EXPO REAL: JLL’s Christian Ulbrich has said that conditions are optimum for M&A within the real estate advisory sector as his firm seeks to expand its European presence.
Speaking to Estates Gazette at Expo Real, Ulbrich, JLL’s chief executive of EMEA Ulbrich, said: “At the moment, it is a good time to be buying as you can buy only when there is something being sold. And only when markets are quite buoyant are there enough sellers.”
He added: “We have lots of offers on the table which we have spent some time on and, hopefully, we will be successful.”
JLL aimed to expand by around 90% through organic business expansion and 10% through acquisitions, he said. So far this year it had made six corporate purchases in Europe and was looking to make acquisitions in countries that were “slightly later in the cycle”.
“I guess there will be a couple more deals before the year end,” Ulbrich said. “In the Iberian countries we are very strongly focused on growth. We have a very strong UK business but we still have to expand in countries such as Poland and Germany.”
The recent macroeconomic turbulence in China had started to affect Europe, in Ulbrich’s view, but he said that there was a weight of capital willing and able to step in to replace it.
“For the time being there is enough capital that will step in. This will come from US investors and what we would call global sources of capital, which are domiciled mainly in the US but collect capital globally. For the next few years the US-domiciled investors will gain in strength.”
