Currently, 40 million euros in brokerage commission for Hausgold run on an annual basis. A good third of this remains as sales on the platform, said the 41-year-old founder.
Hamburg If you google for the Hamburg brokerage platform Hausgold, the first thing you will see is a brazen advertisement from a competitor: “Better to go straight to McMakler – because your house is worth gold”. Also in the perception of the start-up scene, the Hanseatic people are overshadowed by the Berlin digital broker. This is also due to the fact that house gold attracts less attention than the competition for one indicator: founder Sebastian Wagner needs significantly less risk capital for his business model.
While McMakler collected 42 million euros in its last financing round last year, Hausgold currently has ten million euros. However, after the founder of Qiagen, Metin Colpan, Wagner is getting another prominent investor: Former Commerzbank boss Martin Blessing joins Hausgold with partners.
“I am looking forward to following the future development of the company from a partner’s point of view,” said Blessing. The real estate market is still in the early stages of digitization and is therefore a promising business area. Blessing is not alone: According to a study by the Blackprint consultancy, there are 824 PropTechs in German-speaking countries. In the first half of 2021 alone, these real estate start-ups received around 287 million euros in investments – roughly as much as in the entire previous year.
The multiple founder Wagner founded Hausgold in 2014 – one year before McMakler. Early investors include Rocket Internet and Hanseventures. During that time, several start-ups were created that are aimed at home sellers and are still competing today.
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Wagner sees the comparatively small financing round, half of which consists of bank loans, an expression of the capital efficiency of house gold. “We don’t collect money just to collect money,” he emphasized. Unlike the digital brokers like McMakler, the Hamburg-based company does not broker real estate itself, but rather helps house sellers to find a broker.
Wagner wants to use the fresh money to stimulate his own growth
They also provide brokers with digital tools. This means you need fewer employees of your own, but you have to share the brokerage fee with the real estate agent. In this respect, Hausgold is similar to the larger provider Homeday, which acts as a Hertha sponsor. Unlike house gold, however, the Berliners only broker to one broker per region.
Wagner wants to use the fresh money to stimulate his own growth – for example through more developers and marketing people. New offers such as insurance for everything to do with buying a house are to be added to the platform. Wagner intends to almost double sales as early as 2021. At the moment, an annualized brokerage commission of 40 million euros runs through the platform. A good third of this remains as sales at Hausgold, said the 41-year-old.
The latest figures published in the Federal Gazette are from 2019, when the company posted a loss of two million euros.
The current financing round should last until 2023. After that, Wagner wants to work profitably. The fact that Deutsche Bank got involved as an investor and sales partner a few years ago helps. “We can build a good, profitable business – then everything else will show up,” said Wagner about exit perspectives.
Wagner originally aimed to reach profitability in normal operations as early as 2020. In the corona year, however, this was only possible by temporarily reducing marketing costs, said Wagner.
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