Hemnet Data Scraping

Asking-to-sold spread, without a registry join

In most markets a portal gives you an asking price and a listing that eventually disappears. Whether it sold, and for how much, requires a separate registry source with different coverage and a lag measured in months.

Swedish practice publishes final sale prices against listings. That produces something directly measurable that almost nowhere else offers:

• The spread between asking and sold, per property, without a join.
• Whether a market is selling above or below asking, as an observation rather than an inference.
• Time from listing to sale, with a real endpoint rather than a disappearance of unknown cause.

We record asking_price, sold_price, sold_date and derived spread_pct, with sold_price_published flagged — because not every listing publishes one, and the share matters.

The honest limit

Not all sales publish a price. We report sold_price_visible_share per batch, and the same caution applies as on our Domain page: a published-price subset may be self-selecting. It is a much larger and more representative subset here than in most markets, and it is still a subset.

Bostadsrätt and villa are different products, and the fee is the reason

Swedish housing splits into apartments held through a housing association (bostadsrätt) and freestanding houses (villa). They are not two sizes of the same thing.

• A bostadsrätt carries a monthly fee to the association, covering building costs and sometimes heating, water and broadband.
• The fee varies enormously between associations, and it materially changes total monthly cost.
• Two apartments at the same price with different fees are different financial propositions.
• The association's own finances affect the fee's future, and are not on the listing.

housing_type and monthly_fee are on every record and we never compare a price without the fee alongside. We do not compute a fee-adjusted price, because capitalising a monthly fee requires a discount rate and a horizon — both assumptions that belong with you.

Area

Living area and supplementary area are recorded separately. A basement or attic counted into a headline figure would inflate a per-square-metre comparison.

Open bidding, and what we still will not produce

Bidding is visible

Swedish sales commonly run open bidding, with the process more visible than in sealed-bid markets. Where bid history is published against a listing we capture it as a structured series with timestamps.

That supports something rare: observing how bidding progressed rather than only its outcome.

Where bid history is not published, the field is null with a reason. We do not reconstruct a bidding path from the asking and sold prices — the shape between two endpoints is exactly what the data would need to contain.

What we do not collect

• Bidder identity. Bid amounts and timestamps only, never who bid.
• Buyer or seller identity, in any form.
• Agent individual details. Agency is a commercial entity.

Sweden publishes a great deal about property transactions. We collect the commercial facts and not the people, which in a market this transparent is a boundary worth stating rather than assuming.