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shopping center

Union Investment Real Estate – strong growth in the European retail segment

Union Investment Real Estate AG (formerly DIFA) is one of Europe’s leading property investment management companies. Union Investment’s shopping centre portfolio currently comprises 14 centres with over 1,000 stores and 525,300 square metres of gross floor space. Shopping centres make up approximately 14.8% of our current total real estate fund holdings, with a value of some 2.2 billion euros.

Our centres in Germany, Austria, Belgium and the Czech Republic benefit from a lettings rate of 97% at present, thereby demonstrating the success of our external partnerships with highly professional centre managers ECE, mfi, Donaldsons, SCMS, Pirelli DGAG and Solid.

We seek to acquire centres with a balanced mix of tenants on main shopping streets with high footfall or in prime locations with a catchment area of at least 500,000 inhabitants. As well as Germany, we are increasingly focusing on shopping centre investments elsewhere in Europe and in North/South America and Asia.

Experts in centre development

Union Investment Real Estate is your professional partner when it comes to financing and developing high-quality shopping centre projects in Europe.

We are currently involved in developing three large-scale centres in Essen (Germany), Mersin (Turkey) and Jerez de la Frontera (Spain), comprising some 185,000 square metres of lettable space. Our shopping centre division engages with all aspects of the development process through to completion. Their tasks include location analysis together with overseeing external managers and the future development of centres.

At Limbecker Platz (http://www.limbeckerplatz.de) in Essen we are working with Karstadt and ECE to realise one of Germany’s biggest inner-city shopping malls. On completion in 2009 the centre will offer around 74,000 square metres of lettable space.