Sustainable together. With good reason.

As the Deka Group’s real estate specialist, we aim to be one of the leading providers of sustainable open-ended real estate funds. In doing so, we attach great importance to sustainable standards and take our responsibility towards future generations seriously. Our mission as a trustee is also to manage our investors’ funds within an economically, ecologically and socially sustainable business profile.

Mitigating global warming has become one of the most important challenges. With roughly 600 properties, we can make a major contribution towards creating a sustainable environment. That is why we are continuously strengthening our efforts and activities in the area of environmental protection. We mobilise our innovative strength to achieve our sustainability goals: reducing our ecological footprint and attaining climate neutrality by 2050.

Our sustainability strategy as PDF

As a signatory to the UN Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI), we are convinced that including provisions regarding the environment (environmental and climate protection), social commitment and governance (responsible corporate governance) – in short: ESG – contributes to positive long-term value for our customers. Our actions are guided by the 17 Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations Agenda 2030, and we align our measures with the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement.

Let us show you how we, the Deka Group’s real estate specialists, are working towards our sustainability goals.

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We take responsibility for our actions and ensure a future worth living for generations to come. As part of the Deka Group, we adhere to our common code of conduct.

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We communicate in an open and clear way and are committed to greater transparency in our industry.

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We align management decisions with long-term value creation to the satisfaction of our partners, especially investors.

As part of our sustainability strategy, we take the following measures regarding governance:

Further development of risk controlling processes

We will continuously and proactively develop our proven risk management, controlling and reporting processes to meet requirements associated with sustainability and the ability to identify, manage and limit direct climate risks for our portfolios, based on the available information.
Improving transparency

Improving transparency is essential in achieving our goals and ranks as our most urgent challenge. We have therefore defined the goal to successively improve and digitalise the data basis, related to final energy consumption and CO2 emissions. In our view, creating transparency also involves surveying our investment funds’ CO2 footprint.
Sustainability report

As an active member of the German Investment Funds Association (BVI) and the German Property Federation (ZIA), we welcome and support the efforts for more transparency and sustainability in the real estate sector. We regularly document our progress in implementing our sustainability activities in our real estate funds’ annual reports. They are included in Deka Bank’s annual sustainability report. Read more about our activities in the current sustainability report.
Self-monitoring

We constantly monitor and review our own compliance with our principles and values of good corporate governance through various instruments. This creates a high degree of transparency. We achieve this through functional management and monitoring structures, targeted cooperation between management and supervisory functions, transparency within the organisation, internal and external corporate communication and the appropriate handling of risks. To ensure we comply with our principles, we have implemented a range of measures:
- appointing to the supervisory board of two additional members who are independent of the Group,
- setting up an ombudsman position,
- implementing a functioning risk management system,
- guaranteeing investor protection through clear separation of functions within responsibilities.
Investor satisfaction and stakeholder interests

To safeguard the interests of various stakeholders, our management decisions are geared towards long-term value creation to the satisfaction of our partners, especially investors. Investors in our investment funds, for example, are regularly informed about the performance of their funds on the basis of one of the highest transparency standards in the industry: open-ended real estate funds.
BVI Rules of Conduct

In 2003, leading industry association BVI published its BVI Rules of Conduct in collaboration with its members to protect fund investors. BVI’s members agreed on Guidelines for Responsible Investment in 2012, which have since been incorporated into the Rules of Conduct.

The BVI Rules of Conduct set voluntary standards that go beyond the legal obligations for fund managers. The Rules of Conduct acknowledge fund managers’ responsibilities as trustees, which place particularly high demands on conduct towards investors. We – the management companies Deka Immobilien Investment GmbH and WestInvest Gesellschaft für Investmentfonds mbH – have undertaken to comply with the BVI Rules of Conduct. The Rules of Conduct are available here.