Flashback to February 2020: “After 12 months of development, we had just launched the Bingo.lu site, but then the government announced a lockdown due to the covid-19 pandemic just a few weeks later,” recalled , boss of Genista and one of the five co-founders and original investors of Bingo. “In just a few weeks, we had already reached 4,000 adverts online, approaching a third of the ads on the market. But the freeze in property visits drastically slowed down the development of our plans.”
Bingo.lu is a 100% Luxembourg startup, created by five Luxembourg entrepreneurs and with 100% Luxembourg capital. In addition to Biever, they are real estate developers at Asars Constructions and Camille Koener at Sitael, venture capitalist Alain Wildanger of Ilavska Vuillermoz Capital and pharmacist Alain Engel.
“To support a real estate market in difficulty, Bingo.lu is making its platform available to the sector and will publish property adverts free of charge until the end of 2023,” the five investors jointly stated. “We want to give more visibility to properties on the market, while reducing the marketing budget of real estate professionals, since these players are already under pressure in the face of high interest rates.”
Features for professionals and home-hunters
“From the conception of Bingo.lu, as real estate professionals, we had specific expectations, and Bingo.lu meets these needs,” said Agaajani. “It is an ambitious project from a technological point of view, but also from a user experience point of view.” Among the many features for professionals, there is a management toolbox and services for customer management, contract creation, prospect management, activity history, as well as virtual visit services (reducing the number of physical visits while ensuring the interest of prospects). “We particularly like the ‘matching’ feature which allows the advertiser, from their dashboard, not only to identify leads but also to contact them directly. Our technology traces the saved searches and integrates them into the ad toolbox with an element indicating how many matches there are.”
“It is a trilingual platform (French, English, German) offering classified adverts for sale, rental, and also to announce future developments,” explained Koener. “While there are mainly properties in Luxembourg and the Greater Region, there are also properties abroad, in particular second homes.”
“With listings from more than 150 professionals, real estate agencies and developers, Bingo.lu offers a good view of the market,” said Engel. “There are, in addition, very useful functions, such as a loan simulator and the option of saving your search preferences, in particular by setting a circular perimeter or even by selecting a specific area.”
The Bingo search engine has now been integrated into the Paperjam.lu and Delano.lu sites. “This integration will allow Bingo.lu to reach economic decision-makers, Luxembourgers, but also many French-speaking and English-speaking expats, as well as cross-border workers,” stated Wildanger. “And a selection of advertisements will be included every day in the Paperjam and Delano newsletters, sent to more than 35,000 subscribers, thus giving spectacular visibility to the advertisements, also reaching people who are not actively looking for a property.”
Media 4 Equity
“The integration of the Bingo.lu search engine on our information sites meets an expectation of our site visitors. We already have a job board which has been very successful in terms of recruitments completed, so it was a question of completing the offer,” said , founder and CEO of Maison Moderne. “This is a first strategic investment that Maison Moderne is making as part of its Media 4 Equity initiative, which is an investment programme through the contribution in kind of communication services in companies that can enrich its ecosystem.”
After an initial investment of €2m from the five co-founders, Maison Moderne took a 35% stake in Parus SA, which operates the Bingo.lu platform, with an initial €1.5m contribution in kind. With the completion of the transaction, signed on 15 June 2023, Koedinger and , COO of Maison Moderne, joined the Bingo.lu board of directors.