Operationalising the Buy-and-Build: Placing the COO at a Growth Equity-Backed German Property Management Platform

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, most owner-operated and running pre-cloud software, was facing a succession crisis as founders aged out with no heirs and no appetite for the digitisation their businesses needed. The plan 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, with active deal flow and a proven thesis.

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 recently acquired businesses don't run themselves. The CEO, whose background was in M&A and deal execution, needed an operational counterpart to own what the acquisitions had created.

They turned to The Big Search.

Overview of the executive search

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

In October 2025, The Big Search was retained to place the platform's first Chief Operating Officer, designed to put operational leadership in place ahead of the next phase of deal and integration activity. The mandate required direct German PropTech operating experience, an integration track record, and the credibility to lead distributed teams still carrying the weight of recent transactions. The search closed in January 2026.

Executive Search Across German PropTech and Technology Scaleup Leadership

The hunting strategy targeted three pools in order of directness: operations leaders inside German PropTech and digital real estate businesses with sector credibility; COO and VP Operations leaders inside German tech scaleups that had navigated comparable organisational complexity, rapid headcount growth, and geographic expansion; and leaders with explicit integration or roll-up experience inside PE-backed platform businesses.

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
• A structured, collaborative, low-ego leadership style suited to acquired teams
• Based in Germany, with German market fluency

Target 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 in the German mid-market.

We mapped 99 candidates across German PropTech and technology scaleup leadership.

First shortlist

14 days from kick-off

Of the 99, 47 were contacted, 17 reached consultant interview, 8 made the shortlist, 7 went to client interview, and 1 was hired. Most candidates in the broader pool carried two of the three required attributes: sector knowledge without integration depth, integration experience without German real estate fluency, or operational scope without the seniority the role demanded. The profile that carried all three was rare, and 14 days to a shortlist for a brief this precise reflects 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

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

• PropTech at COO level — six years in VP and COO roles at one of Germany's largest digital real estate businesses, with direct sector, regulatory, and distributed team 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, a consistent pattern of systematising what was informal.
• Operated through a downturn — maintained operational continuity as COO through the 2022 to 2024 German real estate contraction.
• Right character for acquired teams — a servant leadership philosophy with emphasis on team development, suited to managing people through post-acquisition integration.

A buy-and-build platform's acquisition cadence 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, and at some point the business needs someone whose full-time job is that reality. The Big Search closed this search in 105 days, with a shortlist delivered in 14, placing a leader who had run a directly comparable business through both growth and contraction.

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