Scout24 Buys Up Rental Portal WG-Suche.de

The German portal operating company Scout24 has reportedly acquired the rental portal startup WG-Suche.de fr an undisclosed sum. Scout24 had previously taken a 25% interest in the startup via a 2017 funding round and listings from WG-Suche.de have been syndicated to the pages of Scout24's leading German property portal ImmoScout24 since then.

Founded in 2012 by Carsten Wagner and Natascha Wegelin (who has since gone on to become a well-known finance blogger under the name Madame Moneypenny), WG-Suche.de specialises in rentals and is particularly popular among students boasting some 300,000 registered users. The startup had been based at the offices of the Scout24 incubator until the program was discontinued in 2017. Since then the 3 employees of WG-Suche.de have been based at ImmoScout24's Berlin offices.

Although Scout24 declined to give any details of the deal to Business Insider and the WG-Suche founders have also been tight-lipped, the deal was confirmed in a Scout24 statement and an 'in cooperation with ImmoScout24' label has appeared on the pages of wg-suche.de in recent weeks.

The acquisition of WG-Suche.de is the second in as many months for Scout24 after the company announced that it had bought up German landlord software firm Vermietet.de for an undisclosed sum in May. Since completing the divestment of its car marketplace business Autoscout in April 2020, it seems that Scout24 is now on the hunt for opportunities to round out its real estate offering.