Maxim Bours co-founded Huispedia in 2018, after he and co-founder Ramon, both then working in IT at KLM, each tried to buy a house and found a Dutch market where listings were well served but decision-making was not. Eight years on, the company calls itself a data intelligence platform rather than a portal. It carries agents' listings for free, takes no advertising money from agents, and charges consumers a subscription instead.

That model is why it can do something almost no listings site does. Huispedia sits on the buyer's side. It tells people when an asking price has been set deliberately low as a bidding tactic, and its coach will advise you not to view a house, or not to bid at all. Ed has been arguing for months that portals need to move towards the buyer. Huispedia is already there, and this conversation is about what that costs and what it makes possible.

Simon Baker works through the mechanics: where the listings come from, how an automated valuation model builds a flywheel the way Zillow and Zoopla once did, what churn looks like when a buyer becomes an owner, and why a portal whose revenue depends on selling leads to agents cannot follow Huispedia without biting the hand that feeds it.

Chapters:
00:00 Intro
01:43 Founding Huispedia in 2018
03:32 What makes the Dutch housing market an outlier
05:54 Free listings, subscriptions and why Huispedia isn't a portal
07:59 Inside Huispedia Plus and the personal coach
12:01 Where the listings come from, and the valuation flywheel
18:27 Renovation scenarios and the data they unlock
21:34 What Huispedia does with the data it collects
25:18 Freemium conversion and hitting the paywall
27:15 Churn when a buyer becomes an owner
31:49 Why aren't Dutch agents complaining?
36:24 Should portals become independent buyer advisers?
39:47 Why lead-generation portals can't follow
43:44 Lessons from eight years on the buyer's side