The Challenge

Founded in August 2023 and backed by a €403M growth equity vehicle, this property management platform was built on a precise thesis. Germany's Hausverwaltung sector, roughly 30,000 firms with most owner-operated and most running pre-cloud software, was facing a structural succession crisis as founders aged out with no heirs and no appetite for the digitisation their businesses needed. The model was to acquire those firms, integrate them onto a centralised platform, and build an institutional-grade property management group at pace.

By late 2025 it was working. In under two and a half years the business had grown to 150+ employees, 25,000+ units under management, and 15+ operational locations across Germany. The deal flow was active. The platform thesis was proven.

But the acquisitions had created their own complexity. Fifteen locations and hundreds of employees across multiple acquired subsidiaries are a different management challenge from a single-site scaleup. Platform standardisation, integration cadence, multi-site compliance, and organisational coherence across businesses that had recently gone through a transaction: none of that runs without dedicated leadership. The CEO, whose background was in M&A and deal execution, needed an operational counterpart to own what the acquisitions had created.

Overview of the executive search

October 2025 → January 2026 | Growth Equity Value Creation: Operational Scale Phase

In October 2025, The Big Search partnered with a growth equity-backed buy-and-build property management platform operating across 15+ locations to place its first Chief Operating Officer. The business had scaled from inception to 150+ employees and 25,000+ units under management in under two and a half years, primarily through acquisition, and the COO hire was designed to put the operational leadership layer in place ahead of the next phase of deal and integration activity. The mandate required a candidate with direct German PropTech or digital real estate operating experience, an integration track record, and the credibility to lead across distributed teams carrying the weight of recent transactions. It was a narrow profile in a market that does not produce many of them.

What made the brief hard was the combination it required. Operations leaders without PropTech domain knowledge would lack the credibility to earn trust inside acquired property management businesses. Sector specialists without COO-level depth and integration experience would not survive the complexity. German real estate experience specifically mattered: the regulatory environment, the culture of the Hausverwaltung sector, and the dynamics of managing residential and commercial portfolios in Germany are distinct enough that a generalist scaleup operator would face a steep learning curve at a moment when pace was critical.

Executive Search Across German PropTech and Technology Scaleup Leadership

The hunting strategy targeted three pools in order of directness. First, operations leaders inside German PropTech and digital real estate businesses: people with sector knowledge, distributed team experience, and credibility inside the type of firms being acquired. Second, COO and VP Operations leaders inside German tech scaleups that had navigated comparable organisational complexity: rapid headcount growth, geographic expansion, multi-site management. Third, leaders with explicit integration or roll-up experience inside PE-backed platform businesses.

The target profile criteria:

• COO or VP Operations experience inside a German PropTech, digital real estate, or real estate services business
• Direct experience scaling distributed, multi-site operations across 150+ employees
• Track record inside PE-backed or VC-backed scaleups, including through periods of market contraction
• Integration or post-merger operations experience, formal or de facto
• Leadership style suited to acquired teams: structured, collaborative, low-ego
• Based in Germany; German market fluency required

Target company archetypes included Germany's largest digital real estate brokerages, residential rental and letting platforms, climate tech and energy transition scaleups, and PE-backed services consolidators operating in the German mid-market.

We undertook an exhaustive mapping exercise across German PropTech and technology scaleup leadership, identifying 99 candidates.

Days to first shortlist delivery: 14 days from kick-off

⏱ Days to first shortlist delivery: 14 days from kick-off

The shape of the funnel reflects the specificity of the brief. Most candidates in the broader pool had two of the three required attributes: sector knowledge without integration depth, or integration experience without German real estate fluency, or operational scope without the seniority the role demanded. The profile that carried all three was uncommon. Fourteen days to a shortlist is fast for a brief this precise; it reflects a targeted search, not an easy market.

The Placed Candidate: A German PropTech COO Who Had Already Run This Kind of Business Through Scale and Downturn

The placed candidate had spent the previous six years in VP and COO roles at one of Germany's largest digital real estate brokerages, a business that had raised over €100M, grown to 500+ employees, and expanded across 40+ German cities before navigating the severe property market correction of 2022 to 2024. He entered in a sales operations leadership role, earned the COO title within three years, and carried full operational responsibility through both the expansion phase and the downturn. Before that, he was Head of Operations at one of Germany's most prominent energy transition scaleups during its hypergrowth phase, building the operational foundation that supported the company's eventual unicorn trajectory.

Why they fit:

🏠 German PropTech at COO level: Five years in VP and COO roles at one of Germany's largest digital real estate businesses; direct sector, regulatory, and distributed team management experience

🔄 Multi-site operations at scale: Built and ran operations across 40+ locations; directly applicable to a 15+ location buy-and build platform

⚙️ Startup to scaleup, twice: Built operational infrastructure from scratch at a digital real estate business and a climate tech unicorn; consistent pattern of entering growth-stage businesses and systematising what was informal

📉 Operated through a market downturn: Maintained operational continuity as COO through the 2022 to 2024 German real estate contraction; cost discipline and resilience under pressure

🤝 Right leadership character for acquired teams: Servant leadership philosophy with emphasis on team development and measurable impact; suited to managing people through post-acquisition integration

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The acquisition cadence at a buy-and-build platform creates its own ceiling. Twenty-five thousand units under management, 15 locations, and multiple subsidiaries in integration is a different operating problem from the one that earned the first round of capital. At a certain point the business needs someone whose full-time job is the operational reality the deals have produced.

We closed the search in 105 days. The shortlist landed in 14. The placed candidate was a German PropTech COO who had run a directly comparable business through both growth and contraction, with the integration depth and leadership character the brief required.

Ninety-nine candidates were mapped. The profile that carries German PropTech depth, COO-level seniority, and integration experience sits in a small slice of the market. When the targeting is precise enough to find that slice, the funnel compresses quickly. When it is not, the search takes much longer than it should.

If you are running a buy-and-build platform and the operational leadership layer has not kept pace with the deal cadence, let's talk.