Shopping Online for Real Estate
Is Easier in the U.S. than Abroad

Despite our wired world, critical information on homes in most foreign countries is still largely kept under wraps, tightly controlled by big real-estate brokerages.

This hit home with me two weeks ago, when I visited Copenhagen to give the keynote speech at a conference organized by FDIH, the Danish e-business association.

The sponsors had invited me because I had written about Zillow and Trulia, two American Web sites that were born during the real-estate boom. These sites effectively put power into the hands of the people by amalgamating information on home prices and graphing sales trends. Each site also has other fancy features: Zillow has its now-famous "Zestimate" of selling prices, its camera pans of houses that give snoopers many-angled views, an interactive component that allows owners to "claim" their homes and correct mistakes on the site from the public record, and its Make Me Move feature. Trulia has comprehensive information on local schools, income levels, travel times and even crime statistics. Soon after they were launched, both sites quickly became favorites of lunchtime Web surfers, hairdressers-turned-real-estate-investors and buyers engaging in bidding wars. In an instant, the sites transformed the way Americans shopped for homes.

Just how much, though, didn't become apparent to me until I went to Denmark, where this kind of information is conspicuously absent online, despite the fact that the country is as technologically advanced as any in the world.

Indeed, according to Anders Hvid, business development manager for Itera Consulting Group in Copenhagen, the four major brokerages who control 75% of the housing market in the country like it that way. Each has its own Web site that shows its own listings and then those of its competitors. Although about a decade ago, the Danish government insisted that the brokerages also create a national Web site, boligsiden.dk, which includes the listings of smaller brokerages, Mr. Hvid says, it doesn't offer much more than that and hasn't been substantially upgraded since its inception.

Denmark reminds me of the U.S. in the mid 1990s, when many real-estate agents, terrified of losing control of their customers, fought to keep vital information on comparable sales and home price trends off  Realtor.com, the nascent national real-estate site started by the National Association of Realtors. Although today that site has over 3 million listings and has improved over the years -- it now shows recent sales of neighboring homes and includes agents' blogs -- it's not interactive and doesn't generate nearly as much buzz as Zillow or Trulia.

Both Zillow and Trulia only operate in the U.S, and both companies say that they have no immediate plans for international expansion (despite the fact that the latter's chief executive officer comes from England, and its chief operating officer is from Finland).

That's left the door open for independent players like Boliga.dk, which launched in January of this year. (In translation, "boliga" means "residence.") The company doesn't publish actual sales prices of individual homes -- those aren't publicly available in Denmark -- but it does show the ups and downs of asking prices, according to Jonas Aradsson, one of the site's developers.

Boliga.dk got its start by a bit of openly admitted plagiarism -- it lifted the listings off boligsiden.dk, Mr. Aradsson says -- until that site blocked them. But the Danish Consumer Council and the Danish Commerce and Companies Agency intervened in Boliga's favor, partly so consumers could see the asking-price trends Boliga was publishing (which showed falling prices). Boliga is up and running again -- though now it gets its listing information directly from brokerages. In August, the Web site had 120,000 unique visitors.

Why should Americans care about how open, interactive and competitive real-estate information is in Denmark? After all, it's a small country of only 5.3 million people. Though it abounds with unusual architecture -- one starkly beautiful waterfront apartment I saw in Copenhagen was cleverly crafted from two old silos -- it's not at the top of the list of most buyers who are itching to buy a pied-a-terre abroad. "We're too cold and rainy, and we Danes are not that friendly," says Steen Winther-Petersen, president of the Danish Association of Chartered Estate Agents. (He’s only partly kidding: Danish law requires non-resident foreigners to get permission from the Ministry of Justice before they can buy a home.)

But when you look at how real estate is listed and sold around the world, Denmark's system is the rule; the U.S. is the exception. It's not that American brokers don't want to control information on sales and price trends; it's simply that they can't. In the U.S, such information comes from public sources, like tax records and Census data, and is readily available online to anyone who wants to build a better Web site, as both Zillow and Trulia have done. In most other countries, such information flows far less freely and openly.

Denmark's example is a reminder that in most parts of the world, you still can't gather all the comparative information you need to buy a home by taking a quick trip on the information superhighway.  

-- June Fletcher is a staff reporter at The Wall Street Journal and the author of "House Poor" (Harper Collins, 2005). Her "House Talk" column appears most Mondays on RealEstateJournal.com. Email your questions about the residential real-estate market. Please include your name, city and state. If you don't want your name used in our column, please indicate that. Due to volume of mail received, we regret that we cannot answer every question.

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