“It might not seem like a real estate play, but it’s all about creating content for real estate assets and having the capability to drive experiences and places,” says Stoneweg CEO Jaume Sabater of the company’s new Stoneweg Places & Experiences platform, which launched in September.
With a focus on operating leisure activities and experiences, ranging from food & beverage (F&B), through sports, entertainment and educational content, the platform has been initially seeded with three assets in Spain, which illustrate the initiative’s creative breadth and aspirations. These include temporary art exhibition space, Palau Martorell, in Central Barcelona’s Gothico District; the America’s Cup Experience exhibition and immersive experience centre, also in Barcelona; as well as The Belbo Collection, a Mediterranean-themed casual dining concept with an initial five restaurants in Barcelona and Madrid city centre locations.
Some €100 million of capital has been set aside for the first seven projects. Along with the first three Spanish ventures already announced, representing a capital commitment of around €20 million, Stoneweg has another four projects in Paris, Miami and Barcelona in the pipeline.
Although sitting outside of the newly launched platform, Stoneweg also has ambitious plans in the water sports space, as part of its diversification play. It is “quite far along with” the concept of developing a raft of surf parks, according to Sabater. The first in Europe will be the Madrid wave park, set to open in the first quarter of 2025 and operated by artificial surf experts Wavegarden. From an investment perspective, the project represents a compelling tie-up between Stoneweg, Atlético de Madrid Football Club and Teras Capital, taking shape on a plot of land next to the club’s Cívitas Metropolitano stadium as part of the new Ciudad del Deporte. Sabater is excited about the “urban beach” plan. “We just created a joint venture with our operating partner to develop multiple surf parks, so it’s about bringing the capital and developing the parks in strategic locations,” he says.
Operational focus
While the Places & Experiences platform is ultimately a “real estate play”, as Sabater underlines, it is notable that with the initial Spanish projects, the firm has entered into a long leasehold structure on at least one occasion, due to the real estate being state owned. While this was inevitable due to the unique location, Sabater says, the venture in future will aim to own the bricks and mortar of the leisure schemes it operates.
Ultimately the platform is a continuation of Stoneweg’s commitment towards growing its alternative assets exposure, Sabater explains, reflecting his conviction that real estate owners need to be operational experts to ride out macroeconomic cycles. “If you take a very traditional approach to owning real estate, for example by managing office assets, you are quite limited in what you can do,” he says. “If your structural costs are going to go up, such as the cost of capital or other operating expenses, you want to be in a position to be able to adjust the revenue from operations. We believe that creating activities has this potential.”
Sabater calls what Stoneweg is doing “content creation”, and the echo with the language of social media is perhaps no coincidence in the experiential age. The firm has built a reputation for innovation and an appetite for experimentation since its launch in 2015, dabbling in a range of asset classes and proving pioneering in most. Headquartered in Geneva, the firm today has offices in in Barcelona, Dublin, St. Petersburg in Florida, Geneva, Milan and London. To date, the firm has invested broadly in multifamily, hotels, medical clinics and logistics assets, as well as creating a debt arm. In recent times it launched Beezi, an ‘experrience-led’ industrial space concept within its Varia Swiss Realtech business, which consists of industrial spaces organised around premium shared amenitites such as offices, conference rooms, fitness and F&B areas as well as mutualised services.
Hospitality launch
Yet the pandemic years and other structural trends arguably convinced the firm to “niche down” into living, logistics and hospitality. In 2021, Stoneweg launched Stoneweg Hospitality, timed initially in spite of Covid, but later leaning on its contingent opportunities.
“We were already in due diligence with our first hotel asset when the pandemic struck,” Sabater says. “We actually closed on that deal in the weeks after the Covid outbreak in Europe, in the first quarter of 2020.”
He adds: “We don’t like crises. We much prefer it when the economy is booming. But it is also true that in more challenging times you can often generate better returns by assuming risks.”
Stoneweg Hospitality to date has secured seven hotels in Spain, a market which Sabater felt was ideal for the department’s debut. However, the business has also been examining potential deals in Portugal and Italy and further expansion is planned. “We are also in the process of positioning the hospitality business to be active in the Caribbean and in the States,” he reveals.
“With the launch of Stoneweg Hospitality, we had a view that the world will not change drastically, and that travelling and people being willing to travel would not stop forever. So, we saw opportunity in the long term,” he notes.
Structural change
“The launch of Places & Experiences is much more in response to structural change. It’s not about a lack of deals or targeting distress, although we hope we might find some repositioning opportunities for the platform, for example, leisure experiences which are performing below their potential, or spaces that we can transform with new content.
“The idea is more driven by the belief that people, over time, will pay more and more attention to lived experiences. Travel won’t just be about going to a hotel or a restaurant; it will be focused on the experience that you have there.”
Sabater underlines that the platform will ultimately seek synergies with its other business lines, such as hospitality. “We want the platform to speak to our other assets.”
The projects that have been unveiled to date in Spain have clear appeal and scope for international visitors, benefitting from prime locations in Barcelona and Madrid. But Sabater and his team have learned from Covid that “you can’t just rely on international tourism”. He adds: “The sites we are operating and will look to operate all have the capacity to attract domestic tourism as well, and even local citizens in their everyday lives. We believe that this adds to their resilience and look forward to expending with further cultural, educational and entertainment formats with a wide appeal.
“We also see a real opportunity to use technology to create immersive experiences and explore other aspects of the digital wave.”