In the future, the Bima should invest even more and build itself.
Photo: dpa/ Stefan Sauer
Robert Habeck is currently on what he calls a »state trip«. After all, there has been a lull in the expansion of wind energy in Germany for years. The Green Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection therefore wants to visit all 16 state capitals by the summer and convince the prime ministers of his major transformation plans. It is doubtful whether this will succeed.
The Federal Agency for Real Estate Tasks (Bima), on the other hand, has already sparked a breath of fresh air. For example, gigantic wind turbines were recently completed at the Spreeau motorway junction. Just a few kilometers away from Tesla’s “Gigafactory” in Grünheide, eight wind turbines are now turning, each 244 meters high. The wind farm is expected to produce 110 million kilowatt hours of electricity this year, as much as 33,000 three-person households consume on average.
The new Spreeau wind farm is not the last that the specialists for renewable energies from Bima’s “Portfolio Management” division are planning together with partners. Questions and concerns from the population are to be taken up “at an early stage” and incorporated into our own planning. The service provider for state-owned real estate, which is largely unknown to the public, might soon play an even more important role in the energy transition with its property portfolio.
The institution under public law has been “on the market” since 2005. The then red-green federal government of Gerhard Schröder (SPD) wanted to create real estate management from a single source, which also worked according to commercial principles. By 2013, almost all lands and buildings owned by the Confederation were gradually transferred to the Bimah. The real estate service provider, whose headquarters are still in Bonn, became the federal government’s “facility manager”, managing 4,300 leases with a floor space of 54 million square meters and around 38,000 apartments.
One of the gems in the federal treasury is the Grand Hotel on the Petersberg near Bonn. Most properties are made available to the departments of the federal ministries once morest payment of the customary local rent. Rental and leasing revenues in the 2020 financial year amounted to 4.2 billion euros, of which 2.6 billion came from the Bundeswehr alone.
However, Habeck’s interest is probably less in office buildings, hotels and barracks than in the extensive, often hardly used commercially huge property. The Federal Institute sees itself as one of the largest real estate owners in Germany. Even the ownership of the Thurn and Taxis family, the largest private owner of land and forest in this country, seems rather manageable. According to Wikipedia, the noble clan »only« owns around 20,000 to 36,000 hectares of land.
In contrast, as of January 2021, Bima owned around 462,000 hectares of land – of which around 440,000 hectares are managed by forests, a spokesman explains. Above all, the Bima owns forest and grassland: “From Trave to Hohenfels, from Rhine-Weser to Lusatia, the 17 federal forest companies provide comprehensive, user-oriented site management.”
In total, land and buildings correspond to a clear three-digit billion amount. The statistics of the Bimah do not differentiate, for example, according to free areas. These often come from the “conversion” of formerly used military terrain. The wide range of services offered by Bima includes not only forestry conservation and the sale of wild game, but also the provision of areas for wind turbines.
In the fourth chapter of the coalition agreement with the strange title “Respect, opportunities and social security in the modern working world”, the red-green-yellow coalition of Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) has great hopes in the bima in a long paragraph. Deutsche Bahn’s »non-railway real estate« is also to be transferred to the Federal Agency for Real Estate Tasks. Which should increase the stock by at least a quarter.
Similar to the well-known KfW Bank, the Bima is intended to help the government bypass parliament as a kind of shadow budget to achieve its construction, housing, urban development and ecological goals. And it should continue to grow: “We will give the bima more freedom and enable them to take out loans,” says the coalition agreement. In the future, the institution is to invest and build more itself. For example, wind farms, such as Minister Habeck wants en masse.
