In June 2024 the private-equity firm Cinven agreed to buy 70% of Idealista, the Spanish property portal, in a deal that valued the company at about €2.9 billion. EQT, the seller of the majority stake, had acquired Idealista in 2020 at a valuation of €1.3 billion, so the company was valued at more than twice as much four years later (EQT announcement and Bloomberg, 28 June 2024).
The listed portals abroad are larger still. In the autumn of 2026 REA Group in Australia had a market capitalisation of about US$14 billion, Zillow in the United States about US$7.2 billion and Rightmove in the United Kingdom about US$4.6 billion (CompaniesMarketCap, September–October 2026). Market capitalisations move every trading day; read these as orders of magnitude, not prices.
The reason is the model. A portal becomes the place where buyers look because the homes are there, and the homes are there because the buyers look. Agencies pay to list and to be seen, the cost of serving one more search is close to nothing, and once a country settles on one or two portals, the position is hard to take away. That is what investors have been paying for.
What the model does not fix on its own is the experience of the person searching. Where several agencies market the same home, it can appear several times. A home that has been sold can stay visible until someone takes the listing down. And on a purchase the buyer often meets a fee conversation on top of the price. None of this is unique to one country or one site; it is how open listing markets work when nobody owns the whole picture of a single home.
Two things have changed recently. Agencies on the Costa del Sol already share their stock through common listing feeds, which makes it possible to see one home once, wherever it is listed, and to notice within the hour when it leaves the market. And language models make it practical to search the way people actually talk — "a three-bedroom house near a school in Estepona, under a million" — instead of through a wall of filters.
MUSE Select is one attempt to build on both. It is a free iPhone and web app launched on 30 October 2026 by Muse Selection, a real-estate company founded in Marbella in 2024. Each home appears once; the feeds are checked every hour, and in the seven days to 2 November 2026 the app removed 431 homes that had been sold or withdrawn. At launch it carried 10,339 homes for sale and 1,449 to rent, from Sotogrande to Málaga, searchable by area, price and size or in plain words through its AI search. Buyers pay no agency fee, and on long-term rentals Spain's 2023 Housing Law puts agency fees on the landlord.
It is early, and the honest description says so: the app is days old, it has no revenue yet, and it is free to use until 15 November 2026. Muse Selection plans to take it from the Costa del Sol to the Costa Blanca and other European markets first, then to the Gulf states, Asia and the United States, and is looking for investors to fund that path. Whether an app can earn the place a portal holds depends on things no launch can show — coverage of the market, the trust of agencies and the habits of the people searching — and those are what the next months will test.