Swiss-headquartered, family-owned investment group Edmond de Rothschild has rebranded its three active real estate subsidiaries into one new group known as Edmond de Rothschild Investment Management.
The group controls a €10.4bn pan-European fund management platform with nine branch offices spread across its three units - the northern European Cording Real Estate Group, French group Cleaveland, and Swiss fund manager Orox. The consolidation and rebranding is designed to move away from the hitherto national strategies largely pursued by the units and create a more unified pan-European approach to appeal to its 80% institutional investors.
Edmond de Rothschild acquired Swiss real estate fund manager Orox in 2012, before taking over French firm Cleaveland in 2016 and pan-European fund manager Cording in 2018.
But rather than creating a large pan-European fund, the new approach will be to focus on specific investment themes it identifies in local markets, Rodney Bysh, Cording’s CEO, explained to REFIRE. The company will identify niche trends, sectors, geographies and thematics on which it can grow investment portfolios. The name change will help simplify the group’s communication by capitalising on the Edmond de Rothschild brand, he said.
Three main areas will be the initial focus - residential markets in Switzerland and the UK, light industrial and logistics in the UK, Benelux and Germany, and repositioning existing office buildings. This last area will focus on land-use planning, the development of new and sustainable buildings, and the renovation and energy-optimisation of obsolete buildings.
Pierre Jacquot, who will head the new consolidated group along with Arnaud Andrieu as deputy CEO and Rodney Bysh as head of development, said there was an ambition to have a positive impact on urban areas “by concentrating on projects that are not only one or two buildings, but a series of buildings on which we can employ new concepts of usage, regenerating areas”.
