The real estate giant Panattoni continues with its growth plan on the Iberian Peninsula. The firm plans to increase its land portfolio by 250,000 square metres by 2023, which will exceed the half a million square metres it currently has.
According to Gustavo Cardozo, Panattoni's general manager for Spain and Portugal, the company bought 485,000 square metres at the beginning of the year, distributed among thirteen warehouses. Therefore, Panattoni's portfolio in the Iberian Peninsula now totals 600,000 square metres distributed in different areas of the peninsula, such as Madrid, Barcelona, Tarragona, Zaragoza, Valencia, Vizcaya, Vitoria, Seville, Murcia, Burgos, Lisbon and Oporto.
As its general manager points out, Panattoni's balance sheet has been positive in 2022 after readjusting its strategy. "We started the year dragging the good inertia of 2021, but in March, with the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, the context began to change. Then came the announcement of the interest rate hike, so investors adopted a wait-and-see position and we were forced to redo the roadmap".
Cardozo points out that the biggest challenge in the new context was to discard several projects that were in the study phase. "The biggest drawback was that we had to restructure the project portfolio to adapt to the new profitability needs of our partners, and that meant that for many projects the numbers were no longer available". Since then, the company has focused on projects with a return on investment of between 6% and 7%.
By 2023, the company aims to incorporate new land with around 250,000 square metres with 13 logistics warehouses, although they will be awaiting the price adjustment of new land according to the evolution of the economic context.
On the other hand, the general manager stresses that they will only promote warehouses at risk in Barcelona, due to the fact that investors prefer turnkey logistics projects, except in Barcelona, an area where the great lack of land means that almost all projects are rented out in record time. In addition, Cardozo points to Barcelona as "the holy grail" of Catalonia being "a great pill of logistics land".
