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Maxim Bours is co-founder and CEO of Huispedia, the largest independent data-intelligence platform for housing in the Netherlands.
He and Ramon Noordeloos left KLM in 2018, where they had worked in an operation in which every decision is instrumented and priced. Both were trying to buy a house at the time. The listing was well served. The decision was not served by anyone. They started Huispedia to fix this.
The company is bootstrapped and took no external investment. It began on eight hundred euros a month of advertising revenue and pivot to sells subscriptions to buyers, homeowners and professionals. Huispedia one of the only platforms anywhere charging buyers directly for decision support.
His argument is that the decision layer is not a technology problem. Anyone can build the model. It runs on what people are willing to tell you about themselves, and that is decided by who pays you. He is a regular commentator on the Dutch housing market for Dutch national media.
Who Owns the Decision Layer?
Anyone can build the model. The question is who gets told the truth.
Portals won the search phase. Value has moved to the phase after it, where people decide what to actually do, and by now most of this industry agrees. The disagreement is whether an incumbent can go there. Huispedia's answer is that the barrier was never technology. Anyone can build a bidding model, and ours was accurate. It changed nothing, because a model that does not know the person cannot advise the person. And people only tell you about a lease ending, a fifth failed bid or a child on the way when they are certain that what they share will be used to advise them rather than to serve the other side of the table. That constraint is set by your revenue model, not your roadmap. This talk is about what it cost to get on the right side of it.
