Thilo Konzok, co-founder of Home, left Airbnb to build a platform that rents apartments from landlords and sublets to tenants, solving the mismatch between landlords who don't want to manage properties and tenants who want responsive ones. Home reached 100,000 apartments in its first year and now serves about 1% of German landlords.
My name is Thilo. I'm one of the founders of Home. Before I started Home, I trained as an architect, worked at Airbnb, and then we started a company 2 years ago. With Home, we rent apartments from landlords and let them to tenants, and we're doing this in order to enable better housing experience for both sides of the market. I think the problem that we saw in the beginning was that a lot of landlords don't really want to be landlords. They don't want to be the person who got called while they were on vacation to fix the water pipes, right? And on the other hand, tenants really long for a landlord who really cares about doing this full-time, who's available when the water pipe breaks. So we thought there's a need for someone in the middle. That is the fundamental basis of the platform. For now, we're just trying to make this work on a really high level and have our landlords really like what we do and have our tenants really like what we do. If you're raising money or thinking about raising money, you just want to work with people who have been in your shoes. We got introduced to EQT by a mutual friend. We were really impressed by the quality of the team, the speed they handled it, and just the hunger that they seem to have. Axel is based in Berlin, so he's the first local partner on the ground in Germany. And the way we work together is mostly in recruiting, actually. We hired a bunch of people that Axel introduced us to, and I think access to that level of talent is just really helpful. We were very conscious about trying to build something that 10, 15 people would like, and we hit that, I think, about 1 or 2 months in. It took us about a year to get to 100,000 apartments. Now we're at the point where 1% of all German landlords use our app. What we're really excited about is having an impact on better housing for tenants. In 5 years' time, you're not gonna be setting up your own Wi-Fi, right? You don't wanna pay your utility billing a year later, and we think you wanna book your apartment online with a click.
