Corrado Rampini

Bär & Karrer Ltd

Zurich www.baerkarrer.ch

corrado.rampini@baerkarrer.ch Tel: +41 58 261 52 83

Biography

Corrado Rampini heads the real estate department of Bär & Karrer. He has broad experience in M&A and capital market transactions, with a particular focus on real estate matters, including asset deals and large-scale portfolio transactions, acquisitions of real estate companies, and IPOs and other capital market transactions of listed real estate companies. In addition, he is considered an expert in data protection and privacy law. Corrado Rampini is ranked in the top tier of the Chambers real estate (Switzerland) chapter, and The Legal 500 lists as a leading lawyer in real estate and construction. He was named 2016’s real estate lawyer of the year in Zurich by Best Lawyers.

What attracted you towards a legal career in real estate?

I started my career as an M&A lawyer, at a time when conveyance of real properties was still much in the hands of local notaries and general practitioners active in their home canton. In the early 2000s, when international investors entered the Swiss real estate market and introduced their standards for due diligence, contract terms and financings, I quickly realised that the real estate industry would undergo an unprecedented professionalisation and specialisation and decided to focus on the industry. My decision was the right one at that time – real estate has become an important asset class with so many more professionals active in the field than I would have ever imagined.

In your practice what challenges arise from the interaction of laws at the canton and federal levels?

While civil law in Switzerland is federal law, many issues in real estate transactions are governed by cantonal law. This applies to the notarisation process including notary and land register fees; real estate gain tax and real estate transfer tax; mandatory cantonal state insurance; legal liens for taxes; connecting fees and other issues; state pre-emptive rights, building regulations; etc. With 26 cantons in Switzerland and thus 26 different regulations, we had to get organised internally with a database, in order to address local specialties quickly. This is of particular importance in portfolio transactions with assets in many different cantons.

How do you manage the scale of transactions in the case of property portfolios?

Transactions with assets in many cantons require professional project management. Apart from the many cantonal specialties that need to be reflected in the due diligence and contract drafting, we must also manage the cantonal and communal notaries, and the registration in the local land registries. Because of this, we focus the training of our associates not only on legal matters, but also on project management skills.

How is the generational shift changing legal practice at your firm? What do younger lawyers do differently?

The lawyers of the new generation are more focused and specialised than we were when I started work. Today’s lawyers do not simply apply to a firm as a “lawyer” but come with clear views of the field of law or sector in which they want to work and take care to be more broadly involved with the client than to provide just legal advice. This fits nicely with the way we understand our role as real estate transaction lawyers within our firm.

You are part of a multilingual team. How do you integrate speakers of different languages?

In a country with three main official languages, many people have at least a basic command of one or two of our other official languages, besides their own mother tongue. As we see providing advice to our clients in all regions of Switzerland as an important part of our service, we focus our hires on people who are bilingual, and we centralise our team members, for all-language reasons, in Zurich, in a multilingual team.

What has been the impact of Switzerland’s very low interest rate on the real estate market?

The low interest rates, with the national bank charging negative interest of 0.75 per cent per annum for overnight deposits and a negative yield of 10 years federal bonds, have been a key driver of the real estate market in Switzerland. The appetite of insurance companies, pension funds and mutual funds for investments in Swiss real estate, seeking even a small return, is unsated. Foreign investors have held back with investments during the past few years due to the competitive market environment, but recently we are seeing more foreign investors returning to the market.

Why do foreign investors look to Switzerland as a destination for investment?

In recent times, we have had the impression that yields in Switzerland have become more attractive compared to the yields in some European states, where yields have also come under pressure. Foreign investors in Switzerland are often focusing on asset classes that are not the primary focus of Swiss institutional investors, such as hotels and, more recently, opportunistic retail investments. As in the 2000s, foreign investors may prove to behave more pro-cyclically than the conservative Swiss investors do. At the same time, we also see investors from certain countries who focus on long-term stable investments, often with an intention to hedge against their home currency.

How do you anticipate the Swiss legal market changing in the next five years? How might this affect your practice?

I am sure that the professionalisation and specialisation of the Swiss legal real estate market will continue. We see in particular more tech solutions being applied in real estate, and it is our ambition to be a fast mover in this field. We hope that these developments will take over some of the simple, repetitive work, and help us to focus on the high-value work as advisers, beyond mere legal drafting, and in project management.

WWL says: Corrado Rampini’s broad and impressive experience across the full spectrum of real estate high-value investments and transactions makes him, according to peers, “one of the best in the real estate market”.