After International Expansion and the Opening of a New Tech Hub, IMMO Recruits Former WeWork and Alfred Top Executive Arik Benzino As CCO

IMMO, the tech driven real estate investment platform building single family rental housing (SFR) portfolios on behalf of institutional investors in Europe, announced today the appointment of Arik Benzino as Chief Commercial Officer following a period of rapid international growth. In this role, Benzino will be responsible for driving IMMO’s revenue strategy, as it looks to enhance its offering to institutional investors and expand its revenue channels to include add-on and financial services to its residents.

Benzino joins IMMO with 25 years of international entrepreneurial experience, marking this move as one of the company’s most senior executive appointments to date. He comes from Alfred, North America’s leading resident experience company. He previously led WeWork’s operations in North America and Israel as COO, steering the company’s operations to achieve 5x revenue growth over a two-year period.

“I am beyond excited to welcome Arik’s immense wealth of experience and knowledge to IMMO,” said Hans-Christian Zappel, IMMO Co-founder and CEO. “His appointment is a testament to the incredible quality of talent that IMMO’s mission continues to attract, and underscores our deep belief that, much like the way we work together, the way we live does not need to be stuck in the past century. Arik’s commercial acumen, together with IMMO’s winning technology, firmly cements us on a path to become Europe’s first proptech unicorn.”

“IMMO is Europe’s most exciting proptech company,” said Benzino. “Its technology has allowed the company to control every part of a seller or resident’s experience, while opening up a previously inaccessible asset class to large institutional investors like pension funds-something previously impossible to do in Europe. It takes a daring company to come in and radically reinvent an entire category, and I’m thrilled to join the team on its mission to revolutionize how people sell, rent and live in Europe, and one day, globally.”

Benzino’s appointment adds to an exciting series of recent announcements for the company, with the high-profile appointment of Solaris Bank AG’s Hima Mandali as CTO, as well as the company’s Series B raise of $75 million in early 2022-the largest Series B raise in European proptech to date. The company has since executed on its plans to enter the Spanish and UK real estate markets, expanding from its large footprint in Germany, and has also opened a dedicated engineering and product hub in Chennai, India.