Looking for an apartment? Idealista.com

Well, my dear readers, another post directly from IE Business School! First of all, let me be careful with my comments since I realized our VIP professor Enrique Dans is a frequent reader of this blog and is closely looking at everything that is going on here, jejejeje (that's how you laugh in a blog in Spanish).

Unrelated ideas apart, last class we had a talk on business internationalization with Jesus Encinar the founder of Idealista.com a website where you can find and advertise real estate. Jesus talked about the opportunity he saw when seeing all those ads in the newspaper that had really poor descriptions of the things being offered. He admitted not being the first one to enter this market and in his opinion before getting in a market where there's no one, think twice!

Jesus approach is very customer driven and instead of promoting real estate all over Spain he decided to specialize in Madrid first, the largest city in Spain with a population of more then 3 million inhabitants in 2007. He started not charging anything as most online business do to create a brand image and then expanded into other regions in Spain, Barcelona and Valencia and after to other countries close by namely Italy and Portugal.

He talked about the challenges faced at that time when services such as hosting and development were not that developed with few players and he had to spend 1 million euros in a platform, something that you can rent today for as low as 250 euros per month. I must say here that in a business plan that I'm developing in another class for a web development agency we also decided not to offer hosting services since nowadays there are so many players offering this service and to add value in this market is almost impossible.

Talking about internationalization, Jesus strategy was to be in places where competition was low and that he could be close to the business. Italy for example consumed all the EBITDA for three years but since it's close to Spain didn't require a strong local presence. The same applying to Portugal where actually Jesus doesn't even has an office running everything from Spain. Another interesting thing that he mentioned was not having different companies and investors in each country, concentrating all in Spain where there's no need for complicated accounting and price transfers.

That's an interesting session and made me think about a campaign that I'm working on in another class that's for the Argentinian market and that we are running everything from Spain. It's amazing how with the Internet you can have a business in a country and run it from another but I agree with Jesus that you still have to manage the business locally and even though he travelled half of his time in the beginning he still travels once a week to the international locations where his business is.

Last, my question to Jesus was why to go to Portugal after working in Spain and Italy that are five times the size of Portugal. He replied saying that the question was why not to go given that there were clients in the border of Portugal that were looking for real estate there and given the proximity and extra cost not working out this opportunity would just give room for another competitor to take it.

Well folks, hope you enjoyed this post, I'll now prepare for my next lecture tomorrow with Alberto Torrón from Todotaladros.com. Meanwhile I'm leaving my apartment here in May, anyone interested? Or should I just tell my landlord to put it in Idealista.com?