Immoweb Raises Its Prices and Loses Agencies' Trust

For years, Belgian real estate agencies have lived with a simple deal: pay Immoweb, and buyers will call. In an article published by L'Echo on 9 November 2026, journalist Maxime Delrue shows that this deal is cracking. Behind the price increases announced for 2027, the trust between agencies and their main portal is wearing thin.

This is more than a dispute over rates. The model on which property advertising was built in Belgium no longer fits a market where listings already live on the agencies' own websites, and where AI assistants are starting to read them there.

1. What L'Echo Reports

"La colère gronde chez les agents immobiliers."

Anger is brewing among real estate agents. (our translation)

The agents interviewed by L'Echo say their Immoweb bill for 2027 rises by 15% to 100%, depending on the size of the agency and the package chosen. Some services double in price, and one agent says it is "getting close to racketeering". Immoweb replies that its new rates, now sold as four packs, reflect "a deeply enriched scope of services", and that an entry-level formula may even cost less.

So why do agencies keep paying? Maxime Delrue sums it up:

"Le nœud du problème, c'est qu'Immoweb est devenu une passerelle absolument incontournable pour mettre en contact les candidats acquéreurs et les agents immobiliers."

The crux of the problem is that Immoweb has become an absolutely unavoidable gateway between would-be buyers and real estate agents. (our translation)

A Brussels agent estimates that 90% to 95% of inquiries come through the portal, and compares it to electricity: the price goes up, but nobody knows how to do without it.

2. Immoweb Is Losing the Agencies' Trust

The tone says more than the figures. Every agent in the article spoke on condition of anonymity, for fear of retaliation. Some talk about a boycott, others about a portal built by Federia or the IPI and funded by the profession itself. When a sector describes its main partner as a supplier it cannot leave and dares not criticise openly, the relationship no longer rests on trust, only on dependence.

And dependence is fragile. What keeps agencies on the portal is the audience it gathers. The day buyers find the listings elsewhere, nothing else holds them there.

3. Why a New Model Is Needed

The portal model rests on an oddity: the listing already exists on the agency's website, often before it appears anywhere else, as we explained in our very first blog article, which compared the main Belgian platforms. The agency then pays to have a copy displayed where buyers are looking. Whoever owns that audience sets the price.

That model weighs hardest on the agencies with the least leverage. L'Echo notes that the size of the increase depends on the size of the agency, and therefore on its bargaining power. Yet the Belgian market is mostly made of small agencies: of the 2,373 agencies that had at least one listing available on 10 November 2026, more than one in four had 10 or fewer, and more than half had 25 or fewer.

And the agencies with 100 listings or fewer, nine in ten of them, together offer almost half of all the listings on the market. A model in which they pay ever more for a single gateway, with no room to negotiate, works against half of the market.

AI is shaking up that logic. An agent quoted by L'Echo puts it bluntly: why would conversational agents still need Immoweb's polished shop window if they can fetch the listings directly from the agencies' own websites? Assistants such as Claude or ChatGPT are becoming a new way to search for a home. They do not need a shop window; they need a reliable, up-to-date source.

A new model should therefore start from the agency's website, not from a paid copy of it.

4. The Model Imino Proposes

Imino was built on exactly that idea. It does not copy its listings from Immoweb or the other large portals: it reads the agencies' own websites and brings their listings together in a single search.

• Free, with nothing to export. The agency publishes on its own website, as it already does, and its listings appear on Imino at no cost.
• The agency keeps the relationship. A listing on Imino links to the original on the agency's website, and a buyer's request lands in the agency's own inbox.
• No competition with the agency's website. Imino keeps its listing pages out of search engines: a buyer who searches Google for a property should land on the agency's website, not on ours.

Agencies can also manage their listings on Imino for free.

The model already works at scale:

Listings visible in the public search of imino.be on that day. An agency counts once per website, whatever its number of offices.

5. An Answer to the AI Challenge

Imino also answers the question raised in L'Echo. Through its MCP server, an AI assistant such as Claude can search these listings directly, filter them, count them or estimate a property's value on the user's behalf. The assistant reads listings that come straight from the agencies' websites, and each result leads to the listing, then to the agency that published it. We explain how it works in a dedicated article.

In this model, AI is no longer a threat to agencies: it becomes one more path to the listing the agency published itself.

Conclusion

The anger reported by Maxime Delrue is about more than a price list. It reveals a model in which agencies pay ever more to reach buyers through a single gateway they no longer trust, at the very moment AI is changing how people search for a home. Imino proposes another model: the agency's website as the source, free visibility, the relationship left with the agency, and a door open to AI assistants. With 138,282 listings from 2,442 agencies to date, it is no longer a theory.

Searching for a home yourself? Remember that a listing is born on the agency's website: that is often where you can see it first.

Source: Inspired by the article "Immoweb augmente ses tarifs et provoque la colère des agents immobiliers" by Maxime Delrue, published by L'Echo on 9 November 2026.