Ladies and gentlemen, dear readers,

As a residential real estate company, Vonovia is an integral part of today’s society. This is a very good situation, but one that entails great responsibility, too. We are able to help ensure that people in cities have homes worth living in. However, it is also a challenging position. It puts our company under the microscope for a number of stakeholder groups, who all have very different expectations from us.

We investigate these expectations immediately because we want to fulfil them, as far as they fall under our responsibilities, to the fullest extent possible. This isn’t always an easy task. Finding solutions to varying demands often involves compromise. But by maintaining dialogue we are always able to bring different points of view together.

Our business approach is also helpful in this regard. As a service provider and the provider of homes for around one million people, our focus is on our customers and their needs. With this in mind, we preserve our buildings and actively shape the residential environment. This is also why we are committed to offering contemporary, senior-friendly apartments and developing services that offer better quality of living. Our focus on customers is also the reason why we are addressing a social issue that is particularly important at the moment: the construction of new apartments.

Last year we began construction work on more than 1,000 apartments; in the coming years it will be significantly more. The new apartments will not be constructed just anywhere, but where they are needed: in conurbations. The average rent for the apartments in our portfolio is around €6.50 per m². This is affordable for the large majority of people.

To some extent, we also consider it our responsibility to ensure that people can live together in their neighborhoods harmoniously. That is why we are implementing comprehensive neighborhood projects throughout Germany, cooperating with charities, promoting cultural and neighborhood projects and working closely with the local communities. In the past year alone, we invested €50 million in neighborhood projects like this. We also donate money through our foundations. It is also our aim to understand interaction in our neighborhoods better and are therefore actively investing in research in this area. We are financing an endowed professorship in Bochum for research into neighborhood development.

We support the German government’s ambitious target of achieving an almost climate-neutral building stock by 2050 through a number of measures to reduce energy consumption and the release of CO₂e emissions. Implementing energy-efficiency modernizations and maintaining buildings are important measures in this regard. We were able to achieve a refurbishment rate of 5% once more in 2018 and thereby significantly improve the energy intensity of many buildings. This shows that we are on the right track.

I’m pleased that we are also very popular as an employer now, too. Almost 10,000 people work for us now – around 1,000 of those are located in Austria and Sweden. The majority of our employees is in direct contact with our customers, which also makes their work very valuable in a social sense. We currently employ 485 trainees completing commercial and craftsmen/technician traineeships throughout the whole Group.

We take care of things. And we do it sustainably. That’s because our business has a long-term focus and flourishes best in a healthy environment.

In our latest sustainability report, you can read in detail all about what Vonovia is doing in Germany to ensure people feel happy with us for the long term and how we are taking our responsibility as a corporate citizen seriously.

I hope you enjoy reading the report.

Bochum, April 2019

Yours,

Rolf Buch