Saurabh Saxena - Scaling a Pan European PropTech Platform
In this interview, the representative of Aviv – a PropTech initiative within the Axel Springer Group – explains the company’s ambition to become a pan‑European real‑estate powerhouse. Aviv has assembled a portfolio of leading classifieds portals across Europe (e.g., SeLoger in France, ImmoWeb, ImmoWelt in Germany, and others) and minority stakes in U.S. players such as Opendoor, Parcel, and Zumper. The core strategy is to replace the disparate legacy systems with a white‑labeled, micro‑services backend that can be plugged into any country portal, enabling rapid feature rollout and hyperscaling. The discussion covers the major challenges faced: (1) transforming the team to a generalist, product‑led culture and dealing with churn; (2) unifying heterogeneous tech stacks (PHP, JavaScript, etc.) into a single platform; (3) navigating European market fragmentation – multiple languages, currencies, regulations, and long sales cycles. The company emphasizes a shift toward majority ownership in acquisitions, treating M&A as a “side‑car” to a product‑driven organic strategy, and focusing on sectors such as seller leads, mortgage tech, rentals, agent tools, new builds, and conversational AI. Talent integration, especially multilingual communication, is highlighted as an ongoing cultural hurdle. Aviv’s governance remains independent from Axel Springer despite occasional strategic alignment. The firm leverages an OKR‑driven structure to share best practices across countries, aiming to standardize the backend while allowing downstream customization for local user experiences. Future growth will double‑down on Europe, continue to nurture existing portfolio companies, and explore AI‑enabled conversational tools for real‑estate interactions.
Chapters
Good evening everyone. Here to introduce Aviv to you. Right, so what does Aviv mean? A lot of people might not know. I actually didn't know myself, but Aviv means spring in Hebrew. Spring has a connotation of positivity. It has a connotation of freshness in general and transformation in this country. Spring also means spring break, which is also in the same breath. It just brings a lot of sweet memories to us. So in that breath, Aviv is all about freshness, it's all about transformation. Europe. So Aviv is part of Axel Sprenger Group. Axel Sprenger is the number three largest media group in Germany. Started as a news and marketing media group. It's over 100 years old to people who know about Axispringer. And then along came this idea to start buying assets, digital assets or digital classified assets. And they started buying assets in recruitment, some in cars and also in real estate. So over the chronology here, you would see that we bought quite a few assets in different countries in Europe, so ended up owning Celloger, which is the number one portal in France, the number one portal in Belgium, iMoweb and the number two in Germany, which is iMoweld. Over a period of time, they realized that this is great, it's great to have all these assets, but we need to harmonize them, we need to bring them together. And now that we have five platforms, we need to turn them into a single platform. So the far right you would see that what we're in today is, is where we're getting to a massive product and engineering transformation with a pretty incredible budget. And what we're really doing is creating a white labeled backend where we could plug and play different portals and different services in a bit of a microservices type manner. Which also means that the front end would continue to look the same or sorry, or different. But the backend would, would and the middleware would largely be the same. Which means that there's an opportunity for hyperscaling across Europe. There's an opportunity for us to create microservices or micro features and release them in different countries very quickly. So that will start happening very soon. And the ambition for the group is to go from an agent, tenant owner focused platform to start servicing the entire ecosystem, which includes developers, financing, mortgage providers and sellers. So we want to be plugged into the entire ecosystem and across multiple countries in Europe with we aspire to be a pan European powerhouse. Again, going back to what I mentioned, that the secret sauce is the white labeled set of microservices that we're building in the back end, which will help us scale hopefully phenomenally. We produce about 500 million in revenue. We're over 2,000 employees and we own a number of brands, as you can see. We also have some brands in the US so we have some minority investments in companies like Opendoor Parcel and Zumper here. And we did have an invest, I mean, we have an investment in Purple Breaks, which was in the news recently. We could talk about it over drinks, but maybe not to discuss too much here. So we do lead with not just listings, but a lot of data. And we've created a really nice team, a very able and strong team of data scientists where we're starting to rewire the data pools that we've got in the backend and pretty soon we will start using it quite intelligently. One thing we want to really differentiate with is that the team in place right now is an operating team. We understand the biggest problems of scaling in Europe, the first one being fragmentation. And