EUROPE – Swiss real estate company Corestate, which has recently acquired several distressed portfolios in Germany, has created its own property management subsidiary Capera.

The Germany-based Capera Immobilien Service will start operations at the beginning of July, with a first mandate comprising 14,000 residential and commercial units managed by Corestate.

Walter Leitner, former managing director at alt+kleber Immobiliengruppe, will manage the subsidiary, with responsibility for approximately 100 employees in seven German cities.

Ralph Winter, founder of Corestate, said the “time was ripe for an innovative concept” in German property management.

A Corestate spokesman added that there had been “a qualitatively weak” range of property management services that was only operating locally.

Leitner said: “Our services include professional management of niche real estate concepts, and we are able to take on difficult portfolios.”

He added that company would focus on large portfolios with properties across Germany.

Winter pointed to the “huge potential” in the existing portfolios of institutional investors and confirmed that the acquisition of existing management companies for further growth was part of their strategy.

In May, Corestate announced the finalising of a distressed deal in Germany just five months after sealing a similar deal in January.

“We had expected more distressed portfolios to come to the market,” Nikolai Deus-von Homeyer, Corestate Capital Corporate Development, had said during the Handelsblatt Immobilientagung, “but we are quite happy about the current inflow, which is quite enough to satisfy our interest for distressed property.”

He said the portfolios his company had bought so far over the last three years were “so-called legacy portfolios” from the 2000s, “with too much debt financing where the banks did not renew their contracts”.