Photo credit: © Peter Rüssmann für DIEAG

Thomas Mohr, Management Board of DIE Deutsche Immobilien Entwicklungs AG (DIEAG Unternehmensgruppe)

1. Describe your company in a Tweet!

We realize ESG-compliant large-scale office and residential quarters for institutional investors and also offer asset management for institutional portfolio holders. With our well-filled project pipeline, we are one of the four largest players in the sector in Berlin.

2. Why are you involved as a Berlin Partner?

Every day, we deal with the question of what makes a city like Berlin attractive to both people and companies, because as real estate developers, we create those places where and in which Berlin's residents live and work. However, that is by no means all that makes up a metropolitan community. A major city like Berlin thrives on the commitment of a large number of players. We want to make our contribution to this large concert and work together with the other Berlin partners to promote Berlin as a business location.

3. What issues drive you in relation to your industry?

Building touches on numerous fundamental questions that concern society today, and for good reason. How do we want to live and work in the future, how do we want to move around in the city? How do we deal with the remaining inner-city open spaces? How can we achieve sensible and sustainable redensification, how can we reuse former industrial sites that are no longer in use? In addition, there is the fundamental question of ecological sustainability. Building is not a short-lived or a consumer good. It sets the course for the future. It is therefore all the more important to plan and implement building projects with an eye to the future, with a view to their resource and climate friendliness, as well as taking social concerns into account.

4. What makes Berlin special for you?

Berlin is not just one city, Berlin is many cities. No neighborhood is like the other, and so the people also differ from place to place. Perhaps this is why Berlin is particularly open to new things. In addition, Berlin is still a city in the making. The often criticized incompleteness, the numerous scars and gaps that characterize Berlin's cityscape due to the city's recent history, offer us the opportunity today to implement construction innovations in future-oriented urban development concepts, even on a large scale.

5. Why is Berlin attractive for your company?

Berlin is located in the heart of Europe, at the center of the European single market and is Germany's only true metropolis. For more than a hundred years, Berlin has been attracting young people from all regions of Germany and the world who are hungry for success and experience - the very people whose talent and commitment once made Berlin the largest industrial metropolis in Europe. This attraction, which remains unbroken to this day, is inevitably reflected in urban development. As real estate developers, we see this as an opportunity to help shape the future.

6. What does Berlin stand for?

For me personally, Berlin stands for freedom. And for confidence. The city whets our appetite for more, for what's yet to come, for the future. Many of our employees don't even come from Berlin, but have made a conscious decision to live here. Because everyone can find the environment that suits him or her.

7. How does your company implement the topic of sustainability?

Neighborhood developments shape the cityscape. We therefore always think in terms of people and plan with sustainability in mind. Accordingly, our development concepts focus not only on economic issues but also on ecological and social aspects of site development. Together with our construction partners, we maximize the potential of construction and building technology in terms of ecological sustainability. This not only applies to the use of climate-friendly building materials such as wood instead of concrete. The development of our projects on a neighborhood scale also gives us the opportunity to install and synergistically link a wide variety of climate-friendly technologies that would not be economically viable to implement in isolated individual properties. The realization also follows the claim to create attractive places to work as well as to live - lively places that make it possible to reconcile work and family life. Ultimately, our investors also benefit from this, because sustainable, functional and attractive commercial and residential districts also promise stable value development in the long term.

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Photocredit: © Peter Rüssmann für DIEAG