I know that people talk about fragmentation almost as a point, one of three biggest points. But Europe is quite special, unlike places like China or US, where you could probably start in a state like Florida and then expand all over the country because of similar language, similar currencies, similar kind of consumer psyche, give or take in Europe is different. Every country is different, speak different languages, different currencies, different consumer psyche. So fragmentation is a problem not just for real estate, but also even, you know, I've got family and friends in big tech, they keep talking about how people in California think that, how hard could it be? You've started in uk? Let's just go and expand all over Europe. It's really hard. And regulation is really increasing. So fragmentation is a real problem. And what we're again trying to solve that is by creating this backend white labeled set of microservices which will help us grow across different countries. Sales cycles, Sales cycles also tend to be quite long in Europe. People like to have a lot of meetings in Europe. The average, you know, average number of meetings per decision tends to be longer in Europe. So we already have obviously a number one or number two position in certain markets. So we have relationships with a lot of people or decision makers in the different sectors of the industry and capital. We, we are backed by of course, Axis Springer, but we also have private equity backers who help us access a lot of resources. So what we again like to say here, and this is kind of a call out to founders and to scale ups, where, you know, we understand the pain of building a business I myself, before joining Aviv, had been building a business in PrepTech for about five years. So it's hard to build a business in Europe within real estate if you're not building a listings platform. So we understand that. And the entire team is quite agile. It's quite. Including our CEO, we've got a pretty generic or generalist team from Expedia and Google and some of the other brands. And we think generalist would deploy, you know, within the real estate segments, we face the same kind of problems. So our conversations tend to move to insight very quickly. When we talk to founders or maybe have conversations with different actors in the industry, we're quite agile. We can get in front of our board very quickly. And yeah, when we acquire companies, we let them run independently and we bring a lot of resources to the table because our aim is always to grow together across sectors within Europe. So we have a pretty large investment ambition. We're looking for companies in certain segments. So I think Ed mentioned fsbo, that's interesting to us. Seller leads is quite interesting to us. Mortgage tech, I think Ed also mentioned it's interesting to us. Rentals, agent tools, new builds and a little bit of generative AI, but really conversational AI, because we know real estate is all about conversations. So we want to see if we could deploy any tech in that space. And conversational AI has been around for five to seven years at least. We want to start piloting some tech stacks there. We're able to buy a number of companies per year. We want to be quite active and we want to be quite friendly and lead by insight to founders. And yeah, we recently acquired a business in France, so there's a booking tool called plato. The integration has been going quite well. We integrated them fully into our Sailor J platform and we give them full support. They're part of the family now. That's the team, that's the wider team. This is all the leadership, the C suite. And this is us, the investments team. And we're here to answer any questions.
Slide would be fantastic. Thank you. Now, which means you've got to ask some questions to get some questions up here. But I got questions for you. When you look at putting Aviv together, it's actually a culmination of many businesses.
Correct.
And you've got new CEO, you got lots of new leadership team around it. What have been the two or three major challenges in actually making this all happen?
Well, the first thing would be the team that we had previously. So I think there's been a bit of transformation, so bringing A generalist mindset to Aviv has been a bit of challenge over the last couple of years, but now the team is in place. So we had a bit of a kind of churn, let's say voluntary or involuntary, but that was required to get to a place where we've got a really strong team now and we've all kind of built businesses or grown scale ups in our respective work lives. So that's one definitive, definitive challenge that we faced in the last two years. The second thing is the tech stacks. The tech stacks, we had about five platforms to begin with. We have the imoweb, the imowelt was also two platforms. So to bring them all together, it's easier said than done because some code is built on PHP, some code is built on some other JavaScript, et cetera, stack. But now we're using the same stack, which means that the internal plumbing or the back work of the plumbing is completely changed and it's one stack, even though it looks different in different countries. So that's where we want to get to. So I think those are the two main almost infrastructure changes from a tech plus people point of view, I think those would be the two biggest changes.
