When I was a child, my family lost every property it owned.
My mother, a math teacher, and I ended up living in a rented room. Two meters by three.
I am not telling you this for sympathy. I am telling you because everything that follows makes no sense without it.
The first job
In 2012 I was eighteen, starting computer science at Sofia University, and I got my first job as a programmer: remote work for a company in the United States.
I had other offers. I took this one for two reasons.
The first was practical. Remote, part-time, compatible with a degree.
The second was not practical at all. The company worked with foreclosed properties and court auctions. Homes that people had lost.
I knew what that looked like from the other side.
So I made myself a quiet promise:
Learn the craft. And learn how homes are lost and found — well enough to one day buy one.
I stayed in that world for more than a decade.
One basket
Warren Buffett has a line I kept coming back to in those years: diversification protects you from ignorance, but if you actually know what you are doing, you put your eggs in one basket and you watch that basket.
I had exactly one basket. Software, applied to distressed real estate. I kept watching it.
A few years ago the promise from 2012 came true, although not the way you might expect. I bought a home in Sofia for roughly a third of what comparable homes cost.
Not at an auction.
I had rented that apartment for years. I knew the flat, I knew the owner, and we trusted each other. The market knew neither. When the moment came, the price reflected what the market did not know.
That taught me the lesson underneath the whole business:
Good purchases do not come from luck. They come from knowing something that is available to everyone and seen by almost no one.
The decision
At the beginning of 2025, I left.
The details do not belong here. What matters is the conclusion I walked away with:
If I am going to invest what I know, I will invest it into something of my own.
Fourteen years of programming. More than a decade inside the mechanics of foreclosures. One basket, finally mine.
Why Germany
Because German foreclosure law looks surprisingly like the American system I had worked with for years.
A Zwangsversteigerung — a court-ordered auction of a property — follows a process anyone who has worked with American foreclosure data would recognize. A court orders the sale. An independent expert appraises the property and sets a market value. The court publishes that value, the documents, and the auction date. The highest bid at a public hearing wins.
Different language. Same skeleton.
And here is the paradox that made the decision easy.
By law, this data is public. Court appraisals, market values, photos, floor plans, auction dates — all of it, published by the courts themselves.
And almost nobody reads it. It lives in PDFs on court portals, scattered, unstructured, expiring quietly.
The information advantage that got me my own home — knowing what is available to everyone and seen by almost no one — is sitting there, in plain sight, for an entire country.
Hammergebot
So I built Hammergebot.
It is not a listing portal. It is a data-intelligence platform for German foreclosure auctions.
It watches the official court sources, so the data is always current. It reads the court documents — appraisals, exposés, land-registry extracts — and pulls out the facts that matter, so you do not have to open every PDF yourself. It puts market values, photos, floor plans, and cadastral signals side by side, and it is honest about how well each property is documented, because a well-papered auction and a thin one should not look the same.
And it lets you save a search and walk away. The opportunities come to you.
Two kinds of people I want it to serve.
People in Germany buying their first home — because a court auction can be the difference between affording one and not, and the process should not require a law degree.
And BRRR investors — buy, rehab, rent, refinance, repeat — whose whole strategy lives or dies on buying below market value. They do this professionally, and they need the facts faster than the courts publish them.
Why these people? Because this is what I understand. I understand this business and I understand software development, and not much else.
It turns out that is enough.
A roof over your head
I still remember the room. Two meters by three.
A roof over your head is not a luxury, and finding one should not depend on who you happen to know.
Hammergebot is live and in production. I will keep building it.
Follow along.
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