The National Commission of Markets and Competition (CNMC) has opened a file to the Idealista real estate portal for artificially raising the price of homes. Idealista is the largest search platform for homes in all of Spain, a portal for both sale and rental where more than one million ads for apartments or houses are published every day.
Idealista is being investigated along with other companies in the sector such as Look & Find because over the past few years, their practices have resulted in an increase in the price of the products they advertised. Research focuses on the search algorithm and the results it offers based on the criteria entered by users and customers. Advertising on Idealista is free, although any user who wants to see their advertising better positioned must pay a fee.
The scale of the idealist and the collaboration with other companies is the one that would have an effect on the housing market, which in recent years has suffered a sharp rise due to the stoppage of construction, foreign investment or the entry into the market of new practices such as residential tourism through other platforms such as AirBnB. This scale has been used by organizations such as the Bank of Spain to use Idealist prices as the basis for some of their statistics.
Idealista is the example of a new generation company linked to the digital world. Its founder, Jesús Encinar, started the business in 2000 and in 2015 sold most of the business to the Apax Partners investment fund.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
Know more