It comes as no surprise that the Swedish start up Booli (a start up offering search engine for residential listings on the Swedish real estate market, earlier coverage) was going to create a debate in the market.

However, earlier this week Lars Kilander, CEO of Mäklarsamfundet (the Association of Swedish Real Estate Agents), made it easy for many papers this week to create selling headlines with the quote (my translation) "We don't believe it is better with more listing services, it just gets more complicated for the buyers".

I guess that there are few things that customers dislike more than being told what they like.

Press about the debate (in Swedish)
DN: the article by DN (the largest newspaper in Sweden)
Metro: here
DinaPengar: here
Realtid: two articles here and here
DagensPS: one
JönköpingsNytt: an article (with a slightly different approach)
From the blogosphere: here, here, here

The response from Booli
Is found here.

The letter
The background is that the press has found out that a letter has been sent to all members of Mäklarsamfundet asking their members "to protest" against Booli in order to keep their 'own' service Hemnet (read more) as 'the one and only' listing service (forgetting that there already exist another one in Bovision).