From left: Avinav Nigam, Hans-Cristian Zappel and Samantha Kempe. Image: Immo
With the latest round of funding, Immo plans to expand its property investment platform to more markets across Europe, taking advantage of the growing appetite for residential real estate.
On Thursday (20 August), real estate investment platform Immo Capital announced that it has raised an additional €3m in capital from Fintech Collective and Surplus Invest, adding to the company’s oversubscribed Series A round.
The investment brings the total raised in the Series A round to €14m. Other investors in the round include Talis Capital and HV Holtzbrinck Ventures. In addition to the funding, the company also announced that it has raised more than €60m through its investment platform.
Recognised as a World Economic Forum (WEF) Technology Pioneer for 2020 in the field of real estate, Immo currently operates in Germany and the UK.
The start-up, which was founded in 2017, buys residential properties directly from consumers on behalf of professional investors, providing investors with desired real estate exposure at scale. Homes purchased through Immo are fully renovated, often furnished and are professionally managed for tenants.
The company was co-founded by Hans-Christian Zappel (who previously featured on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list); former PwC and Blackstone employee Samantha Kempe; and former P&G and Disney employee, Avinav Nigam.
The funding
Through the Covid-19 pandemic, the company has been investing in new technologies and innovations that help to simplify real estate transactions, including virtual 360 viewings, online credit checks and digital contracts for renters who are relocating from thousands of miles away.
The company’s goal is to turn the traditional real estate sector on its head, and to do so, it is using the latest batch of funding to accelerate its investment platform and offer listings in more markets across Europe.
According to Immo, the appetite for residential real estate has only grown during the Covid-19 crisis as institutional investors look for safer, yiel- generating asset classes. The company has built technology to help source, appraise and acquire single units, which account of 94pc of residential real estate transactions.
The company said that valuing and acquiring thousands of single units has proven to be difficult in the past, which has limited investors. Immo said that it has assessed more than 10,000 property leads using proprietary machine learning technology in the past year, reducing the underwriting process from days to a matter of minutes.
Immo’s inspection team collects close to 300 data points for every property and combines this property-level data with millions of environmental data points such as traffic nodes, crime statistics, distance to supermarkets and school, restaurant and Airbnb ratings. By doing this, the platform can come up with an offer price with a seller.
Zappel, CEO of the firm, commented: “We have built a sourcing, renovations and property management machinery that allows us to quickly assemble €100m to €500m sized residential portfolios, made up of single unit assets in a matter of months, that generate very attractive stable returns almost instantly.
“The demand for residential is increasing, and we are confident to deploy scalable capital and generate superior-to-market returns for our investors across European markets. Our proprietary Immo intelligence technology helps investors target specific locations within any European city to get their desired risk-return exposure.”
