Hemnet Elevates User Experience & Scales with Ory: How Sweden's Top Property Platform Transformed c/IAM

About Hemnet

Hemnet is Sweden's premier property platform, established in 1998 as the essential hub connecting buyers, sellers, and real estate agents. They boast the largest selection of properties and connect them with the most potential buyers. Driven by a passion for homes, Hemnet is committed to being an independent and transparent guide throughout every property journey.

Challenges:

Hemnet has a reach of nearly two million users every week, and each year, 9 out of 10 homes sold in Sweden are listed on Hemnet at some point in the sales process. By bringing together the majority of listings, all serious buyers, and over 7,000 real estate agents, Hemnet is the country’s most efficient and trusted platform for property marketing. Identity and access management (IAM) was critical not only because Hemnet brings together different parties, but also because of the financial size of the property transactions. Hemnet believes reducing friction in the login experience will lead to a greater number of happy repeat users.

Hemnet was using homegrown and antiquated authentication systems for each group, leading to disjointed and confusing user experiences particularly for those who might be both buyer and seller. Maintaining and introducing new features, login methods, or user experiences was time-draining and cumbersome due to the unique nature of each homegrown system, effectively tripling the effort.

Our goal was to provide a unified, secure, and consistent user experience across all buying, selling, and brokering groups with the ability to learn, adapt, and customize to user preferences and tendencies.

Tamer Shlash, Software Engineer, Hemnet

Solution:

Hemnet had some specific criteria they were seeking from customer identity and access management (CIAM) vendors: open-source friendly, low level of vendor lock-in, maintainability, scalability, security, GDPR compliance, pricing, internationalization, developer experience, and native app support. The short list included Auth0, Okta, Amazon Cognito, SuperTokens, and Ory.

Ory emerged as the best fit given our requirements. Its open-source roots, developer- friendliness, and the ability to customize were particularly important to us.

Tamer Shlash, Software Engineer, Hemnet

Results:

Ory Network helped reduce friction for users, making the process smoother overall and enabling faster access to features. This contributed to freeing up some engineering time by minimizing maintenance demands but also allowed the team to focus on improving the user experience (UX) and developing new features. As a product company, building and maintaining an equivalent solution in-house would have likely required diverting significant resources away from core product development.

“Ory’s support team is very responsive and helpful, especially when we encounter obstacles,” explains Tamer. “Ory came through with pivotal case-specific resolutions and migration simplification suggestions.”

The quick response from Ory support and their proactive monitoring during the migration expedited Hemnet’s go live timeframe.

“We are excited about the user data Ory provides us. It’s critical in honing a positive and friction-free user experience,” shares Tamer. “Ory provides us the tools to own and improve the experience our users have with Hemnet. As early adopters of Ory Elements, we have seen it evolve to provide a solid foundation for building and customizing authentication flows, and we’re confident we can quickly and easily make future changes using it.”

Future:

In addition to migrating all users (brokers, sellers, and buyers) to Ory Network for authentication and authorization, Hemnet is exploring Ory Keto for fine-grained access control. Hemnet is also considering moving their apps to use the native login solution from Ory and a potential migration of the support team’s SAML integrations too.

“We’ve found Ory to be a flexible platform that provides the scale and customization we need to take ownership of the authentication layer and allows us to put more focus on building our products,” reveals Tamer.

We would recommend Ory because it doesn’t lock you into their way and offers flexibility of cloud or on-premises deployment, dedicated and responsive support, strong developer experience, and a reasonable price compared to other vendors.

Tamer Shlash, Software Engineer, Hemnet