A romp through the Dutch polders in my klompen … wonder if my grandparents’ farm homes are still there?

December 4, 2006

klompen.jpgTrulia’s interview of Marque Joosten, CEO of the Dutch online property site Funda.nl, got me pretty excited for at least two reasons: Wicked cool technology, and a burst of patriotic curiosity. You see, Dutch blood runs thick in my veins: “Boer” simply means “farmer”, which pretty accurately describes my ancestors’ way of life on both sides of the family tree…until one grandfather became a barber, and his son — my father — went to University and got himself a PhD! Somehow I ended up selling real estate in Silicon Valley. But we digress…

Funda.nl apparently has 3.5M unique visitors per month from the Netherlands alone, which gives them a reach of some 20%. Joosten says Internet penetration in the Netherlands is around 85%, of which 90% is broadband, and as a result traditional print media real estate advertising has all but disappeared. He considers the newspaper advertising we have here in the US to be “probably worthless,” and he advises a simple trick to convince sellers that there’s no need to advertise in newspapers: “You can show them how many leads they get from a newspaper ad…zero…and then how many leads they get from the Internet…and that’s tens or hundreds.”

I thought I’d give the site a spin, and thankfully the cobwebs in my brain cleared sufficiently for the 50-odd words of Dutch I still know to come in useful: “Verkoop = “For sale”; “Welkom bij Funda” = “Welcome to Funda”; “Zoeken” = “Search”; “Plaats” = “City”.

A neat little integration with Google Earth pops up some very slick maps.

This is my dad’s home town of Lutjegast (”Little Higher Sandy Ridge” says Wikipedia), whose claim to fame is being the birth place of Abel Tasman, the Dutch seafarer who was the first European to stumble upon the island of Tasmania.

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My mom’s home town was Hantemhuizen, which even Google Earth can’t locate. The nearest town was Dokkum, which looks like practically a bustling metropolis!

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Image of “klompen” — wooden shoes — courtesy of cloggieshop.com Yes, I do have a pair…somewhere. No, I never wear them.

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Written by Kevin · Filed Under Funda.nl, Real estate, Technology | 3 Comments