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Has ECE changed during the crisis too? 

As a family-owned business, we can make decisions quickly, but we reached a size that sometimes slowed us down. And so during the COVID pandemic we split off our  development activities, our management services for large retail properties, and our fund management services into separate divisions, each focused on their specific clients’ needs, and restructured the ECE Group as a holding  company. At the same time, we invested a nine-digit sum in our IT systems and professionalized our internal processes and structures. That was quite a challenge, but we are now seeing the rewards, even if there is still a lot to do. 

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Alongside the acute crises, there are also some very fundamental challenges like climate change. How are you tackling those?  

properties come with a lot of responsibility. Not only in environmental terms, but also as a part of urban development, as a community hub, and as the basis for many people’s livelihoods. We’re far from  perfect, but we’ve always borne these issues in mind and developed and implemented concrete solutions. In the real estate industry, what it ultimately comes down to is finding an environmentally and economically responsible path to net zero for each individual property. Unfortunately, there are now many companies on the market peddling pseudo-solutions. A genuine solution needs to be rooted in a detailed, expert understanding of a property in all its complexity. That’s why we developed the “ECE map2zero”, our Energy Renovation Roadmap, which we’ve been gradually rolling out in our portfolio over a number of years. 

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Do your international operations face similar challenges?

Climate change doesn’t stop at the Atlantic. But America does take a fundamentally different approach to many problems. In Germany, we’ve made requirements for buildings increasingly stringent in recent years. As a result, construction has become more expensive, very little  affordable housing is being built, and construction generates a lot of carbon emissions that are often not included in environmental assessments. The residential developments we’re involved in in the USA often use high-quality but structurally simple timber houses, which reduces both the building costs and the carbon emissions during construction. And the energy for lighting, heating, and AC is generated by solar panels, so that even if the energy consumption is sometimes higher, the carbon emissions aren’t. If we want to successfully tackle climate change, I believe we need to pay much more attention to how much CO₂ a building generates over its entire life cycle, and how and where one euro of investment can most efficiently reduce global carbon emissions.

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Are European politicians setting the wrong priorities in this area?

Politicians in Europe often don’t trust people enough. They want to regulate things too much, and don’t realize that the world is now too  complex and dynamic for detailed regulations. Often the intentions are good, but sadly the same can’t be said of the implementation. However, politicians are just part of a society that complains about “regulatory loopholes” and doesn’t exactly reward those with the courage to try new things – which, unfortunately, also causes us headaches when it comes to the permit approval processes here in Europe. So it’s our duty as business people and citizens to support politicians in their difficult task and, where we can, to actively do our bit ourselves: for instance, by clearly speaking out and saying that, while people’s feelings of dissatisfaction are understandable, there’s absolutely no way populists and extremists are going to solve our problems. 

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You don’t just do your bit as a businessperson and citizen, but also as a patron of many different causes. Why is that?

My family has been very fortunate. The success we’ve enjoyed in business has only been made possible thanks to living in a free, peaceful society with rule of law and thanks to the support of many dedicated people in our company as well as many important external stakeholders. So my father, Werner Otto, wanted to give something back to society in return for that success. And my wife and I are passionate about continuing that tradition.     //