Surfing the wave of the Zeitgeist

Peter Noack, co-founder and managing director of Zeitgeist Asset Management: We’re an asset management company based in Prague and as an asset manager we represent different investors. We purchase, refurbish and rent out real estate properties. Our main investor is a German pension fund, which is also our biggest backer to date representing about 70-75 pct of our investment. You seem to specialise in buying up period properties and renovating them... Our focus is residential for rent. In Prague for instance, where we are managing over 25 projects, you have a variety of buildings from the 1890s to the 1930s, which after the revolution were given back to the original owners. So you have one owner, which is a big plus for us because we must have 100 pct ownership in a building to rent it out. In Warsaw the difference is that you don’t have it. Nearly everything was destroyed. For us this means that here we often do developments and repositionings. What proportion of your cu