After Bankruptcy – Sale of WHB Property: Elektro-Stark moves in with Warehouse

For a young couple from the Eggern region, support is still on the way from nightmare to dream home – after Eggern’s WHB-Steinböck and Steinböck-Homes went bankrupt and the couple sent a call for help with NÖN on the horizon. Out of shell and down payments are consumable. However, the procedure started at the end of 2022 via timber builder WHB and is not yet complete. But according to insolvency director Wolfgang Mayrhofer: “The WHB site itself is history.” The property is sold and in.

Stark already had to rent overseas warehouses. Those items were up for auction, Mayerhofer said. The empty company building has now also been sold to a regional company. Waidhofner’s lawyer did not name the buyer, but NÖN’s search leads to Stark Elektro & Kälte GmbH, which already operates two sites in Heidenreichstein and Litschau with a total of 25 employees.

Managing Director Wolfgang Starck confirms the purchase upon request. “We’ll set up camp here,” he says. Recently, the space requirements could no longer be covered by ourselves, “we had to rent outside warehouses.” In the medium term, he sees the former WHB building as a point of contact for mechanics to get them ready for construction sites.

Sales proceeds are distributed to creditors. However, Wolfgang Mayrhofer expects to tinker with the procedure for a few more weeks before it is surely finalized and “so the creditors will be able to enjoy a share”.

Looking back: from Waldvirtler Holzbau to WHB-Steinböck. WHB was founded – for Waldviertler Holzbau – in the mid-1990s by Herbert Kammermann († 2016) and Christian Bohm, in 2008 sold to Rudolf Weinzettel and in 2017 to Mario Steinbock. The latter renamed the company WHB-Steinböck Fertighaus GmbH.

This slid into bankruptcy before Christmas 2022, and in February 2023 the restructuring procedure had to be changed to bankruptcy and the company closed. Until then, it was the largest company in Egern municipality with ten employees. “Steinböck Homes GmbH”, founded by Steinböck in 2021, informed customers in April 2023, from whom it had previously accepted high down payments for WHB homes as a WHB sales company, that this company was also about to close, “You will be informed by our representative Legal in the next few weeks on the course of further work.

In fact, Steinböck Homes’ bankruptcy proceedings were also opened in the Krems Regional Court at the beginning of May, and the closure was ordered on May 11. All that remains is for clients, AK district office manager Michael Pressel announced, to register their claims in court – with additional costs and poor prospects for money or performance. There was no “mass” in the homes, especially since the property and its inner workings were part of the bankruptcy property of WHB-Steinböck Fertighaus GmbH and not the sales company.