The number of real estate companies in Germany and features of their business activities - an empirical project

In Germany there is not much information available on the number of real estate companies. Property companies in Germany need a permit before they start doing business. In this respect, it should be possible to determine the number of companies selling or letting properties. Since this approval is not returned, even if the real estate company is no longer in business, the number of permits is not meaningful. In addition, there is a lack of information on how many of these companies are only occasional brokers and how many of these companies can be assumed to be fully established brokerage firms. Therefore, the empirical paper analyzes the number of real estate companies, and important features of their business activities based on the IMV database. It also examines how the number of brokerage firms has changed over time considering the respective real estate sales on the German real estate market.The IMV program is an efficient research tool for residential market analysis, the program collects nearly all property ads in Germany, which are published in real estate portals, newspapers, and weeklies, and stores them in the IMV data base. Over 700,000 real estate offers are evaluated nationwide every day from hundreds of print media and the Internet.