Yolanda Schmidtke: Rethinking Real Estate

With a desire to disrupt the traditional real estate industry with innovative financial solutions and unique investment products, Yolanda Schmidtke Co-founded DLE Group AG. DLE soon identified land development as its starting investment asset class that enables property developers and housing companies to gain easier access to building land.

Now spread across 5 countries and led by an experienced management team, DLE Group AG is an asset management platform serving various institutional investors and family offices with innovative and unique investment products alongside the real-estate value chain, including development financing and yielding real estate.

The Steadfast Leader

As the CEO and Co-founder, Yolanda is defining the group’s overall strategic growth path. In April 2021, Forbes magazine recognized Yolanda in “Forbes 30 under 30”. She holds a degree in Business Administration from Humboldt University, Berlin.

Yolanda was primarily bored during her childhood and always looked for side businesses while studying at university. Hence, she launched her first business while pursuing her Bachelor’s Degree. Although her first venture failed, it set the fundamentals for her successful entrepreneurial journey in the real estate sector.

DLE Group AG presently manages more than 2bn EUR equity with its team of more than 90 professionals across the planet. As the leader, Yolanda believes that land development is one of the main asset classes that will help Germany solve its demand-supply gap for additional affordable housing.

She says, “While investments shall deliver the return to our investors, we see ourselves as solving some of the major challenges of today’s society – affordable housing for the mass and accommodation for elderly people are examples.” 

The Business Lines

DLE’s platform approach enables the company to grow and to enter various new areas of the ever-growing real estate sector. The company utilizes its expertise along the entire real estate value chain to create unique synergies in asset management. Currently, DLE is expanding its partnerships with best-in-class investment managers, who hold a stake in its business and benefit from its fundraising strength.

DLE’s business lines now include

• DLE Land Development GmbH: It is Europe’s market leader in sustainable neighborhood development. It aims to create value for investors and society through innovative and responsible investing. DLE Land Development also works in tandem with various public agencies, municipal authorities, and project development companies to reduce the housing shortage in major German cities.
• DLE Capital AG: It is a specialized ESG focused provider of senior debt and mezzanine financing for various real estate developments across Germany, Switzerland, and Austria.
• DLE Living GmbH: It is a specialized, ESG-focused investment manager for various healthcare real estate products across Europe, including nursing homes and assisted living facilities.
• DLE Logistics GmbH: Thanks to growing e-commerce demand and Germany’s leadership in Europe’s manufacturing output, DLE Logistics GmbH leverages the unique environment to build a portfolio of value-added logistics assets.
• • DLE Poland SP. ZO.O: Bringing the Land Development expertise from Germany to Poland DLE’s equity-based land development strategy ensures that real estate developers have the proper access to urgently needed land to develop additional housing.

   

  Mission and Vision

   

  DLE is a rapidly growing sustainable Asset Management Platform in the real estate sector. Its innovative platform allows its employees to go far beyond the traditional real estate products and evolve the company’s offering along the entire real estate value chain. Its investors benefit from an increasingly broad range of investment opportunities in various asset and risk classes.

   

  Whether DLE is developing a land, leasing real estate, or structuring financing, sustainability stays at the core of everything. Its innovative platform creates profitable and sustainable growth that amalgamates attractive returns with high social value. The organization always considers social benefit when measuring economic success at the fund, corporate, and asset levels.

   

  Additionally, the entire team of DLE goes beyond the traditional real estate market to tap into the key mega trends in the real-estate sector, primarily by identifying innovative investment strategies and best-in-class fund managers to build joint ventures. DLE’s partnership approach is the key to attracting the right partners to join the group and helping it build its different business lines to grow the organization into a leading European asset management platform.

  The organization’s mission is to identify, develop, and deliver unique investment opportunities, which helps to achieve continuous platform growth that eventually fulfills the needs of its clients and investors.

   

  She says, “Success is, for me, relative and stands for the journey that you took rather than the absolute achievement that many compare each other to.” 

   

  Yolanda believes that DLE is poised for the future. Under her leadership, DLE’s vision is to generate impactful, long-term value for its stakeholders through active participation in communities’ social and economic development. Through responsible investing, she and her team seek to continue to solve several critical issues related to the impact of demographic and climate change.

   

  Also, as the leader of the organization, Yolanda strives to make DLE a European asset management platform that offers investment products in different asset classes in the next 5 years.

   

   

  Company Name: DLE Group AG.

  Management: Yolanda Schmidtke, CEO, and Co-founder

  Quote: “Love liberates; it doesn’t just hold- that’s just ego. Love liberates.”

  URL: dle.ag