Kevin Tracey of Oberon Asset Management makes the case for Scout24 (ETR: G24), Germany’s dominant online property portal — a business he argues has been unfairly “thrown out with the AI bathwater.” Scout24 has sold off alongside global property portals over the past year and now trades well below its own ten-year average multiple, despite occupying a category that has produced some of the best businesses in public markets. Tracey explains the structural reason these portals are so powerful outside the U.S.: without an American-style MLS to commoditize listings, the leading portal becomes the aggregator, and demand pulls in supply in a winner-take-most dynamic with durable pricing power. Scout24 sits squarely in that position, drawing roughly 20 million monthly visitors, the large majority of listings, and a subscription “toll” model rather than an advertising one.
The heart of the thesis addresses the AI fear head-on. Tracey argues that buyers won’t fully delegate an emotional, heterogeneous home search to an AI agent, and that an LLM without a structured database can’t deliver what buyers actually want — complete supply, instant results, and rich verified data — especially in a fragmented German market with tens of thousands of small agent sites and many homes sold agent-free. Scout24, by contrast, owns the supply and proprietary data (valuations, transaction prices, energy scores), is already shipping conversational search and an OpenAI-built chatbot, and gets around 80% of its traffic direct or via branded search. He then lays out the upside: a take rate roughly half that of peers with years of headroom, multiple growth levers as agent penetration and premium tiers rise, and management signaling conviction through a record buyback and insider purchases above the current price. The framing points to a high-teens IRR before any re-rating, and 20%+ if AI fears subside.
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