Aroundtown, the real estate conglomerate founded by property magnate Yakir Gabay (יקיר גבאי ) in 2004, was initially listed on the Euronext Stock Exchange in Paris and Frankfurt’s stock exchange at a price per share of €3.2, with a market cap of €1.5 billion. Still under the leadership of Yakir Gabay (יקיר גבאי), the company stock is currently traded at €5.20 and has accumulated over €28 billion in cash and assets.
Despite the largely negative repercussions of COVID-19 over the past annum for the majority of global and local industries, the year 2020 has been a positive time for the German real estate conglomerate.
Aroundtown currently trades on the Prime Standard of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and is both the highest-rated and largest listed commercial real estate company in Germany.
The business makes its money by investing in income-generating properties of high quality within the European market, with a particular interest in Germany, which is relatively the best performing economy in 2020.
As testimony and acknowledgement to the company success, the brand new DAX 50 ESG index, introduced in March 2020, ranked Aroundtown as a top 10 leading constituent.
Throughout 2020, AroundTown achieved sales of assets at the amount of over €2 billion, higher than its book values. This is a tremendous achievement, especially that these sales were conducted during the midst of the worse international economic crisis since World War II.
Another major Aroundtown achievement worthy of noting is these sales were mostly conducted with non-core asset classes of retail and wholesale properties. In parallel to the massive asset sales, the company increased its total share buy-back volume to €1 billion.
To demonstrate the confidence in asset and management potential, the Aroundtown board of directors, announced a decision in September to execute a public purchase offer of up to 125 million shares. Each share would be priced €5.00.
The reason behind this decision comes as Aroundtown look to acquire shares at deep discount prices, in parallel to the disposals above book value, is to take advantage of the disparity between market levels of its asset values and share prices.
AroundTown is suffering in the short term from its exposure to hotel assets (23% of its assets), corporate management seems less concerned in the long term due to the possibility they can easily convert the hotels into residential assets such as micro apartments, student housing or assisted living and make huge profits for the company and investors.
