For investors: why Estonia needs one more property portal
Kodu is a new Estonian property portal, built from nothing on a stack of its own: search, map, building-registry data, four languages, REST and MCP, its own DNS, mail and certificates — with no third-party fee per listing. This page says plainly what the market is doing, whom we compete with, what we charge for and what we do not.
The market in numbers
- 51,280 property transactions a year. That is how many were made in Estonia in 2025, of them 40,712 purchase-sale transactions, worth €5.8 billion in total (Estonian Land and Spatial Development Board, The Estonian property market in 2025). Every transaction starts with a listing, and most of those listings are up on somebody's money — a private seller's or an agency's.
- A country of owners. Close to 80% of Estonian households live in a home they own (2025: 79.7%). Moving here is a purchase, not a change of lease, and a buyer searches actively first — for months, with filters, on a map.
- Prices outrun wages. The average price per square metre of a Tallinn flat has risen by more than half in five years. A buyer wants to compare: the building, the year built, the energy class, the price per square metre against the area's average. A wall of listings in time order is not the tool for that.
Who is on the market
Estonian property listings are in the hands of two media groups and one social network:
| Owned by | Model | |
|---|---|---|
| kv.ee and city24.ee | Baltic Classifieds Group (London-listed) — both | paid listings, priced per listing and period |
| kinnisvara24.ee | Ekspress Grupp | paid listings, packages for agencies |
| Facebook Marketplace and groups | Meta | free, no search, no data |
The two largest portals have one owner, which means one price list and one counterparty for every agency in Estonia. A private person who wants to put one flat up for free goes to Marketplace — and a buyer who wants to search does not find them there.
What Facebook Marketplace cannot do
Marketplace is a buy-and-sell wall: a listing is a picture, a price and some text, and search is a word search within a radius. Kodu is property search:
- An area tree — county, municipality, district — and a map on which every listing stands on the right building, not in the middle of the district.
- The building's facts from the national registry — year built, floors, energy class, number of flats — filled into the listing by themselves, from the address. The seller does not type them; the buyer does not have to take them on trust.
- The filters a buyer actually uses: price and price per square metre, rooms, floor, condition, energy class, extras; saved searches and price-drop alerts on favourites.
- A market overview by county, from the same data.
- Four languages — Estonian, English, Russian, Ukrainian — the description machine-translated and marked as such.
- The only property portal in Estonia with AI-agent support: REST and MCP, over which an agent searches, watches and publishes; the portal's own assistant for whoever brings none. Documentation
How Kodu makes money
It does not yet. Listing is free and nothing on the portal is charged for today. The model is to give away supply and sell attention.
- A listing is free — for a private person and an agency alike, with no limit on active listings and no monthly fee. That is deliberate: free listings are how the portal builds inventory, a portal with no listings is not worth searching, and the price of listing is exactly what keeps Estonian supply on Facebook. At most 10 listings may be kept off the market at a time, which is spam protection and not a price.
- Verification is optional and costs €1 — a one-time bank transfer whose sender's name has to match the account's. It is not revenue either; it is trust, and what it buys is a mark on the account. Nothing waits for it.
- The revenue we plan, none of it live yet: opt-in visibility — a featured place in the New homes block on the front page, a paid bump back to the top of the results; plans for agencies — import and sync of an agency's listings from its own system, the app on the agency's site, a portal in the agency's design, API access for heavy users; and referral fees on what a move needs anyway.
The logic of the model is simple: supply is free, attention is paid for. Free listings bring supply, supply brings buyers, and buyers are what makes a place on the front page worth paying for — an agency would pay to be seen, not for the right to stand on a wall.
Why it pays for us
Kodu runs on the comm.ee platform, a whole stack built by one team: DNS, HTTPS certificates, SMTP, HTTP, accounts, payments — on one server, with no per-unit cloud fees. Keeping one listing up costs us cents a month, which is what makes a free portal survivable while the inventory is being built. Growth brings no cost curve that has to be earned back through a price.
What we track and show an investor: the number of active listings, inquiries per listing, the number of verified accounts, the number of agencies and the volume of their imports.
Let us talk
We are looking for a partner who understands that the size of the Estonian property market is not the problem — the problem is that the price of listing keeps supply out of the portals and search out of Facebook. Write to info@comm.ee or call +372 5384 3837.
Sources: Estonian Land and Spatial Development Board, "The Estonian property market in 2025" (February 2026); Baltic Classifieds Group plc, annual reports; Kinnisvarakeskkond OÜ (Ekspress Grupp); Eurostat / Trading Economics, home ownership rate 2025. The competitors are described from their public pages as of September 2026 and not in their own words.