Window-Shopping for Homes That Aren't For Sale

Peter Coy

As we near the summer solstice, let's cast our eyes northward to the land of the midnight sun ... Finland! A Finnish company called Igglo has an extremely interesting concept, which is to create a kind of stock market in housing, where all houses would have a going price whether their owners want to sell them or not. I think the idea is that Igglo agents would close the sale for a modest commission once buyers and sellers had already found each other via the site. Of course, it could get annoying to non-sellers if Igglo started bombarding them with emails telling them that someone was interested in buying their not-for-sale house. Still, admit it: Even if you had no intention of selling, wouldn't you like to know what your house would fetch?

Here's a link to the Igglo website. It will probably be completely unintelligible to you if your education in Finnish is as unfinnished as mine. Therefore I have included links to other blogs in English that talk about Igglo.

Springwise.com, a Dutch-based website that tracks entrepreneurial ideas, thinks Igglo is pretty cool.

Seattle-based Redfin, an online real estate brokerage, says it filed for a U.S. patent on the same concept last year. Here's what CEO Glenn Kelman says about Igglo in his blog:

Why it seems like a good idea for Redfin here in the U.S.: it's uniquely compelling for home-buyers, addictive for home-owners, disruptive for traditional realtors, and a little crazy. We expect the Finns to go hog-wild for this (if Finns go hog-wild for anything), and think Americans might too.

And here's another Finnish-based blog on Igglo that's a little less positive. (Scroll down to find the item.) The blogger says, "My experience tells that the housing market is a services market all over the place. You simply cannot commodify it. And you don’t market services through spamming."