„Die letzten zwei Grad sind immer die teuersten“
For many years, the lion's share of our neighbourhood development projects were in Germany, not Austria. For instance, in 2011, we purchased the Louis Am Park new building project in the Adlerquartiere quarter of the already up-and-coming Gallus district of Frankfurt am Main, and proceeded to develop the area over the subsequent years. Long before the acronym ESG became a buzzword in the real estate sector, we transformed the 50,000 m2 site by combining residential units with a childcare provider, sports pitches and playgrounds to improve the social value of the development. This project was followed in 2012 by East Village, another significant neighbourhood development project in Frankfurt.
Overall, in our first decade, we successfully developed 226,000 m2 of urban neighbourhood space in Germany and another 49,000 m2 in Austria. Then came the Althan quarter in Vienna, with the FRANCIS complex at its heart – an enormous project that in terms of the numbers and area was almost as big as all our previous neighbourhood development projects combined.
Including the Althan quarter, our neighbourhood development projects to date span 550,000 m2 or 55 hectares. That's the same as 77 football pitches or, to put it another way, a small city borough.
By increasing market access to this asset class for institutional investors through our new fund and join-venture models, we now hope to significantly expand the neighbourhood projects in our development pipeline. Neighbourhood development projects currently make up 60% of our total development portfolio in terms of total square meterage, but we expect this figure to rise to 75%, or perhaps even higher, over the next few years.
