Hemnet Scrapes Listings, Cuts a Third of Staff, and Changes CEOs
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.
In under three weeks, Hemnet erased a 34,000-listing gap with competing portal Booli – primarily by scraping listings directly from real estate agents' websites.
Hemnet, which typically charges around SEK 9,000 (roughly $900) per listing, now lets agents list homes for free and "aggregates" the rest from agency websites.
It's Hemnet's third program this year to fight pre-market sales, after Sell First, Pay Later in February and Underhand in June.
A scraped listing carries no agent name or description, it links to the agency's website, and a pop-up says the information "is automatically retrieved from the real estate agent's site."
Hemnet's listing count nearly doubled in under three weeks, from 52,314 on October 18 to 96,603 on November 6.
In Stockholm County, 45 percent of Hemnet's listings were scraped from agency websites.
It's the latest move in Hemnet's fight against pre-market listings, after five straight quarters of falling revenue.
Published listings have fallen year over year for eight straight quarters, with Hemnet saying a larger share of sales now happens on the pre-market.
Only 82 percent of Swedish homes sold in 2025 were advertised on Hemnet, down from 89 percent a year earlier.
Even before free listings, nearly one in five Hemnet listings went unpaid in Q3, either as Sell First, Pay Later listings that hadn't sold yet or as free Underhand ads.
About 40 percent of sellers now choose Sell First, Pay Later, which charges only when the home sells.
To support what it calls this "new strategic phase," Hemnet is cutting more than a third of its staff, from 184 employees at the end of June to about 115.
Hemnet's explanation: "To operate with the agility and speed this new era demands, we took the hard but necessary decision to restructure into a leaner, more efficient organization."
The changes hit the top, with CEO Jonas Gustafsson stepping down by mutual agreement and the board chair adding, "we fully stand behind the company's new strategic direction."
The bottom line: Hemnet is a case study of what happens when a portal raises average listing prices 10-fold in nine years, and then watches its key metrics melt away as customers go elsewhere.
Hemnet has now decided that showing every listing matters more than charging for every listing – even if it costs revenue.
For U.S. portals and the war over unique inventory, the equivalent would be a portal just scraping coming soon listings straight from brokerage websites.