The Digitalisation of the German Real Estate Market
Two digital routes to making the German real estate market more efficient and transparent were explored at the REFIRE 2013 conference. The first follows the logic of a dating website and the second of an online auction house.
Asset Profiler is a platform that bridges the gap between how much money is available to buy real estate, and how much is spent, said Norman Meyer, CEO of the eponymous company.
It transfers the functionality of a dating website to match-making in real estate. A background statistic was that only a third of investors believe the building they find matches their criteria.
An excessive time was spent on property search because, Meyer said, ‘people don’t find each other on the German market’. More transparency is needed because German players make a ‘big secret’ of what they want to buy and what is for sale.
Using Asset Profiler’s private platform ‘love at first click’ follows when a potential buyer enters detailed requirements into an account profile and the interest matching systems finds the best fit among the sellers’ properties.
The vendor controls the next step by deciding whether to follow up an offer or to withdraw from the market.
Dr. Clemens Trautmann, CEO of Immonet.de, said Asset Profiler facilitated hostile cross-border transactions by being:
- an open marketplace
- a closed platform
- a high quality content analysis platform
The aim of the partners was to deliver state of the art business intelligence.
Immonet was seeking to unlock the potential in, for example, its database containing nearly a decade’s-worth of offers on the buy and sell side.
Ken Rivkin, CEO of Auction.com, said his company took pride in obtaining higher prices than the open market. The key difference from a site such as eBay was that the two-day auction sales did not end if someone placed a bid in the last two minutes. If that happens, he said, ‘then we add some overtime, so everyone has ample time to pay more than anyone else’.
An early internet launch, Auction.com had resurfaced in the United States in 2006 after a dormant period. Last year it did $7 billion of business, split 50/50 between residential sales, mainly to families, and commercial real estate.
From offices in London, Frankfurt and Berlin, the company now also operated in Germany. A forthcoming auction in Germany was listing 46 properties from 11 sellers. With a new office in Madrid, Spain was the next target.