Soil reconversion: Intervest

Don’t build unless it’s really necessary

Intervest is a highly active company within the real estate field, with a particular interest in logistics. Gunther Gielen, CEO of Intervest, explains how his company has developed over recent times and what are the backbones of its philosophy. Intervest is a stock exchange listed company which is mainly active in the offices and logistics segments. The company has grown very strongly over the past couple of years, particularly in logistics. This has included a new activity for the company, namely undertaking their own developments rather than buying rented buildings. So shifting the company from merely buying cash flow to generating cash-flow itself. In Belgium Intervest currently has the largest logistics development, the former Ford car production site at Genk. This site has the advantages of being close to the German border and of having a canal running alongside for waterway transport. The portfolio of Intervest now extends to around 1.1 billion square metres representing a fair value of around € 1.3 billion. The ongoing development pipeline is around 405,000 square metres with a real estate value of € 485 million. The portfolio is split as 73% logistics and 27% offices. All figures as at 30 June 2022.

The relationship with CEUSTERS is twofold. Firstly, CEUSTERS acts as a broker for introducing new tenants, and above all the two companies are described by Gunther Gielen as being ‘good neighbours’. The two company headquarters are side by side on Uitbreidingstraat on the southern edge of Antwerp city centre, and this leads to the possibility of ‘intelligent and sophisticated discussions’ with Ingrid CEUSTERS and her team. The two companies invite each other to events they organize.

Intervest’s ESG strategy is based on four main pillars: value creation, client orientation, sustainability and team Intervest. Sustainability in itself is already very important to Intervest and forms part of its ADN. The company has a wide interpretation of the concept of sustainability, which involves every aspect of ESG. In concrete terms, Intervest complies with all seventeen sustainable development goals of the United Nations. They especially focus on future-proof buildings, striving to create high standard buildings with a great deal of focus on energy efficiency and the health, wellbeing and safety of occupants. This therefore takes in the social aspect of ESG. In terms of governance, it is important to note that business integrity and compliance are very much the company’s creed.

Targets

Looking more closely at future-proof buildings and energy efficiency, Intervest sets itself very demanding targets. By the end of this year, Intervest is aiming for 100% sustainable electricity, 80% of the logistics assets being fitted with solar panels and 80% of the portfolio being equipped with intelligent energy metering. On top of this, at least 30% of the buildings are scheduled to have a minimum of ‘BREEAM Very Good’ certification.

ESG: a way to create long term relationships with the stakeholders

Returning to why sustainability as a strategic pillar has such a high impact, Gunther Gielen states that this is as important in itself as the entire ESG concept. This is because most of all they see ESG as creating long term relationships with all of Intervest’s stakeholders. The company believes it is very important, for example during the development of a logistics building, to pay a great deal of attention to the comfort of the end user. They try to make sure, for example, that there is a high degree of daylight even in a logistics building, and they say they were the first company to do this. Daylight contributes to the wellbeing of the employee in the building, of course, but it also adds to the sustainability of the building (and presumably its value) over the long term. It is not only energy (solar panels, high efficiency heat pumps for heating and cooling) which is involved, but also the overall benefit of the building to its users, therefore.

GREENHOUSE COLLECTION - ANTWERP

Renovation

Sustainability means pursuing the highest standards on both the investment and the financing sides of the activities. And if Gunther Gielen speaks a great deal about logistics properties, this is because Intervest believes there are already enough offices in the world, without building more. And, he says, the most sustainable building you can have is the one you don’t build. A tough message, he concedes, but the truth. Politicians, he goes on, always sing the praises of their energy-efficient ‘class-leading’ new buildings, but they forget to mention that these buildings are made with materials and materials have a lot of embedded carbon within them.

“The most sustainable building you can have is the one you don’t build.”

An existing building such as Greenhouse Collection, a former Mercator Insurance building in Antwerp they are currently working on, is sometimes thought of as having many issues. However, this is not true because these buildings dating from the last quarter of the 20th century were generally constructed with high budgets. They had very strong concrete, and this concrete, re-used as part of the structure of the redeveloped building, is already very efficient in terms of insulation. So it doesn’t require a huge amount of investment to integrate new technologies into an older building and bring it up to a high standard with high energy efficiency and without too negative an impact on the financial side. Gunther Gielen believes that Greenhouse Collection with its plethora of technologies, is the smartest building in Antwerp.

GENK GREEN LOGISTICS - GENK

De-globalization

Sustainability in terms of office development, therefore, means not constructing a new building when it is not necessary. The situation is slightly different for logistics, where there is a growing need for storage space and where the requirements of operators are considerably different from the past. The growing need is partly due to the boom in e-commerce, but also to the fact that there is now a trend for de-globalization, which means storing goods closer to where they will be used. To put this starkly, he says, it is also ridiculous that when a ship gets stuck in the Suez Canal or the Chinese install a zero-covid policy in their ports, the whole world economy grinds to a halt!

Soil contamination is an issue which Intervest has to deal with. The Genk project is a case in point because it was a car production plant. The main message, Gunther Gielen says, is that Intervest does not shy away from this type of challenge. They are used to working with brownfields which are both part of our historical legacy and which add to the overall concept of sustainability. The advantages of brownfields are often to be found in their favourable location and in the opportunity they provide for being revitalized. When the ground is a little unstable, such as is the case in a large project in Puurs, much of the project will be supported by pillars. Intervest has the experience of doing this because it is common practice in the Netherlands where the company is also active. The technical engineers within the company, he explains, love this type of challenge. This means that both the end user and the company’s engineers are winners in this situation. Gunther Gielen

CEO of Intervest