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Asset-, Property-, and Facility Management - all in one?
Digitalisation is forcing Germany’s real estate sector to reckon with the outdated separation of asset, facility and property management—a system that many believe has become a breeding ground for inefficiencies, overlaps and missed opportunities. At a recent RUECKERCONSULT panel discussion, attended by REFIRE, five industry insiders offered a frank assessment of a system that, for all its tradition, is almost surely holding back progress and driving up costs.
Dominik Barton, CEO of the Barton Group, has seen firsthand how the old models are creaking under pressure. “The caretaker is the asset manager’s calling card,” he said. “We need to know exactly what is going on on site in order to be able to take countermeasures if necessary.” To this end, Barton’s firm has built its own IT system to integrate the three management functions—an approach that bypasses the customary fragmentation.
Carolin Brandt, Managing Director of Asset Management at HIH Real Estate, warned that a stubborn insistence on control and verification at each management level has become a roadblock to efficiency. “We allow ourselves a multitude of control and overlap issues, so that there are too few people at the value chain level who actually feel responsible,” she said. “We need to consider where a certain degree of stratification and consolidation makes sense.”
The crux of the problem, said Marc Mockwitz of Cloudbrixx, lies in the endless permutations of roles and processes. “Every customer does it a little differently,” he noted. “This makes software solutions complex and expensive to implement, and it also extends onboarding times.” Standardisation is sorely needed, yet there’s a reluctance to abandon cherished processes. “In practice, we find that customers are reluctant to part with beloved processes and embrace standards,” Mockwitz added.
Jürgen Hau, Managing Director of INDUSTRIA Immobilien, believes a gradual shift is inevitable. “The three-way split will continue to exist, but with a different set of tasks,” he said. “Everything that involves recurring effort will be covered by digitalisation and AI. This will allow us to focus more on the value development of the property, the coordination of service providers and communication with tenants and owners.”
Hoarding information and lack of transparency
But there is also a more fundamental cultural obstacle. “Data transport from A to Z is rare,” Brandt observed. “Data often disappears on its way from the facility manager to the property manager, meaning that it never reaches the asset manager.” The result is a cascade of duplications, missed opportunities, and costs that investors ultimately shoulder. Mockwitz was even more blunt: “Technically consistent processes are slowed down because the data and systems for this are missing, or because a lack of transparency conceals poor or non-existent services.”
Dominik Barton pinpointed another glaring flaw—Germany’s real estate market’s limited embrace of transparency at the acquisition stage. “In London, you get all the data on the property, whereas here you are lucky if the tenant list is correct,” he said. “In the real estate industry, you first have to laboriously gather a lot of facts and data to create a basis for information. That’s where we need to start.”
For institutional investors, these overlapping management structures and gaps in digital readiness are more than a mere operational headache—they are a clear risk to value preservation and future performance. While the sector is not short of digital tools or AI potential, the panel agreed it lacks the people to lead the change. As Thomas Junkersfeld of B&L Property Management put it: “There are activities and services that need to be assigned more clearly. I am sure that many would even be happy to hand over tasks.”
We'd say the message is unambiguous: Germany’s real estate management culture is clearly under strain. Companies have to now decide whether to cling to historical divisions and localised practices, or to confront the need for clearer roles, robust data standards, and the digital future that has already arrived elsewhere.