A daily routine for many in Sweden is to go through the comparable residential sales printed in the local paper. At least in the countryside where the local paper cover a smaller area (and the number of comps are fewer).
In large cities like Stockholm this hasn't always been the case since the 'local' paper normally is one of the two national papers, DN or SvD, which haven't put the effort in to this. (There are large papers in the country who has done it, for example Sydsvenskan (great mapping) och Helsingborg Dagblad (just a list).)
However, the local paper Mitt i Stockholm AB which runs 31 (?) local papers in Stockholm has been putting this information in their papers.
Next step, put the information online
Now has Mitt i Stockholm AB taken the next step and put this information online. The service started in April and hit the press a few days (1, 2, 3, 4) with the effect that the service was terrible slow the first days. However, I gave it a try today and it is an impressive web 2.0 service (in terms of being user friendly and designed).
You select a municipality (31 to choose from all in 'greater' Stockholm) and all comparable sales for residential real estates are shown (not multi-family).
The information per comparable sales listing includes:
- address
- purchase price
- purchase date
- assessment value
- seller
- buyer
By clicking on 'read more' the information is displayed like below.
The information feed is from the Swedish Land Register and is (I assume) updated every night (at least it could be).
More to come
Mitt i Stockholm (as many local papers) is working hard to provide super local news, information, classifieds, and also residential listings. (Read more about this localization of news at Mindpark.) In an article in DI the Online Manager Peter Leijonspjuth states that this is just version 1.0 and more is to come.
Adding apartments comps?
Mentioned is to add comparable sales for apartments '(CoOps') before the summer. This is indeed impressive since this data is not collected by the government. The only source I'm aware of is through the Association of Swedish Real Estate Agents('Mäklarsamfundet'). This data is today available on a summarized level at Mäklarstatistik and at the largest residential listing service Hemnet (which is owned and run by Samfundet). Both services has the same provider; Värderingsdata and costs about 100 SEK (~15 USD) for each search.
It will be interesting to see if this information will be published for free at Mitt i. Especially since Peter previously has worked at Teknik i Media which runs the technical platform for Hemnet and is quoted in the DI article that "it is important to never compete with Hemnet" (my translation).