Mike DelPrete's Research Library
Navigate the evolving real estate landscape with smart, data-driven insights.
Loading...
Latest Research
Curated Playlists
Connection Explorer
Loading connection graph...
Hemnet, Sweden's leading real estate portal, is now "aggregating" listings directly from agency websites and showing them alongside paid ads, part of a free listings push that began on October 20.Why it matters: Listings are a portal's most important asset, and Hemnet is now doing whatever it takes – including scraping – to fight pre-market listings that never appear on its site.
The search for the Holy Grail goes international with two of the top real estate portals in the world, each with a very different answer to the Grail. First up is Ludo Wurfbain, strategy lead at Funda, the leading portal in the Netherlands. Funda tried mortgages and pulled back — it’s hard. Dutch law requires friction in the process. And while the bag of money is tempting, there were less difficult ways to grow. Ludo's take is that it may be easier for a bank to become a portal than for a portal to become a bank. Then I sit down with Jonathan Swift, Chief Product Officer at Australia's REA Group, the portal that went all in early on the Holy Grail. REA spent hundreds of millions buying two traditional mortgage companies and is now one of the biggest in the country, supporting over 1,000 brokers. The original bet on a fully digital loan didn't work out, but Jonathan says it was still the right move. Here's why: half the homes in Australia are claimed by their owners on REA, and it can see a sale coming nine months out. The mortgage business grows slower and earns less than the core — four years ago I wrote it off as one plus one equals two. Jonathan says AI changed the math, and owning a broker tells REA what buyers can actually afford. He also disagrees with many of his peers. A portal pushing its own white-labeled loan is serving itself, not the consumer. His Holy Grail for consumers is simple: can I afford this home? Answer that, and you've earned the right to serve them. Check out the companion site for this podcast series at holygrail.mikedp.com. It's a case file: the evidence I've gathered, the theories I'm testing, the questions I'm chasing, and a place to drop intel if you're seeing patterns from the field.
I've been experimenting with real MLS listings inside Claude through early connectors, exploring what's possible when listings are no longer locked inside a portal.Why it matters: For 20 years the portal has been both where listings live and how people search them, and AI is the biggest opportunity yet to separate inventory from the interface.AI opens the door to an infinite number of customized interfaces – a portal knows your clicks, but Claude knows your life.
Six of the world's leading real estate portals earn more revenue per employee than they did in 2022, driven by growth rather than cuts.Why it matters: Revenue per employee is the simplest measure of how efficiently a portal turns its market position into money – and is a timely reality check on the effect of AI efficiency.Most leading portals have converged on $600k-700k of revenue per employee, with Hemnet above that band and Zillow well below it.
Between May and September 2026, I hired a research firm to secret-shop 33 Compass Coming Soon listings on Redfin in Boston, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.Why it matters: My research targets the biggest strategic questions in real estate, and the Compass and Redfin partnership raises one: what happens when buyer leads go straight to the listing agent?
On this episode I chat with Luke Babich, CEO of Clever Real Estate, a referral platform that matches buyers and sellers with agents. Clever has grown profitably, partly by integrating brokerage, title, and mortgage — the Holy Grail is working. Luke's diagnosis of real estate is simple: too many leads and too many agents. And because people only move once a decade, every customer is a new customer. His answer is what he calls the ABCs: Agent Behavior Change. In his view, almost all the enterprise value in real estate right now is built on it, from Compass to eXp to Zillow, and it comes down to getting thousands of agents to do boring things consistently (something Clever is good at). While everyone else is taking friction out, he's adding it in on purpose, making it harder to become a lead. His take on the Holy Grail itself surprised me. I've been asking whether consumers even want a one-stop shop, but Luke says that's the wrong question. The integration isn't for the consumer, it's for the professional. We also cover cosmic miracle realtors, arming the rebel alliance, and why Luke still personally calls every customer who leaves a review of three stars or lower. His takeaway after listening to the series: the Holy Grail isn't the shiny gold cup. It's the carpenter's cup, the least shiny object on the table.