A businessman is said to be offering 450 million euros for the Munich luxury department store Oberpollinger, reports the “Münchner Merkur” (Tuesday). Most recently, a €1 billion offer was made by local construction magnate Georg Stumpf for the Golden Quarter, the Hotel Park Hyatt and the Constitutional Court building in Vienna, as well as for the Tyrol department store in Innsbruck.
As the Münchner Zeitung learned, the offer in question is already on the table for Oberpollinger in the pedestrian zone. According to reports, the prospective buyer is a wealthy businessman who had already been involved in a major real estate deal in a prime location in the recent past.
Consciously turned off the money tap?
The Oberpollinger building belongs to the insolvent Signa Prime. The business in the building, i.e. Oberpollinger himself, is a tenant and belongs to the KaDeWe Group. René Benkos Signa is involved in this company, which is now also insolvent, but the majority owner, with 50.1 percent, is the Central Group of the Thai billionaire Tos Chirathivat.
The German industry magazine “Capital” recently speculated that the Central Group had deliberately turned off the money supply to the KaDeWe Group, which, in addition to the Oberpollinger and the eponymous “Kaufhaus des Westens” in Berlin (KaDeWe), also includes the Alsterhaus in Hamburg. The aim should be to bring the price down.
2.16 million euros rent per month
According to “Capital”, the Central Group could even be looking to buy the properties in Berlin, Munich and Hamburg cheaply – so far it only owns part of the house in Berlin. It recently became known that the rents for the luxury department store are extremely high.
According to the report, Oberpollinger had to pay a total of 25.902 million euros in the 2021 financial year, which corresponds to a rent of almost 2.16 million euros per month. Rents are also a problem for retailers elsewhere, but in the case of Oberpollinger they make up a particularly high proportion of sales.
In fact, the KaDeWe Group said at the end of January that the high rents were “largely responsible for the economic difficulties”. The rents are said to have been set by an index contract – with these Signa is said to have increased the value of the property over the years.
The Signa insolvency brought movement to the Munich real estate market. According to “Münchner Merkur”, the Kaut-Bullinger House on Rosenstrasse recently changed hands. Benko only acquired the traditional house in 2020. The former Hertie department store at the main train station could soon change hands. The deadline for submitting bids expired last weekend. The Old Academy in the pedestrian zone – currently a construction site – is also likely to be a sought-after property.
