The German company TAG Immobilien, through its Polish subsidiaries Vantage Development and Robyg, has consolidated its position as a key player in the Polish real estate market. The spectacular acquisition of more than 5,300 apartments from Resi4Rent by Vantage Development not only significantly expanded its portfolio but also made it the leader in the rapidly growing institutional rental sector. The catch, however, is that one of the main shareholders of TAG Immobilien, which will profit from renting apartments to Poles in Poland, is a German government agency, namely the largest pension provision institution for public sector employees in Germany.
In August last year, the Polish market was shaken by news of a transaction without precedent in history. Vantage Development, controlled by the German group TAG Immobilien, finalised the purchase of 5,322 completed apartments from Resi4Rent for over PLN 2.4 billion. This move catapulted the company into the position of absolute leader, giving it control of nearly 40 percent of the Polish institutional rental market. Along with previously owned properties and new projects, the German giant controls a portfolio of around 16,000 apartments, making it one of the most important players shaping prices in Poland’s largest cities.
“Yet the key question is who ultimately benefits from the profits generated by rents paid by Poles and from apartment sales in our country,”
writes Grzegorz Wierzchołowski in Gazeta Polska.
It turns out that one of TAG Immobilien’s main shareholders is Versorgungsanstalt des Bundes und der Länder (VBL), the institution responsible for providing pensions to millions of German civil servants. This means that every zloty paid in rent for an apartment in Warsaw or Wrocław flows into the fund that will one day pay pensions to German officials. “We are therefore dealing with a situation in which capital drained from the Polish housing market directly feeds the social security system of another state,” the article reads.