This year Atterbury Europe celebrates 10 years of doing business in Europe. CEO Henk Deist looks back… and ahead to a bright future.
A 10th birthday is a memorable occasion – if you were to single out a couple of milestones achieved in the last 10 years, what stands out for you?
It has been an amazing journey – if I wrote a book about it, people might mistake it for fiction! For Atterbury Europe, milestones were achieved at asset level and shareholder level. At asset level we made the three initial investments in Cyprus (July 2015), Serbia (December 2015) and Romania (April 2017) and grew that through additional greenfields and brownfields developments. At shareholder level, we started off with Steinhoff and when their trouble started end 2017, RMH (at shareholder level) and RMB with a loan at company level stepped into their shoes. The Pareto Group partially diluted RMH in July 2019 to repay the RMB loan and increased its stake to 50% in September 2022. Today Atterbury Europe is a 50/50 joint venture between the Pareto Group and Brightbridge Real Estate Limited (a property services company and holding company for individual investors including management).
Could you name a valuable lesson learnt during this period, that has enabled the company to solidify its foothold in Europe?
The cliché “our people is our biggest asset” is simply true. For Atterbury Europe, our “people” include shareholders and business partners in the countries where we operate. Healthy relationships at these levels are the foundation for a healthy business. We have learnt that business and people issues are of equal importance.
If you look at Atterbury Europe today versus when it was launched in 2014, is the company where you hoped it would be a decade in, and to what do you subscribe the success?
When we founded the company in 2014 with Euro 100 share capital, we certainly had a different picture of where we were going. As they say, “life happened” and the success we made of it I believe was due to our ability to respond to a challenge and turn it into an opportunity. As a result, the actual position now certainly by far exceeds the hopes we had back in 2014.
Are there any plans to celebrate this milestone in a concrete way?
We like to celebrate, so we will definitely arrange something, but there are no firm plans that I can confirm yet.
With the first 10 under the belt, is there a strategy in place for the next 10? Can you share any details?
We have certainly grown the business organically in the last 10 years, but to an extent, we responded to events that occurred – including the Covid pandemic and events at shareholder level. In the next ten years, we would like to implement chosen strategies more consciously – and that strategy will be different for each country. We have not had a meaningful liquidity event up to now, so on the cards are to sell some assets to redeem holding-company debt, sell other mature assets and grow where there is still growth on the table.
What are the trends in property development that you will be watching in the next year?
I believe the key topic remains availability of bank debt especially if maturing bonds cannot be refinanced in the capital markets and are also reliant on the bank market. And interest rates go hand in hand with that – inflation seems to have settled, so hopefully we see an interest rate cut in 2024.
