BoligPortal betting big on data

Published Wednesday 17 March, 2021

Denmark’s largest rentals platform offers landlords and customers an opportunity to benefit from the huge data volumes they collect.

BoligPortal has tacitly implemented a major automation project, and after the summer holidays they will be ready to offer landlords and other customers access to quite extensive data volumes, while also allowing users to extract data with a significant level of detail.

“We hold a 55-60% share of the rental housing market, which means that our system contains data from largely any remote location in the country. Until now, we’ve made various market reports manually, using these data, but now we want to give the users the opportunity to do the searches they want,” says CEO Anders Hyldborg.

According to Anders Hyldborg, the system motor has been replaced and soon it will be possible to make lots of real-time searches.

“Modernising the platform was like starting an entirely new business. I’m very proud of the outcome,” says Hyldborg.

The article is published by Børsen. Read the original article in Danish here.

In practical terms, this means that a landlord wanting an overview of demand and prices in a specific area can mark the area on a digital map and then extract large numbers of data.

“In this way, the landlord can both see the price levels in a specific area and narrow the search down to a single street or a few properties,” says Hyldborg.

“We can help both small landlords and large property developers validate and risk assess property prospectuses and the existing portfolio of rentals. Moreover, we can identify any unmet demand broken down by type of rental, square metres and rents down to the last brick,” says Hyldborg.

Large data volumes
Precisely because data have been collected from a very large part of the market – more than half of it – a wide range of information can be extracted. Landlords can see whether demand is for one-, two- or three-bedroom apartments, which family types and age groups are looking for a home as well as any seasonal fluctuations. This could be in areas with many students where demand is typically high before the academic year starts.

This means that quite a lot of users may benefit from the collected data.

“Data must be handled wisely, respectfully and with the right infrastructure. In that way, data may become valuable and be implemented in everyday life. Our vision is to give life and power to data and make them accessible to our customers,” says Hyldborg.

Anders Hyldborg is CEO of BoligPortal, which is owned by North Media

BoligPortal works closely with major companies like Koncenton and Nrep. According to Hyldborg, negotiations are ongoing with a range of other major potential users of the system – e.g. major financial institutions.

“Small rental services with very few rentals would also have an interest in our data, so we need to find a model that makes it financially attractive to very small players to use our data,” says Hyldborg.

Prices are not yet in place, but a SaaS subscription model will be used.

Record year
The new initiatives are being launched after a year of marked improvement,” explains Hyldborg.

“We generated strong growth in our core business, but in particular we grew revenue from our products for landlords. Our strategic objective is to develop even closer relationships with landlords in Denmark to make it easier for them to digitalise their businesses and minimise vacancy rates – that is vacant tenancy periods.

We also plan to bring our offering to a new level using data and technology such as machine learning and AI, which create useful insights into and knowledge about the past, the present and the future,” says Hyldborg.

The article is published by Børsen. Read the original article in Danish here.