Panattoni gears up for €500m German expansion

The logistics and storage property developer Panattoni Europe has been re-organising in anticipation of a big expansion in its German business, which it said recently should reach about €500m in Germany this year.

Last year the company, a subsidiary of the California-headquartered Panattoni Development Company, moved into its new corporate HQ in Hamburg’s Hafen City district.Its German operations will be supported by further offices in Mannheim and Munich. It recently added two new managers, Sönke Kewitz and Fred-Markus Bohne (who joins from Gateway Real Estate in Frankfurt), as managing directors to its board, to beef up execution of the firm’s business strategy in Germany. To date the group has been primarily active in Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

“As a market leader, Panattoni Europe has been quite successful in eastern Europe,” said Kewitz in a press statement. “We want to follow that example and transfer our successful strategy here.” Added Bohne: “An essential building block of our strategy is our proven knowledge of the market and our being close to our clients and their projects.”

The two, with a German team of 13 staff, says they aim to invest €300m in real estate with land banking over the next few months, with an additional €200m earmarked for build-to-suit projects. At present, some 55,000 square meters of logistics space is being developed by Panattoni, all scheduled for the first quarter of 2015 in Bremen, Henstedt-Ulzburg, and Hassfurt.

A further two projects in southern Germany, with 20,000 sqm each, are in the pipeline and set for closing this quarter. One of these is a 5-hectare site on a disused military airbase in Hanau near Frankfurt bought for €4m from the local authority, on which Panattoni plans to build a 35,000 sqm warehouse for contract logistics.

Panattoni also plans to expand property management, with the division targeting a volume of “several hundred million” in the medium term.