A German business address for your remote company

A remote business is one without a fixed, staffed office – the work happens wherever the team happens to be. In practice that covers:

• Remote-first companies – a GmbH or UG whose founders and employees work from home or across different cities.
• Distributed and hybrid teams – no headquarters, but people who meet for offsites, onboarding or client work.
• Founders operating while travelling – running a German business from the road or from abroad for stretches of the year.

For all of them the practical problem is the same: German registrations and counterparties expect a real, fixed address – and someone reliably receiving the post there. A virtual office solves both without tying you to a lease.

Even with no office, a German business has to put an address somewhere:

• Company registration – a GmbH or UG must provide a domestic serviceable address (ladungsfähige Anschrift) for the Handelsregister under § 8 Abs. 4 GmbHG.
• Impressum – a commercial website must display a serviceable address under § 5 DDG (the Digitale-Dienste-Gesetz, which replaced § 5 TMG in 2024).
• Gewerbeanmeldung – where your activity is a trade, you register it with the local Gewerbeamt and give a business address under § 14 GewO.
• Banking, payments and platform KYC – banks, payment providers and marketplaces ask for a verifiable business address during onboarding.
• Reliable legal service – courts and authorities need somewhere they can actually reach the business. An empty home or a shifting set of co-working day passes doesn't cut it; a fixed serviceable address does.

Your Olea address gives you one consistent address to use across all of these, in the city you choose.

This is the part that makes a German address workable for a remote business. Post sent to your location is received on your behalf and forwarded to our central scanning facility, where it's scanned and uploaded to your online mailbox – typically within 5–7 days of receipt. From there you can:

• Read every letter from your phone or laptop, wherever you are, with envelope preview before opening and OCR search across your whole mail history.
• Request the physical original by post when you need it (forwarding from €10/month + postage, international available).
• Keep originals archived securely, or have scanned items shredded after the free 30-day storage period.

For a team that's rarely in one place, that means a tax letter, a court notice or a bank verification reaches the right person the same week – not whenever someone next happens to pass an office.

Keep this distinction clear. Your Olea address is your business address – the address you register and correspond at. It is not automatically your company's place of management (Ort der Geschäftsleitung) or a permanent establishment (Betriebsstätte). Those are tax concepts the Finanzamt assesses based on where the business is actually run and decisions are actually made – which, for a remote business, may be wherever the directors are. A virtual office doesn't create or move a permanent establishment, and it doesn't set your or the company's tax residence. If your team is spread across countries, or you're managing a German company from abroad, get this right with a tax adviser rather than assuming the address settles it.

Being remote doesn't mean never meeting. Because an Olea address is a real office or coworking space, you can book a meeting room for a client pitch, desks for an onboarding week, or a private office for a quarterly offsite – at your own location or across the network in another city. You pay for the space when you use it, with no standing office cost the rest of the time.

The whole setup is online, which suits a distributed team: choose your location and plan, complete identity and business verification through our guided flow, and receive your documents digitally. There's no need to be in Germany to set up the address – though forming a GmbH or UG itself still requires a notary appointment, which is a separate step you handle with your notary.