IMMO will use the additional capital to accelerate the geographical expansion of its investment platform across Europe
IMMO Investment Technologies today announces that it has raised €3M additional capital from FinTech Collective & Surplus Invest in its oversubscribed Series A financing round. The investment brings the total Series A to €14M, and saw participation from prominent investors like Talis Capital and HV Holtzbrinck Ventures. IMMO also counts Tom Stafford & Rahul Mehta of DST Global and Mato Peric among its early investors. On top, the company has raised over €60 million in real estate capital for deployment through its residential real estate platform.
Founded in 2017 by Hans-Christian Zappel (Davidson Kempner, Forbes 30U30), Samantha Kempe (Blackstone) and Avinav Nigam (P&G, Disney), IMMO buys residential properties directly from consumers on behalf of professional investors, thereby providing investors with desired real estate exposure at scale. IMMO homes are fully renovated and often furnished, meaning tenants enjoy quality, long term rental homes that are professionally managed. IMMO’s vision is to become “Your housing partner for life”, as it helps people to sell, rent and invest into real estate. Through the covid crisis, the company has been investing heavily into new technologies and innovations that help to simplify real estate transactions. From virtual 360 viewings, online credit checks and digital contracts for renters that are relocating thousands of miles, all the way to data-driven investing with confidence in unknown cities at the touch of a button, IMMO is turning the traditional real estate sector on its head.
The additional funding comes at an exciting time as IMMO accelerates its investments platform to offer up more markets across Europe, and develop the full technology suite from acquisitions to asset management. The company says that the appetite for residential real estate has only been growing among institutional investors, many of whom are looking at the covid crisis as an opportunity to focus on safe haven, yield generating asset classes.
Professional investors love residential real estate due to its attractive risk-adjusted returns profile, however deploying capital at scale is very challenging 3 despite the fact that residential is the largest asset class in the world (€39trillion in Europe alone4). Single units account for 94% of all residential real estate transactions5, but as valuing and acquiring 1,000s of single units has so far been practically impossible, investors were restricted to deploying in the very limited market of portfolios and multi-family developments. IMMO has built the technology to source, appraise and acquire single units at scale, thereby opening up single unit residential real estate as a new asset class for institutional investors. Over €60 million in capital has already been raised from real estate investors to deploy through the company’s residential real estate platform.
In the past year, IMMO has assessed over 10,000 property leads (€3.5Bn) using proprietary machine learning technology, reducing the underwriting process from days to a matter of minutes. IMMO’s inspection team collects close to 300 data-points for every property. The IMMO Intelligence combines this property level data with millions of environmental data-point such as traffic nodes, crime statistics, school/restaurant/airbnb ratings, distance to supermarkets etc. to come up with an offer price for the seller. It is this speed and accuracy that allows IMMO to buy properties at scale directly from sellers.
IMMO was also recently recognised by the World Economic Forum recently as a global technology pioneer in the field of real estate, joining an illustrious group of past awardees such as AirBnB, Google, Twitter and Spotify.
Hans-Christian Zappel CEO & Founder of IMMO says, “Now more than ever before, we find that investors are looking to residential as a safe haven investment asset class. We have built a sourcing, renovations and property management machinery that allows us to quickly assemble €100-500m 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. The success of Single-Unit-Residential (SUR) as an investment asset class in markets like the US has been very encouraging for us.”
Jannis Roser, Managing Partner at Surplus Invest, comments: “The IMMO team has impressed us with their outstanding and highly complementary expertise relevant to all areas of the business. IMMO is uniquely positioned to open up residential real estate as an asset class for institutional investors by overcoming previously existing barriers to entry through the intelligent use of technology and data. ”
Gareth Jones, Managing Partner at FinTech Collective, comments: “Residential real estate is one of the largest alternative asset classes in the world, representing nearly €40 trillion in total value in Europe alone. However, it is incredibly difficult for institutions to invest in at scale, with only 2% of residential properties currently owned by institutional investors. We were attracted to IMMO as they are building the real estate asset manager of the future – data driven and tech enabled, providing a unique platform for institutional asset owners to find attractive and uncorrelated yields in an asset class they consistently want better access to. It would be difficult to overstate the size of the opportunity in front of IMMO today.”
Avinav Nigam, Co-founder & COO of IMMO says, “For our tenants, IMMO homes are always modernised to a high standard, beautifully designed and furnished as per tenant needs. We want our tenants to have the comfort of knowing that they will feel at home. With FinTech Collective and Surplus Invest, together with Talis Capital and HV Holtzbrinck ventures, we are proud to have some of the top venture investors in Europe and the US part of our journey to disrupt residential real estate, the biggest asset class in the world. Now more than ever, the trend towards work-from-home is increasing, as people move outside of city centres and into suburban areas. We are seeing this trend across cities in Europe. As a result, there’s increased demand for a standardised, quality rental product within the single family residential sector that IMMO can uniquely offer..”
