Cleanventure AG buys GxP, targets €750m property investment

As late as June this year the Berlin-based commercial property specialist German Asset Management GmbH relaunched as GxP Asset Management. Although founded only in 2015, German Asset Management has already invested over €160m in office and retail properties across the country, in cities including Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig, Erfurt and Hannover.

The company is now undergoing a new change of identity. Listed Hamburg-based investment company Cleanventure AG is buying GxP along with its property portfolio by means of a capital increase, and will rename the group GxP German Properties AG.

The plan is to expand the portfolio to over €750m over the coming two years, with acquisitions of €250m already in the pipeline. The investment focus will remain on core-plus and value-add office and retail properties in German metropolitan areas and selected mid-size cities.

German Asset Management had been steadily building its own portfolio, in May this year adding a package worth €40m consisting of 12 properties from a bank sale. The assets included the Lenné-Passagen in Frankfurt/Oder, the Teltow-Towers in Teltow and six 'toom' DIY stores in cities including Düren, Halle an der Saale, and Düsseldorf. The average remaining lease terms were only 18 months. Most have since been extended to nine years.

The CEO of the new company is former Conwert Immobilien board chairman Johannes Meran, while GpX founders Andreas Lewandowski and Rainer Schorr (both previously at Estavis) join the board – Lewandowski as CFO, and Schorr as chairman. Philip Moffat and Hermann Otto Solms complete the board of the new company, which is already listed on the Munich and Stuttgart exchanges. A Frankfurt listing in the Entry Standard is imminent, says the company.

Meran helped drive Conwert's expansion from its Vienna base to becoming a significant holder of German residential property, much in the news over the past two years as both a predator and itself a takeover target as part of the great consolidation going on among German listed residential investors. Since leaving Conwert, he founded Equity Partner GmbH in 2014, which to date has raised €800m of equity capital for the acquisition of various German property companies.