Bordeaux businessman Michel Ohayon, 61-year-old leader of the FIB (Financière immobilière bordelaise), began his professional life in the 1980s by selling ready-to-wear clothing to the Daniel Hechter brand. A retail activity that he will abandon a few years later to take an interest in complete Meccano, that is to say the management of goodwill and walls. And Michel Ohayon has a well-honed method: he looks for buildings at bargain prices, located as much as possible in the city center, has them refurbished and rents them to well-known commercial brands.
It was the start of his adventure in the hushed world of commercial real estate, in which he was to become one of the most important national players. If his name is on everyone’s lips today, it is because Michel Ohayon has returned since 2018 to this retail universe where he started but where he has not made a career. A strategic shift that he is negotiating with the creation in March 2018 of the subsidiary Hermione People & Brand (HPB), at the head of which he will put Wilhelm Hubner, a former senior executive of Auchan. A month earlier, in February, he took over the management of 22 Galeries Lafayette stores located in the region with the FIB, since this operation is part of its business in commercial real estate.
A rapid change in social dimension
It was in September 2018 that HPB successfully attacked its first target: the Grande Récré toy retailer. But in October following the judges of the Commercial Court of Evry prevent him from getting his hands on another reference brand: Toys’R’Us France. Whatever, Michel Ohayon has seen others and is not likely to stop there. With its hunt for struggling new businesses to take over, HPB sets out to strike all over the place.
If Michel Ohayon is not a clone of Bernard Tapie, since 2018 he has been deploying a strategy that furiously resembles him. HPB brings back in its nets ready-to-wear brands as well known as Camaïeu, Gap France, the specialist Go Sport but also the Le Havre roaster Cafés Lega “… And this is how the boss of the FIB, until there unknown to the general public, found himself in less than five years at the head of more than 7,000 employees. He who does not like to talk numbers and does not have a huge experience of social dialogue, since he was mainly in contact with the staff of his subcontractors in the building sector, will have to force his nature.
Sustainable return of consumers to stores?
Witness its very recent failures in ready-to-wear, marked by the collapse of Camaïeu (2,600 employees) or setting bankruptcy filing for Go Sport (2,160 employees). Publicized failures that contrast with this chiaroscuro world of commercial real estate where everything is hushed and discreet, including transactions.
As he pointed out in an interview granted on September 19, 2019 to the American magazine Forbes, Michel Ohayon became aware at the end of the 2020s of a fundamental evolution and opted for retail:
“People are back to convenience stores once more. Home delivery has shown its limits, cities are on the offensive to unclog traffic that has reached saturation. I believe that it is important to understand the major sociological movements, this hyper digitalization feeds a strong desire to return to physical neighborhood stores, ”explains the strategist, who will then rush on this wide open boulevard.
If this trend was frozen by the Covid-19 pandemic, it started up once more at the end of the confinement. The future will tell if galloping inflation will in turn put a stop to this consumer desire.
A son of Moroccan immigrants
Even if he has moved most of his strike force to Paris for a few years, Michel Ohayon retains the head office of his group in Bordeaux, where he has a management team. Born in 1961 in Casablanca, he is one of those Bordeaux entrepreneurs from a more or less distant elsewhere, who grew up and signed his first successes in Bordeaux. It is not “a son of”. He does not belong to the Bordeaux gentry. He arrived with his parents in Mérignac (Bordeaux Métropole) at the age of two.
Son of Moroccan Jewish immigrants, who were modest cloth merchants, Michel Ohayon, however eager for recognition, ticked none of these boxes that open the doors of the Bordeaux bourgeoisie. An environment whose upper floors escape the canons of provincial life to mingle – in particular thanks to wine – in the global village of great fortunes. Thus the existence of the young Ohayon might only be totally ignored by the Bordeaux establishment. And then, as for other invisibles before him, came the moment when Michel Ohayon began to succeed.
