Nestoria Blog

This month as part of the Nestoria interview series we’re very pleased to be able to chat with Jesus Encinar, CEO and founder of Idealista, a leading Spanish property portal (and Nestoria partner) in Spain and Italy. Prior to entering the online real estate market Jesus worked for Wolff Olins in Silicon Valley, where he experience the first internet wave, and as a management consultant for Mitchel Madison Group. He also co-founded several other internet ventures including floresfrescas.com and 11870.com, an innovative online geography service. Jesus has an MBA from Harvard, and is a Young Global Leader for the World Economic Forum. He lives in Madrid and is an active blogger. If you are able to speak the language of Cervantes don’t miss jesusencinar.com.

Jesus, thanks for speaking with us.

1. The global “credit crunch” has caused dramatic shifts in the property market in several European markets, most specifically the UK and Spain. How has this affected Idealista? What are the opportunities in this crisis?

The real estate slowdown taking place in Spain since the summer of 2007 has been quicker and more dramatic than expected and it’s impacting globally the Spanish economy. Regarding idealista.com, it has slowed our growth rate below our expectations at the beginning of the year. we are grateful that we continue growing and we maintain good margins though. In the current scenario that is positive news. We are also happy that we have no debt, we have always taken a very conservative approach to financial management and that is helping us now.

2. Idealista recently expanded to Italy. How is it going? What was different than you expected? Are there any plans for further international expansion?

Idealista.it is going better than we expected. We launched the website a year ago, in May 2007, and we are already leaders in the Milano area, our primary target for now. We are now expanding into new areas and have recently open offices in Padova and Roma, in addition to our Milano office. We estimate that our investment in Italy will take 4m Euro to break even and we think we will achieve it earlier than we thought. We have a local team of 50 people and we think we can become leaders in the exciting italian market.

3. Idealista is well known for having high quality listings, checked by humans. Why is data quality such an issue in this industry?

Whoever looks for a home knows immediately how to answer this question. There is nothing else as tiresome as looking for home in a site full of duplicates, with little information, few or no pictures, without data really requested. It is unbelievable that currently projects are launched without respecting the user. The number of properties in a market is not infinite, it’s actually quite a bit smaller than many people think. We believe that if hundreds of people will look into a particular listing we have to see it first, just to ensure that there’s nothing wrong with it. No editor would publish an article without proofreading it. Success in the classifieds business is no different. Quality content is paramount.

4. What are your thoughts on the developments in the property search sector in the last year?

The last year has seen a dramatic shift. Newspaper classifieds have seen an average reduction of 40%-50% as agents and developers tried cheaper and more efficient advertising models to face the slowdown. Part of that money came to online players bringing money and content which, in time, will accelerate the transition to online real estate classifieds. We have also seen some big media companies taking an increased interest in online classifieds and taking positions in many markets. I think we will see more of these two trends in the coming months.

Thanks Jesus. We agree quality and putting the user first are paramount in creating a consumer facing service. All of our work on creating a highly relevant algorithm is of minimal benefit if the underlying data is poor. As such we’re pleased to work together with Idealista on the Italian and Spanish versions of Nestoria.

past Nestoria interviews: Ivailo Jordanov, Salim Mitha, and Alex Singleton.