International retail real estate fund and asset manager Pradera has announced the opening of its first German office to be led by newly recruited head of Germany, Berith Ironside.
Ironside, a German native, brings 27 years’ experience in Pan European real estate asset management to the post.
Prior to joining Pradera, she was head of International Expansion at AGRE and set up and ran the German portfolio for Cityhold Property. In previous roles, she led the European Foreign Investment Team at Allianz, was senior fund manager for a Pan-European Retail Fund at Grosvenor in Paris, established Savills IM in Germany and was fund manager of the Savills IM German Retail Fund.
Her local team will manage the German assets held in the Pradera European Retail Parks SCSp fund, which last April acquired 17 retail parks from IKEA Centres. Ten are in Germany, including assets in Cologne, Hamburg and Ulm.
The new office is also responsible for managing assets in the Pradera Open-Ended Retail Fund (POERF). These include the Real Hypermarket in Bamberg along with the Äppelallee-Centre in Wiesbaden, which POERF acquired in early 2016 for €82 mln.
David Fletcher, Chief Executive of Pradera, said: 'The opening of our first German office under Berith’s expert leadership is a natural progression in our ambition to be the go-to partner for retail real estate fund and asset management across all retail asset classes. It provides significant opportunities for investors and asset owners in one of Europe’s most resilient economies, where we anticipate strong appetite for high quality retail product, now and in the future.'
The move is the latest initiative to follow a minority investment by multi-family office LJ Partnership in April 2016. That deal signalled Pradera’s plans to take its platform into untapped segments of the retail property market and new geographies.
Pradera has since established Pradera Retail Asia, a joint venture with Macquarie Retail Real Estate Management (MIRA). Last May it added a fourth retail property in China – Mosaic Chongqing Metro Park – to assets already managed in Qingdao, Xi’an and Shanghai, with a total gross leasable area (GLA) of 200,000 m2.
