Scout24 Acquires Landlord Property Management Platform Vermietet

Market-leading German property portal operator Scout24 has today announced that it has acquired German private landlord software business Vermietet.de for an undisclosed sum.

Berlin-based Vermietet, the core brand of parent company Zenhomes, was founded in 2016 by Jannes Fischer, who will be kept on as Managing Director. The firm's latest funding round was a Series A of some €13 million back in the summer of 2019 participated in by René Benko's SIGNA Group.

The deal sees Scout24 expand its ancillary services around its main real estate marketplace ImmoScout24 where listings packages will be offered with Vermietet's comprehensive cloud-based property management toolkit to make bring more services under one brand in one location. Commenting on his company's acquisition, Scout24 CEO Tobias Hartmann said:

"With Vermietet.de, we will substantially extend ImmoScout24's product offering for private landlords, fully in line with our market network strategy. With the investment in this company and continued partnership with Jannes Fischer and his team, we will accelerate our digital product development for the tenant market. In the German real estate market, rent is key. By the end of 2021, our customers will benefit from first synergies of both platforms"

For his part, Fischer said of the deal:

"We are delighted to have ImmoScout24 as a new partner. We share the vision of making complicated processes in the real estate market more digital, transparent and simpler. With hundreds of thousands rental objects already managed through Vermietet.de, we are already a market leading solution for private landlords. With the marketing power and reach of ImmoScout24, we will be able to further catalyse our growth to jointly create an entire ecosystem, forever redefining how people interact with real estate"

Leading property portals in mature markets looking to increase their presence in ancillary services around property transactions is nothing new, but the number of these type of deals seems to be increasing. Zoopla, long known for its desire to get into ancillary services, has snapped up housebuilder software firm YourKeys as well as comparison site operator Penguin Portals in the last six months, REA Group recently bought mortgage company Mortgage Choice, and Zillow has been on the back foot in terms of its PR after buying out popular visit scheduling company Showing Time in February.

Recent deals with even more parallels to Scout24's latest announcement include OnTheMarket's purchase of rental platform Glanty as recently as March and Idealista's acquisition of rental management software company Rentger in January.

As former Scout24 CEO Marc Stilke told us in a recent interview, Scout24 is very interested in how to monetise private listers as well as established estate agents and with today's acquisition announcement the Munich-based classifieds giant is taking another big step in this direction.