Simon Bray is VP Real Estate at Kleinanzeigen, bringing extensive leadership experience in technology-driven marketplace businesses. Previously, he served as President of REW, Canada’s fastest-growing real estate marketplace, from 2020-2025, transforming it into a market leader. His international career includes CEO roles at Private Property in South Africa, where he drove the company from losses to profitability, and CEO Marketplaces at LIFULL Connect in Spain. With expertise in platform business, product development, and stakeholder management, Simon specializes in the intersection of technology and real estate, focusing on how engaged teams drive marketplace innovation and industry disruption.
AI as Enabler, Not Threat: Kleinanzeigen's Playbook for Reinventing the Property Journey
As Germany's undisputed general marketplace leader — and the country's No.2 real estate platform — Kleinanzeigen sits on a unique vantage point in the AI debate. In this session, Simon Bray explains why the company views AI as an enabler rather than an existential threat: its C2C leadership makes its supply hard to aggregate, and its role as users' default in-app messaging platform keeps it at the centre of every transaction.
Simon will share how Kleinanzeigen is embracing AI to tackle the fragmented, friction-filled processes that still define general marketplaces — and real estate in particular. He'll outline how the company has structured its efforts into two dedicated streams: uplifting the seeker experience on the buy-side, and building seller operating systems on the sell-side.
The session closes with live demos of concepts in development, including an agentic companion that guides users through messaging, viewings and negotiation for their next apartment — a glimpse of how the property search of tomorrow might feel less like a process, and more like a conversation.
