Flexible & sustainable buildings help deliver social impact
Flexible buildings and social impact are the two main strands of RE:BORN Real Estate’s strategy and vision, delegates heard at Real Asset Media’s Impact & ESG briefing, which was hosted by CMS at their offices in Amsterdam. The Dutch group, founded in 2008, wants to deliver what it calls “the 3E impact”, which means creating buildings with a higher economic, emotional and ecological value.
The buildings are developed in such a way that they can be adapted and dismantled into different components, each with its own lifespan, that can be re-used whenever possible.
“Our buildings are all flexible and sustainable,” said Saman Mohammadi, CEO, RE:BORN Real Estate. “We call them function-free, because our buildings can easily adapt, as time demands, to residential, healthcare, hotel, office or educational use. We look at the neighbourhood and the communities and see that they need.”
The ‘Satellite’, an 8,000 sq m office block in Amsterdam with a round tower, which used to be the headquarters of De Nederlandsche Bank, was to be demolished. RE:BORN dismantled the building into elements and transported them by electric boats to a circular hub, with the idea of giving these materials a second lease of life elsewhere in the city.
“We’ve had the materials in storage since then,” said Mohammadi. “It’s a perfectly circular project that we wanted to rebuild in the city, saving 60% in CO2 emissions, but there is no capacity, so we are being forced to take it elsewhere, to a place just outside The Hague. It’s yet another missed opportunity for Amsterdam, and an example of the unnecessary obstacles in our path.”
The problem is red tape and the amount of time it takes for the local authorities to reach a decision, he said.
“We do not want to be hostage to slow municipal decision-making,” Mohammadi said. “We want to complete a project in two years, not wait for five years as is often the case. There are 70,000 houses ready to be built in Amsterdam alone but they don’t get the green light. All over the Netherlands the municipalities do not have the capacity to deal with planning applications. We employ more people than New York, which has 20 times the number of inhabitants than the Netherlands, but there is no capacity to execute.”
In order to speed the process along, the group gets all stakeholders involved – the tenants, the community, the municipality – from an early stage.
“By acting early and having those conversations we save time, which is good for our finances,” he said. “For us developers it’s all about timing, a crucial element because if the development time is shorter then the revenues are higher.”
Time is of the essence for RE:BORN also because the company operates on razor-thin margins.
“We target low returns,” said Mohammadi. “We measure the lowest possible returns without going bankrupt. I ask the tenants what they need and what is the maximum they can pay and I do some financial engineering. This is because we focus on tenants that do not receive subsidies from the Government.”
The tenants are multi-generational and range from start-up companies to handicapped children, from homeless young people to day care for the elderly, he said, “all people who do not have the financial ability to be in the city, yet they are not looked after by the authorities”.
