Challenges, Opportunities and Risks

There is a strong public focus on the housing industry and – due to the current high demand for homes – it is currently an area of business that has a high emotional value attached to it. Vonovia’s business model is influenced by current social and property management developments, which pose challenges for acquiring residential properties and their management. This is also shown by the partially controversial nature of the public discussions surrounding housing. It once more clearly shows that our long-term success is particularly dependent on the satisfaction of our tenants.

Moving our business is impossible due to the fixed nature of residential property. This means we can only react to unforeseeable developments with a limited amount of flexibility.

The internationalization of our activities and the strong growth of our companies bring their own challenges, such as the integration of different cultures, languages, data systems and processes. Language barriers pose particular problems in the area of compliance and in the communication of guidelines and rules that must be communicated in a way that prevents any misunderstanding even in another language.

The increase in our (new) construction activities also brings about challenges for our company – for instance, in the form of numerous regulations that apply to construction.

All of our activities carry the risk of losing the trust of our customers and the public. This is a loss that can only be remedied with great effort. Nevertheless, our activities also provide us with the opportunity to build up trust with our services and our reliability and to remain a good corporate citizen.

Details regarding the risks related to business can be found in the risk report in our 2018 annual report. AR 2018, Opportunities and Risks