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As Germany's urban rents spiral and social housing gaps widen, the need for speed and affordability has never been more urgent. Modular construction—once an industrial curiosity—has emerged as a credible solution: faster, cheaper, and greener. Yet for all its promise, the question remains: will Germany’s regulatory maze allow it to flourish?
At the centre of this push is George Salden, CEO of Capital Bay GmbH in Berlin. Most recently known for a dizzying €7bn fundraising spree, Salden has turned his focus from capital chasing to the more elemental work of creating housing itself. His pivot to modular and micro-living signals a recognition of where his real future lies: in direct solutions to Germany’s housing emergency, not just in trading the assets it creates.
REFIRE has tracked Salden’s trajectory for more than a decade. Over ten years ago, we serialised his book The Dynamic Method across twelve issues, laying out his holistic approach to well-timed, profitable investing. That message—real estate as dynamic, not static—resonates today in his embrace of modular construction. For Salden, “Location, Location, Location” is no longer enough; adaptability, speed, and lifecycle thinking are the new imperatives.
A key to understanding modular’s disruptive promise is to grasp the difference between it and serial construction. Serial building uses prefabricated 2D elements— walls, floors, façades—assembled on-site, offering flexibility in tight urban spaces. Modular, by contrast, is fully 3D: entire room modules built and finished in the factory, delivered to the site as plug-and-play units. “Serial is 2D, modular is 3D,” Salden says—like the difference between assembling Lego bricks on-site versus delivering the Lego room pre-assembled.
For a country that prides itself on engineering precision, this logic should feel intuitive. In Salden’s partnership with Daiwa House— the world’s largest modular housing company—it finally meets a proven industrial backbone. Daiwa has delivered 1.9 million apartments globally, a scale that dwarfs anything in Germany’s housing sector. Bringing this expertise here is no small feat; it’s a statement that modular can be more than a boutique experiment. “We need half the time, which means half the capital commitment costs,” Salden says. That alone should make every housing minister take note.
A visit to the Daiwa factory in Fürstenwalde, Brandenburg—just past TESLA’s vast site— shows what’s possible. The factory stands on the bones of a former steelworks—an apt metaphor for Germany’s industrial resilience. Cars in the car park bear plates from across Europe, a testament to the diverse nature of the workforce; inside, shift workers build entire room modules in a controlled environment. Outside, hundreds of finished modules stand stacked in precise rows, waiting for permission to be put to work.
The scale of this promise is already visible in Berlin’s Lichtenberg district. A massive development there will bring 1,600 new apartments by late 2025, half already rising eight storeys high. The project is for Gewobag, a Berlin housing association under intense pressure to deliver social housing. Half the site remains a hole in the ground—a stark reminder of how fast modular can move, and how slow traditional processes can be. Those remaining Daiwa units will be up and running by year’s end.
Beyond speed, Salden argues modular has a decisive edge in carbon savings. “We assume a carbon footprint that is 50 percent lower than the market average,” he says. In an era where ESG compliance shapes investment decisions, that matters. But modular’s true revelation is mobility. “Thinking of real estate as mobile is what’s groundbreaking about it,” Salden says. These modules are not tied to one site—they can be redeployed as demographics shift, offering a new approach to urban planning.
Salden’s strategy is also holistic. Through his associated company, 360 Operator, he manages an ecosystem of housing brands spanning every stage of life: from student housing to senior living. Modular isn’t a gimmick—it’s the foundation for a continuum of housing solutions matching Germany’s evolving needs, across all generations.
Yet there’s a reason modular hasn’t swept across Germany. The core obstacle isn’t technology—it’s regulation. “We don’t have a unified national framework, which means there is still no type approval,” Salden says bluntly. Germany’s federal tangle of codes and approvals—once a point of national pride—has become an unintentional blockade. “The more precise the planning, the more we can create a standard, the more repetitive and the more we can automate many sub-steps,” he notes. But without harmonisation, even the best-run factories might have to stand idle.
In Japan, modular sets a global benchmark: 25 square metres of space built in eight minutes at 800 euros per square metre. Germany won’t match that overnight, but Salden believes that with political will and scale, costs here can fall to 1,500 euros per square metre within a decade. In projects like Lichtenberg, he argues, modular already beats conventional building costs—and the productivity and environmental gains are simply impossible to ignore.
For investors and policymakers, the message is both clear and hopeful. Germany’s real estate sector has no shortage of engineering skills or modular ambition. What it lacks is a framework to accommodate this 3D approach—recognising that the bottleneck lies not in the factory, but in the permit office.
Salden’s commitment to modular is as much about faith in German manufacturing as it is about housing policy. In a country that built its prosperity on engineering, he sees no reason why Germany cannot harness its own workers and skills to solve its housing problems. “We have the workers, we have the skills, we just need the political will,” he says.
This is not the first time REFIRE has chronicled Salden’s instincts for timing and opportunity. But this is different. In modular, he’s not just trading in assets—he’s building a vision for how Germany can actually meet its housing needs. And he’s not alone. The technology is here. The factories are built. The modules stand waiting in Fürstenwalde’s yards. The question is whether Germany’s lawmakers will finally clear the path for them to roll.