ATP Ejendomme looks five years ahead as it plans to assert its spending power across the eurozone
ATP Ejendomme, one of Denmark’s biggest real estate companies, is planning to commit up to €500m to European property over the next three to five years.
The company is a wholly-owned subsidiary of ATP, the Danish Labour Market Supplementary Pension Fund. According to ATP Ejendomme managing director Lars Frederiksen: “We have so much money to invest just for our own country and it is too risky to put a lot of money into the relatively small local Danish market. Another reason is purely for diversification.”
ATP has decided to invest with local foreign partners, said Frederiksen: “We decided we should do it with local investors whether in listed property stocks, property funds or through limited partnerships.”
The company will start in the eurozone and also in the UK, as the latter is a large and liquid property market. “Being an institutional investor, we would be looking for low-risk institutional-type investments,” he said.
It is the second time that the company has made a foray into foreign markets. In the late 1980s ATP founded Hercules, a company specially for overseas investment, which bought five properties in the UK, on the outskirts of London, and one in Germany.
It withdrew after the real estate crash in the early 1990s. Hercules sold the last property in the UK and the German one last month.
