PMM Partners to expand offerings in Berlin

UK-based real estate advisory firm and fund manager PMM Partners, which advises UK listed investment group Phoenix Spree Deutschland, is looking to expand its offerings in Berlin, its founder Mike Hilton told REFIRE.

‘We focus on residential assets in Berlin but we’re also looking at conversions of offices to residential or at other options,’ Hilton said. ‘You need scale for critical mass, or around €100m. You get bigger or you get out.’

Disposals are also on the cards, according to Hilton: ‘We want to invest more in Berlin, which is why we’re divesting our holdings in other German cities,’ he said. ‘At the moment, €90m, or 18%, of our €500m portfolio is outside Berlin. By the end of the year, I expect that to be 15%. We’re disposing of our legacy portfolio that we’ve owned for 10 years.’

It is a good time to sell. Earlier this year, PMM advised Phoenix Spree on its sale of portfolio of 17 non-core properties in Nuremberg and Fürth for €35.25m. The properties in Nuremberg netted three times what was paid for them in 2008, Hilton said.

PMM is one of a number of clients who used to employ disgraced UK public relations firm Bell Pottinger to do its PR. The public relations firm collapsed into administration in the UK earlier this month after being accused of exploiting racial fault lines in a South African PR campaign. It put itself up for sale in the wake of a scandal but has been unable to find a buyer. The administrators BDO said the firm had been ‘heavily financially impacted’ by the scandal. Bell Pottinger, which was started by an adviser to Margaret Thatcher, was thrown out of the UK industry body PRCA earlier this month for a PR campaign that emphasised the power of white-owned businesses in South Africa. It is only the second company in 10 years to be ejected.

Several clients, including HSBC, Investec and luxury goods company Richemont, severed ties with the firm over its work on the campaign. Bell Pottinger's Middle East and Asian units had already announced plans to separate from the UK parent company. It is not the firm’s first brush with controversy: in the late 1990, it worked on a campaign to release former Chilean dictator General Pinochet after his arrest in London on a Spanish extradition warrant on murder charges.

PMM Partners has since switched its financial public relations to London-based Tulchan Communications.