also motivated by the user experience: in Malta, I’ve noticed that many people are less comfortable with complex filters compared to other countries. For those users, typing a natural query like “3 bedroom apartment in Sliema with parking” is far easier than navigating a long filter panel. AI search bridges that gap, making the platform more accessible.

To make it work, listings are automatically tagged with a rich set of taxonomies. Because Malta is such a small island, it’s helpful to split the country into regions - North, South, Central, and Gozo - something that wouldn’t be as useful in larger countries. The taxonomy also reflects Malta’s property realities: features like private rooftops are extremely common and worth highlighting, while the prevalence of ongoing construction projects means most platforms are cluttered with sitemaps and 3D renders mixed in with ready-to-move-in homes.

On Darscover, these are separated into clear sections so users know exactly what they’re browsing. Since agencies rarely provide this level of detail, Darscover uses AI to detect and filter out sitemaps, renders, and incomplete data, ensuring users can easily distinguish between new builds, off-plan projects, and homes that are actually available today.

Give us one thing that’s been easier than expected so far and one that’s been more difficult than you imagined.

Although with my own naivety and a bit of delusion, the overall build took far longer than I originally expected, certain elements were surprisingly easy to add because of the way I designed the architecture. Owning the full stack meant that advanced features like AI search, duplicate detection, and media moderation could be integrated without much friction.

On top of that, using AI tools has allowed me to move far quicker and at a higher level of quality than I could have before - including translating the entire site into 14 different languages, which are then proofread by experts to ensure accuracy.

What’s been much harder than expected is onboarding agencies. I assumed that offering a free trial would feel like free marketing for them and their listings, but it’s still been difficult to convince them to take that first step. As expected, the first agency was the toughest to bring on, and while it gets a little easier with each one, agency adoption has been slower and more resistant than I imagined.

Which other portals or other businesses have you looked to for inspiration?

From a business model and pricing perspective, Darscover is heavily inspired by Idealista, with similar categories and many of the same filters, since it has proven to work well in Southern European markets. On the product side, most portals tend to feel quite similar, but I’ve focused heavily on how Zillow handles filtering and SEO, which is one of the strongest in the industry.

In terms of design and user experience, Idealista’s UI feels fairly outdated, so I’ve taken inspiration from more modern platforms like Jitty and Airbnb, where the emphasis is on clean design, intuitive search, and a seamless user journey.

How is the business funded, and are you looking to raise money?

The business is currently fully self-funded, and I’m not actively looking to raise money at this stage. Right now my focus is on proving the model in Malta and establishing Darscover as the go-to property platform locally. That said, raising external funding is a route I might consider in the future - particularly if expansion into other markets with similar, underserved dynamics becomes viable.

What’s next on your to-do list for Darscover?

In the near term, my focus is on ranking highly on Google, onboarding more agencies, and establishing Darscover as the number one property portal in Malta. If we achieve that, the longer-term horizon would be to explore expansion into other markets with similar dynamics, places where the real estate space is fragmented and proptech adoption is lagging.

Beyond that, I’d also love to experiment with a model similar to Ostrich in the UK, where the goal is to get as many off-market properties listed as possible. If that idea is going to work anywhere, I think a small island market like Malta is the perfect place to prove it.