Duncan Owen on his new gig, new digs and next fund

A little over a year since stepping down as Schroders’ global head of real estate, Duncan Owen has re-emerged with a fresh role, helping an established European developer to get a foothold in the UK. Owen has joined Belgian developer Immobel Group to lead its new investment management business. Immobel Capital Partners will focus on the office and residential sectors in the UK and continental Europe, and will invest money on behalf of the Immobel Group balance sheet as well as partnering with third-party investors. Immobel, a big name in the Benelux development market with other teams in France and Germany, focuses on offices and residential and has a development pipeline valued at some €5bn (£4.1bn). Setting up an investment management arm is the next step in the “evolution” of the business, Owen says. “That’s partly driven by a diversification of the business, and partly driven by [the fact] they were making and developing some really world-class residential, office and integrated schemes, and they are high-class investments,” he says. “It does seem to them odd that they couldn’t continue to have an interest in them post-development.” Owen will lead teams across the continent from a new London headquarters. The business has one fund, Immobel Belux Office Development Fund, launched in 2020. Owen expects a near-term launch of another fund, likely also targeting offices and this time on a pan-European basis, including the UK, where the group has no assets yet. Indeed, the UK has until now been seen as “a missing piece of their jigsaw puzzle”, he adds. “It’s a statement that they wanted me to be in the UK and have a head office in the UK,” Owen says. “My firm belief is that for the first time in my career, the UK is relatively cheap compared to some of the bigger Western European markets on the continent. So it would be obvious that we would look in the UK for early investments.” New strategies will look for returns of, say, 8-12% or 10-15%, he says by way of example. “It will involve a lot of asset management, a lot of development, repositioning of assets,” he says, adding that Immobel has long prioritised green strategies and that he and colleagues will have a laser-like focus on ESG in new and existing schemes. “The ‘E’, I think, is hard work but easy to define in terms of carbon footprints, renewable power,” he says. “But the ‘S’ is something that will differentiate us – there will be a lot of improvement of the local environments and investment in infrastructure and things we can do to have a positive social impact.” Owen is now looking to hire, including ESG experts as well as investment managers, and the business is close to signing for a West End office. Having worked in London for years, Owen was happy to find the leasing market competitive in the capital, despite the ongoing threat of homeworking to the city’s economy – many of the spaces he looked at while choosing on his own base have since been snapped up. “People are busy signing leases – maybe they’ve just decided they’ve got to get on with it.” Owen was global head of real estate at Schroders for nine years until the start of 2021 and, since then, acted as special adviser to the group. He has also picked up a non-executive directorship at Workspace Group and been named a non-executive adviser at Sellar. Both of those recent roles have given him afresh insight into changing face of the office market, he says. “I learned about the service mentality in operating offices and I learned about minimalisation of your carbon footprint in development and improvement of office buildings,” he says of his posts at Workspace and Sellar. “They’re both market leaders in different ways and I’ve benefited – and greatly enjoyed it.”   To send feedback, e-mail tim.burke@eg.co.uk or tweet @_tim_burke or @EGPropertyNews