Frequently asked questions

If your building costs are so much lower, what is sacrificed - quality, longevity or quality of life?

We don't save on quality - we save on waste.
The industry is not expensive because quality costs so much - but because it is inefficient: over-engineering, nested subcontractor structures, middlemen, bloated processes. We reduce these costs through industrial thinking: standardized design, direct procurement and vertical integration. This is how we reduce costs - without compromising on quality. An important point: in Germany, you can't simply build in poor quality - the strict building regulations ensure this. The quality standard here is high right from the start.

If low costs automatically meant low quality, there would be no IKEA in almost every middle-class household in Central Europe. Simplicity and quality are not mutually exclusive - as long as you are disciplined enough to plan for both.
If low cost automatically meant low quality, SpaceX would be no more efficient today than NASA - a government-funded giant with 60 years of experience.

With heritable building rights, you severely restrict the group of buyers - and make the property unattractive for institutional investors.

We do not sell to speculative short-term investors. Our target group is long-term owners: asset managers, pension funds, insurance companies, municipal housing associations - in other words, precisely those institutions that today pay attention to ESG criteria, stable income and social added value. For them, leasehold is not a disadvantage, but a structured, low-risk cash flow investment. This is not a theory - we have already sold leasehold properties to core and core+ investors who value current income and location over land ownership. As long as the leasehold contract is long, clearly regulated and transferable, an exit is also possible - and we have proven this in practice several times.

In the case of leaseholds, the selling price of the property is generally lower than that of a comparable property with full ownership.

Yes, that's right - the sale price on exit is usually lower for leaseholds than for freeholds. However, this discount is more than offset by significantly lower land costs at the outset - often 80-90% below the price of a freehold property. This increases the returns. So we don't sacrifice value - we just bring it into the project earlier.

It is also crucial that the key drivers of market valuation are not the form of ownership, but location, yield potential and tenant quality - and our projects are consistently convincing in these respects.

With heritable building rights, you forego the one element that continually increases in value: the land.

That's right - we don't own the land. But that is precisely what keeps our entry costs low and enables affordable housing in locations with high demand. Land value appreciation is ideal for long-term owners. However, our focus is on value creation through efficient project implementation, subsidies and stable rental income. Our strategy is not based on speculative value appreciation, but on predictable performance - regardless of the market cycle.

What prevents others from copying our model?

Our strategy can be imitated in principle - but only by players who are prepared to rethink operational complexity, work in a permanently lean manner and consistently manage implementation themselves. Real estate development has a strong local character: Every project is embedded in specific municipal regulations, political frameworks and local partnership structures. There is no central platform, no transferable brand and no economies of scale that could cancel out these local realities.

The market is also extremely capital-intensive: the housing stock in Berlin alone has a volume of over € 570 billion. In order to dominate just 10% of this, investments of €57 billion would be required - an order of magnitude that even market leaders such as Vonovia clearly exceed. The real estate industry does not work like the technology sector. There is no dominant player, no central operating system - and no industry-wide margin control.