ECE European Prime Shopping Centre Funds

With the "ECE European Prime Shopping Center Fund", ECE Real Estate Partners established for the first time an own Pan-European real estate fund in 2011. Globally leading institutional investors participate in the fund, among them international sovereign wealth funds, pension funds and insurances. The Fund focuses solely on the acquisition of already existing shopping centers with value growth potential.

The first acquisitions included Stern-Center in Potsdam, Linden-Center Berlin, and Galeria Kaskada in Szczecin. In the following years, the Fund invested in further shopping properties in European cities, among others in Brno, Linz, Bielefeld, Poznan, Berlin, and Vienna. The management, leasing out and refurbishment of the Fund centers was always taken over by ECE: The Fund's investment in the shopping mall Megalò in Chieti was at the same time ECE's market entry in Italy. Since the Fund's acquisition of the second largest shopping center in Denmark, ECE has been opening up the Scandinavian market since 2013.

After the success of the first Fund, ECE Real Estate Partners established a second Fund in 2014. "We see a lot of investment potential regarding revitalization and modernization in the coming years which we would like to exploit it with the new Fund," says Dr. Volker Kraft, Managing Director of ECE Real Estate Partners.

The ECE European Prime Shopping Centre Fund raised capital commitments of 850m euros to provide an investment volume of more than 2bn euros, including bank financing, for the acquisition of further centers and their restructuring. The first project and seed asset secured for the second Fund is Zielone Arkady, which was developed by ECE in the Polish city of Bydgoszcz. The investment phase for Fund II is to continue until 2019. In total, since the first Fund's launch, a portfolio of 20 shopping centers was established with a value of more than four billion euros.