Industry News

Union Investment is further expanding its position in the Irish residential market with the acquisition of “Newtown Gardens”, a development in Blackrock, in Dublin’s South suburbs. The Hamburg-based real estate investment manager entered the Irish residential market in 2021 with the acquisition of the residential development "8th Lock" in Northwest Dublin, which is currently under construction. "Newtown Gardens" and “8th Lock” have been acquired for the portfolio of the open-ended public real estate fund UniImmo: Deutschland. This is the fourth...

Arminius Group, an independent transaction, asset and fund manager with a focus on sustainable commercial real estate, has initiated distribution of the Arminius Impact Office Fund. The new sustainability investment fund for institutional investors is structured as an open-end special alternative investment fund (offener Spezial-AIF) investing exclusively in prime German office properties. Arminius Impact Office seeks out investment properties which not only meet this segment’s high standards of quality and location but also meet the fund’s exacting criteria in terms...

Allianz Real Estate, acting on behalf of several Allianz Group companies, has completed the forward purchase of MultiBusinessHub Mittelrhein, a prime logistics center in Polch, Germany. The asset has been sold by Lang & Cie. Industrial AG, a German developer of high-quality logistics facilities. Located in between the metropolitan areas of Cologne and Bonn to the north and the Rhein and Main areas to the south, the state-of-the-art facility is comprised of six warehouses, each with a net lettable area...

Macquarie Asset Management has announced the hire of Parthia Mazda Ghaziani as head of Nordic real estate transactions, based in Copenhagen. Ghaziani joins Macquarie Asset Management from Hines, a privately owned global real estate investment, development and management firm, where he was most recently an acquisitions manager covering the Nordic real estate transactions. He began his career in real estate at the Danish private equity real estate house, Thylander Group. The appointment will support Macquarie Asset Management’s intention to grow...

Katharina Gödecke has been appointed Head of International Acquisitions and Sales at Deka Immobilien. Since 1 September 2022 she is responsible for Deka Immobilien's non-European investment business and its activities in the UK and Ireland. Katharina Gödecke has been with Deka Immobilien since October 2013 and was previously responsible for investments in Germany, most recently as Head of Acquisitions and Sales for southern Germany. Prior to joining Deka, she worked for various international investment managers. She has also worked in...

Pan-European real estate investment manager Boreal IM has appointed Nikos Koulouras, the former head of investments at global investment advisor AEW, as a partner. Koulouras brings over 20 years of investment experience to Boreal IM. Koulouras spent over seven years as investment head at the €85 billion (AUM) AEW, where he led the firm’s pan-European value-add investment team. Koulouras has been directly involved in over €2 billion of transactions across 12 countries. Koulouras will focus on the development and implementation...

Hartmut Leser has been appointed partner and chief investment officer of Freo Group as of 1 September. He will also take on the role of spokesman of the management board of Freo Germany, based in Frankfurt. Leser was previously CEO of Aberdeen Investments Deutschland for around 15 years. Before that, he was managing partner of Feri, with responsibility for investment consulting. Freo Group is a real estate and private markets investment manager with a predominantly international institutional client base. Leser's...

MEAG has acquired the World Port Center (worldportcenter.com) in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, for a special real estate fund in which Munich Re Group investors are invested. The seller of the property is a Joint Venture between a fund affiliated with MCAP Global Finance (UK) LLP (the UK affiliate of New York based global asset manager Marathon Asset Management L.P.) and Unifore Real Estate B.V. The building is let on long term leases, with major tenants being the Port of Rotterdam...

Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM) is investing €438 million in majority shares of two large office and retail properties in central Paris and Berlin, via a new joint venture with Swiss Life. Swiss Life said an investment vehicle targeting core, mainly commercial, real estate assets in Berlin and Paris, had been established for the two partners to invest in, which would be managed by Swiss Life Asset Managers. A spokeswoman for NBIM, which runs Norway’s NOK 12 trillion (€1.2 trillion)...