Real estate agents automated the work, but somehow the fee stayed the same.
Hoobler lets Belgian homeowners sell their property independently, for a flat fee, with AI handling the listing, buyer matching, and admin ā the parts of the process that used to require an agent. It's a way to get the same help you'd get from an agent, minus the fee that used to come with it.
The idea started with Thomas (Hoobler's product guy), who was trying to sell his own house without an agent. He quickly ran into the same wall a lot of people hit: he was more than willing to do the work himself, but almost every tool out there for selling a house was built with agents in mind, not homeowners. So he did what most people end up doing in that situation: he hired an agent.
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That agent was Sander Van Gilse. A year later, Sander (Hoobler's Real Estate Guy) is Thomas's co-founder.
How three co-founders ended up with the same problem
The third co-founder is Jasper, who used to run a real estate photography business. His photographers were in and out of houses all day, and kept hearing homeowners say some version of the same thing: I'd sell this myself if I only knew how.
So you had three people looking at the same problem from three different angles:
- A marketer hearing the frustration secondhand
- A homeowner living through it firsthand
- And an agent who'd basically become the workaround for it.
When the three of them started talking, it soon became clear that homeowners weren't the problem. Nobody had ever built them the tools to actually pull it off.
So they built the tool instead
In May 2025, Jasper, Thomas and Sander launched Hoobler, giving homeowners access to the same kind of tools agents already use, so they can sell their own place, stay in control of the process, and pocket the commission themselves instead of paying it out.
Before they built anything, they spent time just talking to people, homeowners who'd sold privately and others who'd wanted to but never got around to it. That's what shaped their business plan, which is also what helped them get funding. Only once that was in place did they actually start building the product. The first version came together around two months ago, and it's being tested right now with real homeowners, ahead of the public launch.
The real challenge is getting people to trust it
If you ask the team what's actually giving them trouble right now, it's not really a technical thing, it's trust. People have relied on agents for decades, and selling a house isn't only a financial decision, there's an emotional side to it too. So asking someone to hand that whole process over to a platform instead of a person is genuinely a big ask. Hoobler isn't trying to argue people out of that feeling. They're trying to earn it, by making sure the platform feels clear and dependable at every step, and that the way they communicate actually sounds like a person, not a script. They're not trying to remove the human part of selling a house. Just the price tag that used to come with it.
Why they joined imec.istart
The core platform is already there, and the team is now getting ready to actually launch it, which is exactly the phase where things can go sideways if you're not careful. That's a big part of why they joined imec.istart: help sharpening their positioning, and a sounding board for the growth decisions that are easy to get wrong the first time around.
There's also the trust question we mentioned earlier, and being part of a program like this helps with that. When homeowners, partners or investors are deciding whether to take a chance on a new way of selling a house, being backed by a program with a track record adds a bit of weight to that decision. On top of that, there's the network: other founders who've already dealt with the same growing pains, people with real product and scaling experience, and potential partners and investors the team wouldn't necessarily run into on their own.
What's next
Hoobler is launching publicly in September 2026, and they're starting small on purpose, in Leuven and Aarschot, so they can stay close to their first users before expanding into the rest of Flanders, then Wallonia, and eventually the whole country. Further down the line, they'd like to go beyond private sellers too, into professional sellers, developers, rentals and renovation, and beyond Belgium as well, with the Netherlands, France and Germany as likely next markets.
Hoobler is part of imec.istart's Summer 2026 cohort, and over the coming months we'll be working alongside the team as they sharpen the product and get ready for launch.