The main dates:
- 1995 : failure of the Burdipolis project in Bordeaux
- 1996 : creation of the FIB
- 1999 : takeover of the Grand Hôtel de Bordeaux (delivered in 2007)
- 2003 : abandonment of the Burdipolis project in Lille
- 2004 : obtaining the market for the auditorium of Bordeaux (delivered in 2012)
- 2004 : sale of 18,000 m2 of retail space to the Grosvenor group (Duke of Westminster)
- 2018 : creation of Hermione People & Brands (HPB) and start of serial takeovers in retail
His first encounter with large families
His revenge once morest this blindness of the Bordeaux establishment, an environment he has always described with a touch of fascination, perhaps because the Bordeaux gentry wants Bordeaux to remain considered a city where it is always possible to fortune, Michel Ohayon was able to begin to taste it thanks to the 1991 real estate crisis. the founder of the FIB found himself in a position to buy.
Michel Ohayon (credits: APPA Agency).
Michel Ohayon laid the historic first stone in his personal pantheon on the day in 1999 when he bought the Grand Hôtel de Bordeaux from the bar of the court. An emblematic building from the 18th century located on Place de la Comédie, just opposite the Grand Théâtre. A building dormant since 1981, whose young Parisian owner ended up committing suicide. Michel Ohayon manages to seize this future palace, by intoxicating the other buyer in the rows: Clement Fayatboss of the Bordeaux group of the same name.
18,000 m2 sold in 2004 to the Duke of Westminster
When he became the owner of the Grand Hotel, for the sum of 31 million francs (7.3 million euros in constant euros), a sum considered modest even at the time, Michel Ohayon signed his first triumph in the heart of the port of the moon. The future Intercontinental Bordeaux-Le Grand Hôtel will be delivered in 2007 and this first decade of 2000 will mark a turning point, with a cornerstone that will remain 2004.
That year, for months, auditors, lawyers and figure specialists worked tirelessly in the Bordeaux premises of Spiic (the ancestor of the FIB) to complete the sale by Michel Ohayon to the Grosvenor property company, property of the Duke of Westminster, the richest man in England, of 18,000 m2 of commercial space in the center of Bordeaux, almost the entire rue Porte Dijeaux, for 110 million euros. This will be the largest transaction recorded in 2004 in France on this market. There is also another good news.
A diversification thought out in the early 2010s
Arrested abruptly in his tracks in 1995 by Alain Juppé, then mayor of Bordeaux, for his project for a commercial complex with Burdipolis housing, in the heart of the city, Michel Ohayon finally obtained the green light this time from the Palais Rohan to carry out a large Bordeaux project. Alain Juppé then entrusts the developer with the construction of the future auditorium in Bordeaux. But this consecration will not be a long calm river. Because the site is negotiated for a fixed price in 2004 and the deadlines will completely slip.
The auditorium should initially be delivered in 2007. But the many adventures encountered (asbestos removal, discovery of Roman archaeological jewellery, technical and financial problems, conflict with the client) will cause the site to slip with delivery in 2012. Still involved in commercial real estate, the boss of the FIB began to think regarding diversifying in the early 2010s. It was during this period that he bought, in 2014, the Waldorf Astoria Trianon in Versailles, for a sum valued at 150 million euros. In 2014, it also announced a new investment program of 3 billion euros in the medium term, targeting palaces and commercial real estate projects.
Still many projects on fire including in Libourne
If today almost everyone has the impression that Michel Ohayon is a compulsive ogre, who attacks everything that moves to buy a maximum of companies in a minimum of time, the boss of the FIB also knows be slow. In commercial real estate, such as future palaces, this even seems to be an absolute rule. And, in the end, there is little doubt that the creation of HPB in 2018 is the culmination of its development strategy partially unveiled in 2014. Because Michel Ohayon continued to buy palaces, such as the Sheraton de Roissy , in 2016, or the Waldorf Astoria in Jerusalem in 2017, which he would have acquired for 160 million euros according to the Israeli press.
In France, he has also set foot in the world of wine, with the acquisition in 2017 of Château Trianon (Saint-Emilion grand cru) and has invested since 2015 in the former Virgin Megastore on Place Gambetta in Bordeaux, which he wants make another palace. He is also involved in the vast restructuring program for the old barracks in downtown Libourne, which does not seem to be progressing as quickly as the mayor, Philippe Buisson, would like.
Will Michel Ohayon survive his setbacks in the ready-to-wear business, where did he make an error in judgment on the dynamics of the market? This is the question everyone is now asking. But it is likely to ease off on this sector, if only because of the rise in the cost of silver.
