This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on June 23rd, 2026. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.
Selling a home in Sweden without using Hemnet was unthinkable just a few years ago. Now the estate agents have revolted, the share is collapsing – and Sweden’s Competition Authority has opened an investigation. What has actually happened to Hemnet?
A newly married couple had an estate agent visiting their apartment in Bagarmossen this spring. They were looking to upgrade, and the apartment was being prepared to go on the market.
“We’ll see if we go with Hemnet, it depends. This is probably the last year we do it,” the agent said.
A Hemnet listing, which was once a given, is now optional. Perhaps even something you can skip entirely. That’s just one of many symptoms of how dramatically the playing field has shifted for the property platform.
Monday brought another: Sweden’s Competition Authority is now investigating the company for abusing its dominant position – after Hemnet tried to create new partnerships with estate agents.
When a company is market leader, the strategy is usually fairly straightforward: make sure everything continues as before. Apple wants people to buy new iPhones, Google wants people to Google. Market leaders benefit from the status quo.
For many years, Hemnet was exactly there. A self-evident and indispensable marketplace for anyone buying or selling property. It was also a paradise for snoopers – “Hemnet-surfing” became a term for people browsing home photos to see how the neighbors had decorated their living room.
And for Hemnet’s part, it appears to be largely self-inflicted.
Much of the success – and the subsequent problems – can be traced back to the ownership structure. During Hemnet’s golden years, the service was partly owned by several large estate agency chains. Their incentive to use Hemnet was then crystal clear – Hemnet’s success was the agents’ success. The analysis of the market was also correct: it was better for home buyers to go to one place to search than to navigate around all the different agencies.
In 2015, the Norwegian media group Schibsted (which also owns Svenska Dagbladet) was set to buy a majority stake in Hemnet, but that deal was blocked by Sweden’s Competition Authority. Instead, private equity firms General Atlantic and Sprints stepped in as co-owners. Several of the agencies sold parts of their holdings, with Fastighetsbyrån and Svensk Fastighetsförmedling selling everything. The target was the stock market – and Hemnet went public in April 2021.
When the agents sold, Hemnet’s best partners disappeared from the ownership register. And a new challenge emerged.
On the stock market, you need to show growth. That’s hard to do in a market where you don’t control supply and demand yourself. The volume of homes sold is influenced by many factors, but Hemnet can only control a few. And if you can’t increase the number of properties sold, you have to work with the other variable in the business: price. Listings therefore became considerably more expensive on Hemnet.
“Greed has unfortunately taken over,” said Marcus Svanberg, CEO of Länsförsäkringar Fastighetsförmedling, speaking to Dagens Industri. Without the clear incentive of owning a stake in the service, the agents pushed back and started looking for alternatives.
SBAB had already acquired the property service Booli back in 2015 – at the time a promising search company. It has since grown into a formidable competitor. Booli aggregates property listings in one place and then refers users on to the agencies’ own websites. One might reasonably ask why a state-owned bank is competing with a private company over property listings. Hemnet therefore filed a complaint against the competitor with Sweden’s Competition Authority in January.
Not only did Sweden’s Competition Authority dismiss the complaint against Booli – they also launched a new investigation into Hemnet itself. It concerns Hemnet’s new partnership with agents around “sell first, pay later,” which the authority describes as “suspected abuse of a dominant position.”
Meanwhile, Hemnet’s share price has only fallen. Since the listing it has dropped over 60 percent, and a full 75 percent compared to a year ago. This despite the company having spent nearly two billion kronor buying back its own shares in recent years. Nobody seems to want to buy this stock right now – except the company itself, which also has approval to buy back a further half a billion kronor.
Falling out with the estate agents has proven costly for Hemnet. Some agents have joined forces to apparently recreate what Hemnet once was – an agent-owned aggregation service called Boneo. There the agents have every incentive in the world to make it fly. The old Hemnet strategy is back, just now as a competitor.
Market leader Hemnet has a long road back to reclaim its position.
Right now, it looks more like a power shift is coming.
