Edmond de Rothschild has rebranded its three real estate subsidiaries as it seeks to expand its €10.4bn pan-European fund managment platform.
The Swiss-headquartered, family-owned investment group has consolidated Cording Real Estate Group, Cleaveland and Orox into one group known as Edmond de Rothschild Real Estate Investment Management.
Edmond de Rothschild acquired Swiss real estate fund manager Orox in 2012, before taking over French firm Cleaveland in 2016 and pan-European fund manager Cording in 2018.
Pierre Jacquot, who has been overseeing the integration of the three businesses since the end of 2018, has been appointed CEO of the fully consolidated entity.
Rodney Bysh, the CEO of Cording, has been named head of business development.
The consolidation and rebranding is intended to help Edmond de Rothschild REIM become more of a truly pan-European player and to move away from predominately offering domestic real estate strategies to investors in respective jurisdictions.
Jacquot told IPE Real Assets that combining the three businesses would enable the company to “travel with our clients”. He said: “In other words, we are able to propose to some of our existing clients access to other markets.”
Approximately, 80% of its clients are institutional investors, with the remainder private investors and in-house capital, Jacquot said.
He cited recent examples of taking Swiss investors into Benelux real estate markets, and German investors into the UK.
However, rather than create a large pan-European fund, the company will focus on specific investment themes it identifies in local markets.
It plans to focus on thematic, sectoral or regionally focused funds, as well as club deals and joint ventures.
“We see a trend that some of competitors are concentrating management and rationalising operations in only certain decision centres,” Jacquot said. “We don’t want to go in that [direction].”
He added: “We don’t want to necessarily grow a super big pan-European fund. We’d rather identify niche trends, sectors, geographies, thematics on which we are able to grow investment portfolios based on what we see in our local markets.”
Edmond de Rothschild REIM has identified three main areas of focus: residential markets in Switzerland and the UK; light industrial and logistics in the UK, Benelux and Germany; and repositioning existing office buildings.
For the latter, the company is focusing on land-use planning, the development of new and sustainable buildings, and the renovation and energy-optimisation of obsolete buildings.
Jacquot said there was an ambition to have a positive impact on urban areas “by concentrating on projects that are not only one or two buildings, but a series of buildings on which we can employ new concepts of usage, regenerating areas”.