How bad, how do you think about integration. From the people perspective, culturally? How do you get these different companies you've acquired, you put them together, how do you get them to become one team when they fundamentally come from different teams?
It's not easy, especially even something as small as language. When you sit in a meeting and you have people from different countries, the standard language is English, but it's more common here or in UK than in Europe. So if you're sitting in a meeting with, you know, people from France, Belgium, Germany, it's also hard to find talent who could speak English plus the local language. So I think that would be one of the things that that's been challenging and we're overcoming that.
That's a long process, right?
It is a long process and we're still kind of working on that, I think. And I've worked in France and Germany over the last decade. What I'm increasingly seeing personally is that there's a lot more talent now, especially younger talent who's well traveled abroad and who has worked in multiple industries and they're quite generalist in their thinking. So it's becoming easier. But. But in some countries it's harder than others.
Yeah, I can imagine that. Now when we think now what was interesting when you showed up there before, you've got all these businesses, you own 100% of and then you got the investment business that you own part of, like investment into open door and so on. What's the underlying thought process behind that? Either you're an owner operator and you own 100% and you're looking for efficiencies and driving them through common platforms and common culture, or you're an investment business, but you seem to have a foot in each camp.
Yeah. Yeah. Why so. Yeah, good question. So I think, you know, I think what we are now trying to do is as a standard, we want to have majority ownership because that is the, that is the kind of relationship structure where you could really grow together as a, as a, as a group, as a partnership. In the past, of course, we made quite a few investments in hybrids and these are all sorts of stakes, they're double digit stakes. There's also some single digit stakes in some of the companies. But we're kind of revisiting that strategy now. We want to have a bit more substantial stake so that we can really open our resources and grow together with the company. Yeah.
Would the experience with Purple Bricks have anything to do with that thought?
Not necessarily. I mean, not necessarily. I think it's been something that's just been with the new management also. I think the new management is questioning the strategy or the execution in the past and it probably does look like it's coinciding, but there's a lot more.
Reasons because what's interesting from an outside in perspective is the things you own 100% of are pretty much the same. They're marketplaces and have lots of consistency across the various countries, whether it's Belgium, France or whatever. What's interesting is that Purple Bricks is a fundamentally different model. So as an example, it always stood out as being something a little bit different anyway. And is there a, when you think about your investment theses, do you think about as now we want to stick to what we know, which is sort of marketplaces within these four things or is how are you willing to broaden that?
So I think we're trying to become much sharper now. So on one of the slides I presented the segments that we're really targeting in the past, we've invested quite a bit. It's not just Purple Bricks, but there's also some other hybrids. We've invested in Spain, in Germany. I think it was probably also a wave of. There was a wave five to seven years ago where a lot of these investments were getting made. Now we're trying to be a lot more careful and also we're trying to Be more product led. We're trying to be more product and engineering led as kind of big tech does or bigger tech companies do, rather than having these disparate strategies and they can, you know, we see the manifestation of that today with your question. I think if you're product led, if you have a clear organic strategy, then M and A is kind of like a sidecar which goes along with the strategy, but it should not go into different directions, which is what you kind of asked. So going forward we want to be a lot more aligned to the organic strategy and that is led by the white labeled pn, EP and T type strategy, product and tech. Got it.
Now actually then, a related question. I was looking at your map, right? You've got basically Europe, you got Israeli investment, you got you in the us. Do you think about just focusing on Europe and selling off those ones or you're just focusing or are they going to continue to grow no matter where it is in the world?
So they'll continue to grow independently? For now, we have a team which works on portfolio management. So we have a dedicated team which just works with. It's almost like a private equity structure that way. So we work very actively and very closely with the, with the teams in these acquired assets. So the. Yeah, so the short answer is that we want to let the assets continue to grow independently, but in terms of geographic focus, we want to in the next few years want to double down on Europe and.
Yeah, okay, now that I got a feeling, I'm trying to not tread on a landmine here. Is there an impact on marketplace businesses within Axel Springer by all the drama that's going on and I'm not 100% across the drama, so.
