immosuchmaschine.at (immosuma GmbH)↓ImmobilienScout24 / Scout24 Group
Situation
Gernot Singer, a native of Carinthia who had previously worked at Ericsson among others, launched immosuchmaschine.at in 2010. The platform works as a meta search engine: it aggregates property listings from numerous portals and classified sites, giving searchers as complete an overview of the market as possible. In turn it sends visitors to the portals; Scout24 had been receiving traffic from it for some time on a pay-per-click basis. In Austria, immosuchmaschine.at reached around 600,000 visitors a month, while immosuchmaschine.de recorded more than 1.1 million visits in Germany. Singer built the business largely on his own, first as a sole trader and from 2016 as immosuma GmbH. He described it as "an extended one-man show" and, by his own account, highly profitable. The open question was who should carry such a business forward in the long term.
Process
IGCP held the exclusive mandate for the sale of immosuma GmbH. Its work extended from strategic positioning through investor search to operational handover and the final merger with ImmobilienScout24. For a search engine that lives on referring users to portals, the portal operators themselves are the most obvious buyers: they know the value of every referred visitor from their own billing. On top of that comes the trust built through earlier cooperation. As Singer put it, with the Scout24 Group they had won "one of our longest-standing and closest partners as buyer".
Outcome
The buyer of immosuma GmbH was the Munich-based Scout24 Group. On the Austrian market it operates Immobilien.net and immodirekt.at alongside ImmobilienScout24.at; together with immosuchmaschine.at, this network reached around 3.5 million visits a month according to Scout24. The acquisition was followed by operational integration and finally the corporate merger with ImmobilienScout24. The immosuchmaschine.at brand and domain were retained, as was immosuchmaschine.de. Singer remained managing director for a further year after the sale and then stayed on in customer and partner relations. The purchase price was not disclosed; Singer said only: "In any case, I am very satisfied."
What the case shows
immosuchmaschine shows that even a very lean company can find a strategic buyer if its value lies in its function within the market rather than in staff or assets. Its business consisted of referring searchers to portals; for one of those portal operators, control over this flow was of direct value. Anyone running a similar business model should therefore see their business partners not only as customers but also as potential acquirers. At the same time, the case shows what a one-man show requires in a sale: knowledge and relationships sit with one person. Singer's decision to stay on as managing director and later in partner relations kept that knowledge within the business.