Core is no longer enough and value add must pay

"Classic core is largely dead. This is the decade of value add." That was Ramin Rabeian's provocation at last week's Rueckerconsult INVESTMENT Expo in Berlin. The more interesting conclusion, however, was that the distinction itself may no longer matter. What emerged was not a rotation from one strategy to another, but a more fundamental shift: the investment playbook that defined the past decade is being quietly dismantled.

The four panellists — Sebastiano Ferrante of PGIM, Rabeian of Montano Real Estate, Sebastian Schneider of DWS Alternatives and Felix Frankl of EZVK — agreed on one thing: maximum uncertainty. Ten-year swap rates, which had fallen to 2.70% in February, have since moved back above 3% amid renewed geopolitical tensions. Transaction volumes remain subdued. Institutional investors are either over-allocated, structurally constrained, or waiting for valuations to reach levels at which exits become viable.

The market is not merely slow: it is not yet clearing. Much of the repricing is happening through entity-level deals that never appear in official statistics, while many portfolios have yet to absorb the full extent of the correction. As Frankl put it, "the bill will be read when the prolongations come due."