With all of the commotion about Expofinques’s seeking bankruptcy protection and continuing signs of a real estate crisis, I almost forgot to mention that nuroa has reached an agreement with Spain’s leading real estate group, Metrovacesa, to open up a new homes section to our property search engine.

I have to say that I really admire Metrovacesa’s approach. We first got in touch with them, when they invited Victor (the author of our Spanish blog “Sin Techo“) to a meeting to talk about their aggressive new Internet strategy. A lot of real estate groups are just starting to bet aggressively on advertising online, but Metrovacesa is already one step ahead; they’re not just trying to advertise properties, they want to complete the transaction online.

They’ve got cojones, and we admire that. And since we like to think that we also have cojones, we figured they’d make ideal partners.

I’d like to think that this is just the first of many such deals. After all, Metrovacesa is Spain’s leading real estate group, so convincing them was a pretty big test for us. Metrovacesa is one of the only listed Spanish real estate companies whose share price continues to increase, even as all of the other real estate groups struggle to withstand very brutal attacks on their share prices, or simply struggle to stay out of bankruptcy court.

They obviously have a clue as to what they’re doing. And it’s always exciting to know that market-leading companies have confidence in our project.

By the way, thanks to all of the journalists, bloggers and press services that wrote about the story, including:

• Javier Martín from Loogic
• Carmen López from OjoInternet
• Cinco Dias
• Yahoo Finanzas
• El Economista
• Finanzas.com,
• Carlos Mantero,
• Victor Aloi (Sin Techo), and
• Europa Press.

It was bittersweet to read that the real estate agency Expofinques has entered into bankruptcy protection. Expofincas is the first major Spanish real estate agency that has sought bankruptcy protection (various developers are already in a similar state of affairs).

I actually know Expofincas quite well. My first business was a franchise of Expofincas in the Eixample Esquerre, and I think I was among the initial group of real estate franchisees in Barcelona. I remember fondly the training sessions, which took place over a couple of weeks, and where I learned about “pisos calentitos” (apartments that will get sold quickly) and “compradores verdes” (first-time buyers who are eager to learn but unlikely to buy in the near future). I became fluent in the language of Spanish real estate speak thanks to Expofincas.

But by 2005, I realized that I wasn’t entirely convinced by their model. They had captured the form of American real estate franchises, but not the spirit. There was a lot of internal tension in the company itself between the franchise department and the internal staff (they have a mixed model between franchised offices that are run by entrepreneurs under a licensing agreement and offices run by full-time employees of Expofincas). In addition, their operational staff consisted of a lot of old-time real estate agents who were anti-Internet(though in later years they’d become one of the biggest spenders in online advertising). They instructed us that agents shouldn’t be given computers, because they’d only surf the web all day — that all of the tasks required for entering new apartments could be done by speaking with porters in apartment buildings, contacts and looking at La Vanguardia. Most of all, I hated that they treated the entrepreneurs and our staffs like dumb children. They didn’t see us as partners in extending their brand, and didn’t really want us speaking with one other franchisees. They made me feel like an idiot who’d paid a lot of money to fund their expansion efforts.

When I told them that I wanted out of my franchise license, they tried to convince me that sticking with them and their brand was the best way to withstand the eventual consolidation of the real estate market that we’d all been expecting but that no one really seemed to believe was around the corner. They highlighted the fact that they had the economic resources to withstand a downturn. And they hinted that if my agency wasn’t working as well as they’d originally projected, it was because of my own defects - not economic factors or failings of Exponfincas — which meant that my best bet would be to stick to them.

I left and eventually started nuroa, a property search engine focused on the German and Spanish markets, based in large part from the experience that I’d gained via Expofincas and then afterwards.

And there’s probably a lot of truth in what they said about my failings. It was my first business, and you really do learn a lot about yourself as a first-time entrepreneur. You learn a lot about yourself, your threshold for pain, your family, friends and loved ones, your strengths and weaknesses, etc. Everyone loves you when things are going well, but when things go badly . . . you really begin to understand the logic of the expression “a friend in need is a friend indeed.” And hopefully, you begin to live by the expression: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me!”

So that’s why I feel a bit bittersweet. I chose to collaborate with Expofincas, because they had a great reputation in the real estate sector, and because they had an ad with Jesus Vasquez. And while I feel somewhat vindicated that maybe I wasn’t such an idiot after all, I also feel humbled to see such a prominent brand brought to its knees by the vicious combination of the international credit crunch (which meant that the banks didn’t give them viable options to refinance €10 million in debt) and the real estate crisis in Spain (which meant that they really don’t have any income to make debt payments and pay current expenditures).