Well, some parts of the wider group tend to be controversial and we sit in Berlin and it's close to the political kind of. It's a political capital. So it's. There tends to be some. We're quite outspoken as a group, I think especially for the general European conservatism that tends to be quite outspoken and this becomes controversial at some point. But no, it has no impact on our business. We are already kind of carved. Not carved out, but we are in terms of governance. We run independently.
Okay.
We do interact with Axispringer quite closely on some bigger decisions, but otherwise we've. We're quite self sufficient at this point.
Okay. In moving to one platform, how do you balance the localized needs of the different product orgs within the portfolio and how do you bring them along? At what point do you say, sorry, you're not going to have customized. You're going to be part of the family.
Yeah, well, so the one platform also applies to the five platforms that we started discussing about. And then these are listing platforms and largely, let's say, you know, 80, 90% of listing platform, platform code base can be standardized, if you could say that. And then we have customization downstream so you know, kind of standardization upstream in a way and standardize customization downstream. So that's kind of the way we look at it.
Okay. Numerous marketplaces have historically strived for this single platform. We're not dominant in the markets. Should this be a priority or should market position be the priority?
So I would say from an economics point of view, and a lot of portals, a lot of marketplaces will talk about this where they're number two in the market. It comes with challenges. For example, REA in Australia, I think the number two in Australia is a third, gets a third in traffic, if I'm not mistaken. And the ARPA difference is a factor of two. And we see that number one, number two effect in most markets, including the uk. So then the number two tends to, what they tend to do is start looking outwards, that is they start expanding into horizontal services. Yeah. So what we are trying to do is of course maintain that number one position and double down in the countries that we are number one and in number two countries where we're trying to be more open minded, we're trying to think out of the box for sure.
Okay, you've invested in some disruptive companies in the brokerage space. Is that still the thing you're looking for?
No.
I think we've learned that one. Okay, you have some big operations in seller leads. Will you be taking that model into other markets?
Potentially, yes. Yeah, this is definitely something we're looking at and we see that. I think Ed also mentioned the next gen lead gen type models. So we're looking at it from all angles. The digital, the part operating models where you have to nurture the lead and staying away from the transaction. But we're looking at it. We're really getting close to what's happening on the ground and how different companies are solving it differently. So definitely looking at that space.
Can you talk about the synergies that a pan European plus Israel platform brings? Is there a lot of knowledge and resource sharing or are they mostly standalone?
So from a user point of view, I think for now, I mean real estate, we all know, I mean real estate is quite localized as an industry and from a user point of view, it Tends to be a, a localized experience. So a person sitting in France when they move to Germany, they would currently in the current setup, it's not like we would have a relationship with them and we would kind of cross sell them or cross reference them to the German market. We don't have that yet. Whether we build that capability in future, it is something we've thought about. But I think we have a long journey of standardizing the back end first before we get there and also start optimizing on the user experience and start getting a slightly more stickier relationship with our users in each country. Because only then could you cross reference them to other platforms.
Right. It may not even be a case of cross referencing to another platform. It may be a case of saying, well, in this market, this function feature, bell or whistle worked really well. Let's just pick that up and we're going to plonk it another market.
Absolutely. So that happens all the time, on a weekly, daily basis. So we're very, very tight together as all the countries. Yeah, I think I mentioned on one of the slides speed, it really feels like a startup. It feels like maybe not a startup, but a scale up. The decision making is really quick. We have a bunch of consultants in the team, I'm one of them. But we have a lot of really fast moving resources in the wider team who actually sit in different countries and they're aligned to the business. So we have an OKR structure where part of our team is literally aligned or one part of the team is aligned to a certain okr. And sometimes it also gets split out by country, but often they will have a view of all the core countries which means, you know, they could plug the best practice from Germany, put it in Belgium or take the one from France and put it in Germany. So that's. That happens on a daily and weekly basis.
Cool. Thank you very much for sharing.
Thank you.
What's happening at vivgroof and good luck.
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
And I need this.