Hotel Investments AG Acquires a Stake in KI Hausverwaltung Novumstate

Hotel Investments AG has become a shareholder in Novumstate GmbH. With the entry of the company led by real estate investor Holger Ballwanz, the PropTech firm is receiving additional capital and strategic support for its continued expansion. Novumstate positions itself as an “AI-first” property management company and aims to transform a market that, to this day, remains heavily reliant on manual processes and, consequently, high labor costs.

No details were provided regarding the size of the investment or the company’s valuation.

AI Is Not Meant to Supplement, but to Manage

According to Novumstate, its approach differs from that of traditional property management firms, which retroactively supplement existing workflows with digital tools or individual AI functions. Its proprietary platform was developed from the ground up around the use of artificial intelligence. The technology is designed to directly take over or prepare those processes that have previously required a significant amount of manual effort.

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The potential is correspondingly great: According to Novumstate, about 70 percent of revenue at traditional property management firms comes from manual work.

Incoming inquiries, for example, are automatically understood, classified, and assigned to the appropriate employee. Emails and phone calls are converted into structured tasks without first having to be manually recorded. An early-warning system is also designed to identify risks before they escalate into major problems.

Proprietary platform covers the entire management process

Technologically, Novumstate relies on a platform developed entirely in-house. This platform is designed to consolidate as many areas of property management as possible into a single system. These include communication between owners, tenants, and management; the processing of individual tasks; owners’ meetings; and accounting.

This is also crucial to the business model. Since Novumstate develops and operates the technological infrastructure itself, potential efficiency gains from automation remain within the company rather than going to an external software provider. The combination of property management and an in-house software stack could thus constitute a significant part of the scaling strategy.

Hotel Investments AG Sees Potential in the Fragmented Market

Hotel Investments AG is now joining as a strategic shareholder from the real estate industry. The company is primarily active as an investor in the hotel real estate sector. For Holger Ballwanz, this investment is also part of a broader digitalization strategy in the real estate sector.

The company approaches property management from the perspective of artificial intelligence and combines this technological innovation with operational excellence.

Holger Ballwanz

The investor sees significant growth potential, particularly in this highly fragmented market. The new capital is to be invested primarily in the technological advancement of the platform and the scaling of the business model.

A Market Well-Suited for Automation

Property management is one of those industries where digitization has been discussed for years, yet many day-to-day processes continue to rely on emails, phone calls, documents, and manual data entry. At the same time, the market is highly fragmented. It is precisely this combination that makes it attractive for new “AI-first” business models.

This does not necessarily mean completely removing humans from property management. Rather, AI could take over a large portion of the recurring administrative work, allowing employees to focus on areas where decision-making, communication, and problem-solving actually require human attention.

For Novumstate, it now remains to be seen to what extent this technological advantage can actually be scaled as the real estate portfolio grows. This is because, particularly in property management, standardizable processes repeatedly encounter unique buildings, owners, tenants, and challenges. If the company succeeds in combining these two elements, what might seem like a traditional property management business could evolve into a truly interesting PropTech company with a technology-driven scaling model.