“We’re extremely satisfied with the results of our professional trade fair appearance at the Expo Real,” says Dirk Beller, Head of Commercial, summing up the feedback received from the Licence Partners and numerous customers. The content dealt with on the further optimised exhibition stand in the course of dozens of appointments extended to include establishing new customer contacts, exchanging professional views on current and planned projects and transactions as well as consolidating existing customer contacts. Over 200 Consultants from Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Czech Republic and Italy made intensive use of the golden opportunities available. “Our size of our exhibition stand has increasingly grown in recent years, but we’ve once again almost reached our capacity limits,” says Beller.
Meanwhile, the event format “Engel & Völkers Commercial Lounge” has likewise become firmly established. As always, this event took place on the first evening of the trade fair. This year, after five successful years in the Film casino Munich, we managed to move to the “Pacha”, which now is well known everywhere in Munich and the surrounding area. “This gave us the opportunity to raise our visitor capacity yet again, following the extraordinary demand registered for our event. “Overall, more than 1,000 guests had accepted the invitation, enjoying a fantastic evening of good DJ music, live gigs and sophisticated catering and service,” reports Ramona Heusinger, responsible as event manager from Engel & Völkers Commercial for this event and other tasks.
With 2,190 exhibitors from 45 nations and over 46, participants from 76 countries, the strong turnout reflects the positive expectations of the real estate sector for this year. This total number of participants comprised 22,065 specialist trade fair visitors (2018: 22,029) and 24,682 company representatives (2018: 23,029). The top ten visitor countries behind Germany: Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the Netherlands, Austria, Poland, Switzerland, France, the Czech Republic, Luxembourg, the United States, and Spain. The primarily German topic of affordable housing attracted a great deal of attention. In numerous forums, policymakers and business leaders interacted, discussing measures such as caps on rents along with urban consolidation programmes.
Even if the discussion concerning a possible downturn lying ahead, Engel & Völkers Commercial as well as the international real estate sector expect 2019 to turn out as yet another successful year. “It is important to note on the other hand that we plan to focus fully on digitalisation of the real estate sector. We mustn’t waste even a minute of time any longer in massively advancing this topic; after all, start-ups from all over the world are penetrating the market with impressive ideas,” emphasises Beller. There certainly was plenty of evidence of this at the trade fair. While the number of visitors to Hall A3 was still manageable last year, numerous people surged into the hall this year to obtain an impression of many of these ideas. Many digital solutions are already gradually replacing the services offered by estate agents in the past. “We also need to deal with these changes and keep our eyes open in order to extend our market leadership in clearly defined areas with innovative ideas,” adds Beller.
