Corestate hires capital-raising head

The Zug, Switzerland-based private equity real estate firm used the announcement of Steffen Ricken’s hire from IVG Institutional Funds to suggest it would add a core and core-plus investment focus to its strategies.


Corestate Capital, the Zug, Switzerland-based private equity real estate firm behind more than €2 billion of transactions, has appointed Steffen Ricken as a managing director and head of global capital raising, it announced today.

Ricken, who also joins the firm’s senior management board and investment committee, joins this month from IVG Institutional Funds, the German real estate and infrastructure asset manager, where he was a managing director.

At Corestate, Ricken will be responsible for global investor relations and capital-raising activities. These will include joint ventures and club deals as well as other institutional products, Corestate said. The firm has been looking to extend its investor network of late and, in April, it opened its first office in Asia – in Singapore – with a view to increasing the amount of Asian capital it has to deploy in its European markets.

In Ricken, Corestate has hired someone who has raised €1.3 billion of private equity capital from German and international institutional investors and who has placed funds into investments valued at €2.2 billion. He has developed and expanded IVG’s international investor base to include central and eastern European investors, as well as investors from Italy and Korea. Ricken also previously worked for  the real estate investment banking division of Sal Oppenheim.

Ralph Winter, founder of Corestate, said the hire came after tracking Ricken’s career for many years. “His professional capabilities perfectly augment Corestate’s already successful approach in combining interesting real estate opportunities with investors’ appetite,” he said.

Corestate typically has been a value-added and opportunistic real estate investor, but Winter used the announcement of Ricken’s hire to suggest it would pursue lower risk-return strategies. “Corestate Capital will continue to grow globally with a new segment of core and core-plus investments,” he said.

The appointment comes just two months after Corestate parted with chief executive officer Phillip Burns. His duties have been passed to Thomas Landschreiber, one of Winter’s co-founders and the chairman of its board.