Can you tell us a little about BNP Paribas Real Estate?
“BNP Paribas Real Estate is one of the leading real estate advisor in Europe, and the market leader in France and Germany. In the UK, we are on the rise with a new management and a clear expansion plan.
“We offer the whole range of services, including letting, sales and investment, valuation and consulting activity across all real estate segments. We’re a big property manager and currently have around 31 million m² of real estate under management in Europe, mainly offices and logistics properties.
"We’re also an investment manager and have €13 billion of assets under management. But we’re a big developer too, which isn’t that well known. In Europe, we’re one of the biggest development companies for commercial real estate and in France we are the number one.
“In France we are developing 200,000 m² of commercial real estate this year. Last year we also built around 2,600 residential units right across France, this year we will launch around 2,300. We’re developing commercial real estate in Italy and in the UK, mostly large office buildings, sometimes built speculatively, but mostly with pre-lets. In London we’ve just started a new 40,000 m² office project in Kings Cross.”
What’s your involvement in CEE countries?
“We’re active in Poland where we’re involved in a lot of shopping center management activity; we’re also growing other services here. We’re working with a lot of alliance members right across the world, for example in the US we’re working with Transwestern. Altogether, we have a network of alliances covering 15 countries.
“We also have alliance members in countries where we don’t have ownership, for example in the Netherlands, Austria, and in Eastern Europe. But we’re not planning to go to Russia yet, we’re concentrating on Western Europe where we are successful, particularly France, Germany, the UK, Belgium, Luxembourg, Italy, Spain and also Poland. The next step will be to cover the Nordic countries, working together with alliance partners.”
